Mother-woman gives up whatever ghost of a unique talent she may have had

Or: Riding the Old Nag of Science to Death -- Backwards and Again

In the latest edition of Middle East Forum Phyllis Chesler is, so it seems, quite out of character carrying a torch for the Western male.

Differing Characteristics of Honor Killings and Domestic Violence

Honor Killings	Domestic Violence
Committed mainly by Muslims against Muslim girls/young adult women.	Committed by men of all faiths usually against adult women.
Committed mainly by fathers against their teenage daughters and daughters in their early twenties. Wives and older-age daughters may also be victims, but to a lesser extent.	Committed by an adult male spouse against an adult female spouse or intimate partner.
Carefully planned. Death threats are often used as a means of control.	The murder is often unplanned and spontaneous.
The planning and execution involve multiple family members and can include mothers, sisters, brothers, male cousins, uncles, grandfathers, etc. If the girl escapes, the extended family will continue to search for her to kill her.	The murder is carried out by one man with no family complicity.
The reason given for the honor killing is that the girl or young woman has "dishonored" the family.	The batterer-murderer does not claim any family concept of "honor." The reasons may range from a poorly cooked meal to suspected infidelity to the woman's trying to protect the children from his abuse or turning to the authorities for help.
At least half the time, the killings are carried out with barbaric ferocity. The female victim is often raped, burned alive, stoned or beaten to death, cut at the throat, decapitated, stabbed numerous times, suffocated slowly, etc.	While some men do beat a spouse to death, they often simply shoot or stab them.
The extended family and community valorize the honor killing. They do not condemn the perpetrators in the name of Islam. Mainly, honor killings are seen as normative.	The batterer-murderer is seen as a criminal; no one defends him as a hero. Such men are often viewed as sociopaths, mentally ill, or evil.
The murderer(s) do not show remorse. Instead, they experience themselves as "victims," defending themselves from the girl's actions and trying to restore their lost family honor.	Sometimes, remorse or regret is exhibited.

Is she? (Colouring added by me.)

In 2003 I wrote about Chesler's, then new, book "The New Anti-Semitism":

I read the book and I was disappointed. Chesler is an annoying woman, and that in more than one respect. A founding mother of second-wave feminism, she is not just a man-hater and sloppy researcher if it suits her agenda (in her 1986 book Mothers on Trial she stated that 70 percent of mothers in custody battles lost, which was based on an extremely non-random sample of 60 women, but frequently used as a feminist mantra) and, even worse, one of those irritating women who send their dignity, education and brain flying when they marry a Western-educated Muslim, followed him to his native country, find it -- surprise, surprise -- less than accomodating there and are then jumping on the victim-bandwagon.

[...]

Not to speak of Chesler's basic credibility problem. An "academic" who writes, as Chesler does in "Women and Madness", that "mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they 'marry' and raise children" (inverted commas by the author!) has lost any right to have her say on any conservative cause. Correction: On ANYthing.

And to answer my own question: no she isn't. This man-hating ogre (or is it ogress?) who has presumably destroyed as many families as the average post-WWII armed conflict, is -- again -- up to her old tricks and, under the disguise of informing about the difference of "normal" domestic violence and Muslim "honour killings", fudging in her anti-social feminist drivel.

What is the truth about domestic violence?

Despite the criticisms leveled at Steinmetz and her concept of the battered husband, violence directed at husbands has been reported by others. For instance, Murray Straus, Richard Gelles, and Suzanne Steinmetz (1980) estimated that about one in eight men in the United States acted violently during marital conflict. However, they estimated a similar number of women also acted violently during marital conflict. They also noted that in a majority of these cases, violence was a mutual or bilateral activity, with only 27% of cases finding that husbands were the sole perpetrators of violence and 24% of cases finding only wives acting violently. With respect to serious violence, as judged by the Conflict Tactics Scales (Note 2), these authors stated that the rate for men beaten by their wives was 4.6%; a figure that indicated "over 2 million very violent wives." While 47% of those husbands who beat their wives did so severely three or more times a year, 53% of women who beat their husbands severely did so three or more times a year.

In a later article, Straus and Gelles (1986) reviewed both their own and other studies in the United States and reported somewhat equivalent assault rates for both male-to-female and female-to-male. In their 1975 survey, Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz (1980) estimated that approximately 38 out of every 1000 families experience severe husband-to-wife violence, while 46 out of every l000 families experience severe wife-to-husband violence. Ten years later, Straus & Gelles (1986) reported that the rates have dropped from 38 to 30 and 46 and 44 per 1000 couples, respectively. In overall acts of violence, as defined by the Conflict Tactics Scales, husband-to-wife rates of violence were 121 and 113 and wife-to-husband rates of violence were 116 and 121 per 1000 couples for the two study years (i.e., 1975 and 1985).

Although Straus and Gelles (1986) did not dwell on these comparisons, they did make a statement that seems to run counter to the prevailing academic and public perception of the time, namely, that "an important and distressing finding about violence in American families is that, in marked contrast to the behavior of women outside the family, women are about as violent within the family as men" (p. 470). The small change in the wife-to-husband rate of violence, as opposed to some change in the husband-to-wife violence, was suggested to result from a lack of attention or concern to male victimization. The case for giving due regard to domestic women-on-men assaults and an acceptance of this higher level of victimization was backed by reference to other studies finding similar levels of male victimization (Brutz & Ingoldsby, 1984; Gelles, 1974; Giles-Sims, 1983; Jourilles & O'Leary, 1985; Lane & Gwartney-Gibbs, 1985; ; Laner & Thompson, 1982; Makepeace, 1983; Sack, Keller, & Howard, 1982; Saunders, 1986; Scanzoni, 1978; Steinmetz, 1977, 1977-78; Szinovacz, 1983).

In conclusion, summarized such data as Straus and Gelles (1986) indicating that women engage in minor assaults against their male partners at a slightly higher rate than for the same attacks upon women by men. In situations in which both partners use violence, men and women were also almost equally responsible for the first blow, but in only one quarter of these relationships was the man the sole victim. At more potentially injurious levels of assault, men were considered to exceed women in their aggressive behavior and it was suggested that a relative rate in the order of 6 or 7 to 1 (male versus female) was evident for the perpetration of injurious assaults.

Can we really believe that the scientific findings from decades ago have not yet arrived at Professor Chesler's desk?

In post-Renaissance Europe, society ostracized and humiliated hen-pecked husbands. In France, for example, a "battered" husband was forced to trot around town riding a donkey backwards. It is safe to assume that enough men are, despite the worst efforts of a feminist society, still carrying some faint remnants of the patriarchal ethos telling him that a husband is expected to protect his wife and family instead of being beaten by her. Thus, a battered husband may be just -- dare I say it -- ashamed to admit that he has been the victim of female violence, which makes one wonder about the number of unreported cases.

But, thanks to the Cheslers of this world, as we children of the post-feminist age know, men do not suffer from subtle feelings like shame, victimization or humiliation. Only women do that.

I wish that hysteric woman would just shut up or at least stop abusing her academic position to deal with her personal problems. As a saviour of Western civilization she is simply miscast.

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We have dicussed "honor killings" and the matter of "honour" in Muslim societies generally (for example) here, here, here, here or here. Many continuative links provided.

Cross-posted at Roncesvalles.

What Makes a Hero?

An interesting point was made at VFR. Lawrence Auster asked:

Was Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III's safe landing of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River an exceptional accomplishment, even a miracle, as many believe, or, as a correspondent has put it, the outcome that would be expected of a typical, experienced airline pilot? To answer the question, we need to strip the situation down to its essentials, leaving only the water landing itself. That is, we need to eliminate the initial shock experienced by the flight crew when the flock of Canadian geese collided with the plane and destroyed the engines; eliminate the uncertainty about whether to turn back to La Guardia; eliminate the pilot's sighting of Teterboro airport in New Jersey and the discussion about whether to try to land there; eliminate the plane's curve from a northern to an eastern to a southerly course to head down the Hudson; and eliminate the challenge of keeping the engineless plane aloft long enough to maneuver it over the Hudson.

Once we've gotten rid of all those factors, we're left with this "pure" scenario: An airliner has just taken off and climbed to 3,000 feet and both its engines go out. It has several miles of a mile-wide, relatively calm river in front of it. Under those circumstances, what kind of landing would be expected? Would the smooth landing that Capt. Sullenberger achieved, with the plane left floating intact on the water, be the expected norm, or would it be very unusual?

Auster regards

...the talk about "heroism" in this and so many other cases as the hysteria of the dopey and lazy press.

Although there is a lot of merit in this opinion, I think it is just one angle from which one can see the remarkable event on the Hudson.

I do not think that one should strip the immediate understanding of the situation in a shock situation and the following lightning quick decisionmaking from the event. It was as important as the landing itself which was, indeed, "only" what can be expected from a fully trained pilot of that calibre. Still, Sullenberger was not a hero. Heroism needs, so I think, some ethical component which is lacking here. But then, to go back and search the sinking aircraft again and again to make sure that nobody was left behind has an element of heroism. John Maynard, and those for whom that fictitious character stands, are heroes. The British fighter pilot who crash landed his jet in an open field when he could have saved himself by the ejection seat at the peril of having the abandoned jet crashing into a village was a hero. That happened about 40 years ago in Eastern Westphalia and I have never forgotten it, although there was only a minor notice in our regional newspaper.

To me this is another instance of the somewhat natural reaction to a feminized world of mediocrity, self-centeredness, bitching and complaining, where a difficult job superbly performed must appear as heroism. What a "pilotesse" suffering from PMS or post-menopausal complaints would have done in Sullenberger's place I hate to think. We are so starved of heroes that any politically correct, widely accepted instance remotely touching heroism will trigger off a deluge of admiration.

An interesting bit of insight into the mind of one from that remarkable class of men gives the interviewwith Jürgen Vietor, the first officer of the legendary flight LH 181. In 1977, during the "German Autumn", after the cold-blooded murder of his captain by Arab terrorists at Aden, Yemen, the young first officer (like Sullenberger a former military pilot) had to fly the 737, which had just undergone a gruelling emergency landing, solo to land safely at Mogadishu, Somalia, an airport, that had before, literally and metaphorically, not been on his, a Boeing 737 pilot's, map. Vietor is adamant that he is no hero. Maybe not, but anyway, I strongly oppose his definition of what makes a hero. HERE is the interview.

Evil by Any Other Name

Who hasn't heard about the sad case of the little English girl Madeleine who mysteriously disappeared in Portugal and whose parents have lately become suspect of having killed her. And who hasn't wondered about the somewhat over-developed zeal of those parents, the mawkish display of the little girl's cuddly toy included. Not that zeal in the face of such a horror isn't basically understandable, but it's not what other parents tend to do in similar circumstances and, sadly, Madeleine's is by no means an isolated case.

British doctors believe it is extremely unlikely for parents - especially doctors such as the McCanns – to give a child an overdose of regular medicines intended to sedate children.

I wonder whether British reporters are really that naive to print such a drivel and British doctors are either fools or trying to keep their name clean or both. Who said that doctors are better and more ethical people or parents than anybody else? Parents are killing their children all the time and even more parents are taking illegal means if they don't want to be bothered by their children for a while. The dumb tie them to their beds or just lock them up and leave them to their own devices if they are living in a neighbourhood that allows for such a behaviour, the more sophisticated apply sedatives. The girl's parents are doctors, so they thought they could get away with it. But this beats it all:

If they were [fooling everyone], it would be a truly extraordinary effort. “It is very difficult for two people to lie over a death, whether it was accidental or deliberate,” said Mike Berry, senior lecturer in forensic psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University. “I cannot see how they would be able to keep up a lie for so long under this media attention.”

What if the media attention was not circumstancial evidence for the innocence of the parents, but a means in itself for the perpetrator(s)? Anybody remembers Marybeth Tinning who was inordinately unlucky in raising children because nine of them died over the course of 13 years? When she was finally found out, she was blamed for a lesser degree of homicide through her "depraved indifference to human life." In any civilised society that would increase her guilt, not lower it.

Tinning, too, while nine of her children died, was only ever convicted of one case of murder because there wasn't sufficient evidence for the others.

Read the rest at Roncesvalles.

Women Suffer and Die Under Islam--But North American Feminists Simply Cannot Be Bothered!

Feminists claim to be helping women, but they seem to be helping themselves instead.

Writing in The New Republic in 1999, philosopher Martha Nussbaum noted with disapproval that "feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States." Too many fashionable gender theorists, she said, have lost their dedication to the public good. Their "hip quietism . . . collaborates with evil."

...Take psychology professor Phyllis Chesler. She has been a tireless and eloquent champion of the rights of women for more than four decades. Unlike her tongue-tied colleagues in the academy, she does not hesitate to speak out against Muslim mistreatment of women. In a recent book, The Death of Feminism, she attributes the feminist establishment's unwillingness to take on Islamic sexism to its support of "an isolationist and America-blaming position." She faults it for "embracing an anti-Americanism that is toxic, heartless, mindless and suicidal."

....Happily, not all women's groups follow the lead of the Enslers, the Pollitts, and the women's studies theorists. The Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) has been intelligently fighting the mistreatment of women in the Muslim world for several years. In 1997, in a heroic effort to expose the crimes of the Taliban, Eleanor Smeal, the president of FMF, with the help of Mavis and Jay Leno, created a vital national campaign complete with rallies, petitions, and fundraisers. It was a good example of what can be achieved when a women's group seriously seeks to address the mistreatment of women outside the United States.

....Hard-line feminists such as Seager, Pollitt, Ensler, the university gender theorists, and the NOW activists represent the views of only a tiny fraction of American women. Even among women who identify themselves as feminists (about 25 percent), they are at the radical extreme. But in the academy and in most of the major women's organizations, the extreme is the mean. The hard-liners set the tone and shape the discussion. This is a sad state of affairs. Muslim women could use moral, intellectual, and material support from the West to improve their situation. But only a rational, reality-based women's movement would be capable of actually helping. Women who think that looking like a pear is an essential human right are not valuable allies.

The good news is that Muslim women are not waiting around for Western feminists to rescue them. "Feminists in the West may fiddle while Muslim women are burning," wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Kay Hymowitz in a prescient 2003 essay, "but in the Muslim world itself there is a burgeoning movement to address the miserable predicament of the second sex." The number of valiant and resourceful Muslim women who are devoting themselves to the cause of greater freedom grows each and every day.

Source
Western feminists are too busy enriching themselves to pay any attention to women who are actually suffering, in the third world nations, and especially under Islam. These pampered princesses of the left cannot get their hands dirty trying to help actual victims. Instead they must manufacture victims out of affluent western university students--who have the entire world at their feet--so as to make themselves feel needed, without inconveniencing themselves at all.