One step at a time
Anne Applebaum raises some questions:
the real reason Saudi teams aren’t kicked out of the Olympics is that “Saudis have succeeded in pulling a fast one on the world by claiming their religion is the reason they treat women so badly.” Islam, she points out, does take other forms—in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, and elsewhere. But Saudi propaganda, plus our own timidity about foreign customs, has blinded us to the fact that the systematic, wholesale Saudi oppression of women isn’t dictated by religion at all, but rather by the culture of the Saudi ruling class…
the women of contemporary Saudi Arabia need a much more fundamental revolution than the one that took place among American women in the 1960s, and it’s one we have trouble understanding. Unlike American blacks, it has been a long time since American women grappled with issues as basic as the right to study or vote. Instead, we have (fortunately) fought for less fundamental rights in recent decades, and our women’s groups have of late (unfortunately) had the luxury of focusing on the marginal. The National Council of Women’s Organizations’ most famous recent campaign was against the Augusta National Golf Club. The Web site of the National Organization for Women (I hate to keep picking on them, but it’s so easy) has space for issues of “non-sexist car insurance” and “network neutrality” but not for the Saudi rape victim or the girl murdered last week in Canada for refusing to wear the hijab.
The reigning feminist ideology doesn’t help: Philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers has written, among other things, that some American feminists, self-focused and reluctant to criticize non-Western cultures, have convinced themselves that “sexual terror” in America (a phrase from a real women’s studies textbook) is more dangerous than actual terrorism. But the deeper problem is the gradual marginalization of “women’s issues” in domestic politics, which has made them subordinate to security issues or racial issues in foreign policy. American delegates to international and U.N. women’s organizations are mostly identified with arguments about reproductive rights (whether for or against, depending on the administration), not arguments about the fundamental rights of women in Saudi Arabia or the Muslim world. Until this changes, it will be hard to mount a campaign, in the manner of the anti-apartheid movement, to enforce sanctions or codes of conduct for people doing business there.
“Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia…” Hmmm. We’ll have to take a closer look at those countries. But the idea that Wahhabism is merely a product of the “Saudi ruling class” seems quite a stretch to us, considering how ubiquitous are the problems of other, similarly ordered societies.