by Alan M.
Dershowitz • March 15, 2017 at 8:30 pm
- There are many
countries and movements throughout the world that treat women as
second-class citizens: Israel is not among them.... There is a
word for applying a double standard to Jews. That word is
anti-Semitism.
- If Sarsour was
concerned with addressing structural causes of all female
oppression, she would mention the status of women in the
PA-controlled West Bank where just a few months ago the names
and photos of female candidates for the municipal elections were
omitted, referring to the women instead as "wife of"
or "sister of." Sarsour would also call out the
Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, where the police are a law unto
themselves who act as judge, jury and executioner of those who
speak out against their oppression and misogyny. She would
condemn the tolerance, if not acceptance, by so many Muslim
countries of the "honor killings" and genital
mutilation of women. Instead the IWS platform exploits the
feminist cause in order to delegitimize and demonize only one
nation: that of the Jewish people.
- The real choice to be
made now by all those who care about the feminist cause is
whether to allow Sarsour and her radical anti-Israel allies to
hijack the movement in support of their own bigoted views. The
alternative is to maintain feminism's focus on key issues that
pertain to women and to call out countries and movements
according to how seriously they violate women's rights, rather
than singling out the one Jewish democracy – Israel.
On March 8,
women abstained from work as part of the International Women's Strike
(IWS) – a grassroots feminist movement aimed at bringing attention
"to the current social, legal, political, moral and verbal
violence experienced by contemporary women at various
latitudes." But these positive goals were distorted by the
inclusion of anti-Israel rhetoric in the platform of the IWS.
There are
many countries and movements throughout the world that treat women as
second-class citizens: Israel is not among them. Yet this platform
singles out for condemnation only Israel, the nation state of the
Jewish people. There is a word for applying a double standard to
Jews. That word is anti-Semitism.
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