Indeed. That’s why every point began with the phrase “Some of us….” Each of us has our own opinion, and our own priorities. Furthermore, that is a Good Thing. My personal feminist priorities, for example, include affordable health care, local victims of domestic abuse, and the right of women to be treated as competant human beings by men in positions of authority (whether that authority is as a cop or as an auto mechanic). Yours are probably different, but I have found quite enough issues to keep me busy close to home.

When a whole culture needs to change…

Isn’t that contrary to the tenets of multi-culturalism?

When a whole culture needs to change, the situation is not anything like dealing with the abuse of indivicual women in the West.

Strawman alert!

Blaming “feminists” is a laughably vague.

Who, specifically, is disappointing you?

And to Michael van der Gaelin:
I remember reading about the Taliban’s treatment of women well before the Sept 11 attacks made the Taliban a household word. Ms. Magazine followed the developments in Afghanistan pretty closely and urged readers to contact human rights groups to protect women’s treatment there.

That said, as American feminists, we have more power to act in the U.S. There’s only so much we can do to change laws in another country.

As for the plight of Muslim women in the U.S. trapped in abusive marriages – I think this is more an issue of domestic abuse in general than one of the oppression of women in Muslim communities. I don’t know the statistics, but I don’t think that spousal abuse in the U.S. is more prevalent in Muslim marriages than in non-Muslim marriages. What struck me about the 21-year-old Pakistani bride is that she didn’t know she had rights in the U.S. To me, this woman has more in common with sex slaves who are brought to the U.S. and held against their will than with Muslim wives in arranged marriages. And that’s a lot harder to fix. We can pass laws outlawing spousal abuse, but how do you know that everyone knows their rights?

And…I almost let this go but I just couldn’t do it…..but the pro-abortion campaign? Wow. Although I’m sure some people think abortion is a good thing, I think most people in the pro-choice camp believe (as I do) that the fewer abortions, the better.

That’s my general impression. Much as workers rights activists in the US aren’t crusading to end child slavery throughout the world, American feminists (as ShortWoman has aptly shown us) deal with AMERICAN feminist issues. I’m sure the vast majority abhor Muslim treatment of women, though I agree that sometimes some (not all) feminist organizations make “allies” out of Muslims for other purposes and it makes me entirely uneasy.
That said, I think more should be done about Muslim women INSIDE the US. Fine that you can’t very well take on the viscous Islamic world beyond our borders, but educating and campaigning for laws obligating equality for any woman within the US should be at the forefront of an American feminist organization, since doubtlessly Muslim women (especially recent immigrants) must rate amongst the most vulnerable of women. I can only hope this is the case.

“other female members of her own family had the power to prevent even the faintest possibility of it happening.”

A common misconception of discrimination against women is that only men do it. This is of course nonsense, women are very often the most common “enforcers” of their own oppression. They are the ones teaching their daughters that they are lesser and are to obey men. They are the ones teaching their sons to lord over women. They are the ones who will socially exclude another woman who steps out of bounds, and often the one who will snitch about rule breaking. A woman who leaves “her place” is a living reminder that you are too afraid to do the same. Some will react with admiration, others with hate.

Some of us — in the case of Taliban Afghanistan for example, where women could only be taken care of by female doctors but females were forbidden to gain the educational level necessary to become a doctor — feel that because the actions taken by men amount to self-genocide, the terrible circumstances simply cannot survive a generation.

Some of us are too busy fighting for things like equal pay and adequate access to contraception and proper care/education for our children to spend a whole lot of time on things halfway across the world. We have to pick which battles to fight, because there is not enough time or energy to fight them all.

Some of us believe that the solution to our Muslim sisters’ problems must come from within their own sisterhood of feminists. We will gladly support groups that do this work, but they have to — if I may borrow from the psychologist’s lingo — take ownership of the problem and decide to do something about it.

Some of us realize that in the Western world, it *may* be a woman’s choice to wear modest clothing, and even chador, veil, hajib, or burka. That being said, in the Western world a woman of any culture has the inalienable right to choose her own marriage partner and furthermore the inalienable right not to be assaulted.

On a related note, this item absolutely stunned me. At 6 this girl was shipped off to India to care for her sick mother and at 11 she was in a forced marriage. Her Aunt back in the UK apparently thought it was just fine for an elementary school child to be a slave care for a disabled adult, but not just fine for her to be forced into sex and marriage. Her own family did this to her, other female members of her own family had the power to prevent even the faintest possibility of it happening.

We can’t save the world when some people won’t even save a blood relative.

Anyway: thanks for those links.

I wonder why there isn’t a full scale feminist movement to do something about this problem. They should really launch a big campaing, equal to the pro-abortion campaign.

Since when did Westerners give a rats ass about oppression in other countries in general?

Western men seem more interested in buying these women (or the girls in some cases) not liberating them

I certainly hear and read lots of comments.

Me neither.

http://feministing.com/archives/006766.html
http://feministing.com/archives/005902.html
http://www.msmagazine.com/news/uswirestory.asp?id=8466
http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=8957