As the author notes, Gaddafi is an anti-American socialist and therefore the Left including Obama have no real interest in removing him. Hosni Mubarak for all his shortcomings was pro American and kept the (albeit cold) peace with Israel while Gadddafi wanted to destroy Israel. The same folks who celebrate Palestinians, will never celebrate the removal from power of of those who support them be it Gaddafi, Ahmadinejad or others. The Iranian protests have pretty much been ignored.
by Seth J. Frantzman
Can someone tell me why the world’s press rushed to Tahrir Square in Cairo and cooed about how wonderful that uprising was, yet cares little for Libya?
By all standards, the Libyan situation seems more heroic. Photos show jury-rigged pickups with anti-aircraft guns mounted atop them to shield the protesters from Muammar Gaddafi’s Russian-made aircraft. They show old men waving antique rifles and swords while fighting marauding gangs of mercenaries who shoot into crowds. Isn’t all that more courageous than the protesters at Tahrir who, for the most part, were not harmed on such a large scale?
But there are few op-eds waxing poetic about Libyan freedom fighters. Nicholas Kristof, the inveterate New York Times columnist, is a good example. He wrote four laudatory columns between February 1 and 6 about Egypt. They included “Exhilarated by hope in Cairo” and “We are all Egyptians.”
But on Libya he was bored, noting on February 24 that “it’s time to nudge Col. Muammar Gaddafi from power.”
Nudge? And on March 2 he really got down to business with, “Let’s ratchet up the pressure toward a peaceful outcome.”
Such strong language!
Kristof is typical of a malaise about Libya. Is it really just because the press got used to rebellion in the Middle East? It seems that the big yawn is more about the fact that Libya doesn’t fit the right model. Gaddafi is an anti- Western socialist in the mold of Fidel Castro, an exotic part-time crazy person. He banged his fists at the UN; he carted around a big Beduin tent that he forced countries to allow him to pitch where he pleased. He postured and posed in robes that seemed like they came from the set of a movie about 1970s pimps. He wasn’t a fat, US-funded dictator and friend of Israel.
[…]
Had Gaddafi been the best friend of the Jewish state, would we not be hearing more about the inspiration of the Arabs throwing off the dictator? Or had he been some Western- supported regime, like Mubarak, with US airplanes bombing the protesters, wouldn’t there be some huge outcry about the “propped-up dictator” murdering Arabs in the street?
WE WILL never know why Libya didn’t inspire. We won’t ever know why Palestinians with slingshots and checkered keffiyehs make people weak in the knees, while the same people 1,000 miles away are boring.
[…]
Leading celebrities time and again patronized the Gaddafi family. Usher, Nelly Furtado, Beyonce and Mariah Carey all performed at lavish parties for them. When Gaddafi was in Italy in June of 2009, he asked to meet 1,000 prominent Italian women. And, no surprise, they came in droves to sit and listen to the dictator, much like Columbia University lapped up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech in 2007.
According to one report, “there were leading figures from politics, culture and industry; ministers posed for cameras, lawyers talked earnestly… in their seats and reality TV personalities blew kisses across the aisles.”
[…]
Read the rest: Terra Incognita: Libya: Many collaborators, little romance
Caroline Glick points out the anomaly that so called women’s groups (all of whom are left-wing) are silent about the brutality that Muslims display towards women – including child brides, forced mutilations, and over all barbaric misogyny. Meanwhile there are Orthodox groups in Israel who are dedicated to rescuing Jewish women (and children) who for reasons known only to God decided to marry Arab Muslims and are brutalized daily in Gaza, the West Bank and even within Israel itself. Liberal groups such as “J Street” and “New Israel Fund” remain silent, just as they remain silent over Gaddafi and anything that makes the Arab world look bad.
by Caroline Glick
Every few months, we are presented with media reports about Jewish women rescued from their Muslim husbands in the Palestinian Authority or within Israel.
The stories are always similar. The women were tortured by their husbands, often locked in their homes or under constant guard by members of their husbands’ families. Either with or without the help of their Jewish families, they reached out to Yad L’Achim which rescues Jewish women and their children from Muslim husbands. Yad L’Achim volunteers plan and carry out often dangerous rescue operations and bring these women and their children to safety.
In January, Channel 10 presented live footage of one such rescue. Viewers saw relatives of a mother of four named Dana waiting anxiously at the Erez checkpoint as she and her children fled her husband and his family in Gaza and took their first steps of freedom.
During their courtship, Dana’s husband showed her every courtesy. After their marriage, he began regularly beating her and kept her under around the clock surveillance. A visit to Yad L’Achim’s website makes clear that her story is anything but unique.
Yad L’Achim’s work in saving Jewish women from violent Muslim husbands is especially notable given the nature of the organization. It is an anti-missionary haredi organization led by Rabbi Dov Lipshitz. It is not feminism that motivates its members to save these women. It is Jewish law. And specifically, the halachic command of the ransoming of Jewish hostages. According to the organization, it carries out scores of rescue missions like the one that rescued Dana every year.
The question naturally arises, why do haredim dominate what by rights ought to be a field occupied by secular feminists? Why aren’t Israeli and American Jewish feminists at the forefront of efforts to save these women from their violent husbands? Where, for instance, is the New Israel Fund? Its website brags, “The New Israel Fund founded or funded most of Israel’s women’s rights organizations and networks.”
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IN HER interview with Channel 10, Dana said that in Gaza, “what they do is curse the Jews 24 hours a day.”
The fact is that both misogyny and Jew-hatred are facts of life throughout the Muslim world. This state of affairs renders marriage to Muslim men a particularly dangerous prospect for Jewish women.
[…]
But the feminists throughout the Jewish world are silent on this issue. And this isn’t surprising. The egregious mistreatment of Jewish women by their Arab husbands involves two issues that the Left – which encompasses most feminist groups – is intent on ignoring: Islamic misogyny and Islamic Jew hatred. Just as the Left ignores, underplays, trivializes or justifies the fact that hatred of Jews is the most universal sentiment in the Muslim world today, so it systematically ignores, underplays or trivializes the endemic brutalization of women and girls throughout the Islamic world.
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Rather than discuss the real, truly life-threatening dangers faced by women and girls throughout the Islamic world, Amanpour presented her viewers with a superficial and false depiction of recent events in which a few well-dressed, perfectly coiffed, pretty young women in Egypt and two Western dressed women in Libya are supposedly transforming the position of women in their societies one tweet at a time.
It was a complete lie. But it wasn’t shocking. It would have been shocking if Amanpour had provided her viewers with any relevant facts about the subject she was purportedly discussing.
[…]
Read the rest: Women’s Surprising defenders
Tags: Caroline Glick, Seth J. Frantzman
