If you follow foreign news, you’ll remember that former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returned to her native Pakistan two weeks ago and only narrowly avoided being blown to bits.
After suicide bombers and rooftop sharpshooters finished attacking Bhutto’s celebratory convoy, the streets of Karachi were slick with blood and 140 people lay dead. It was a depressingly predictable homecoming for a woman who has declared herself an enemy of Islamic fanaticism.
I was thinking of this when I saw the reviews of Susan Faludi’s new book, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America,” in which the dyspeptic feminist decries the “silencing” of women after the attacks. Evidently someone in Pakistan wants to “silence” Bhutto permanently, but that’s not what Faludi has in mind.
Faludi’s idea of “silencing” — and forgive me, but here it’s such a preposterous, super-fatted term that I can’t help giving it quotation marks — is not a bullet in the head or the detonation of explosives to shut up forever some meddlesome woman. Faludi is distressed that male writers outnumber females on the op-ed pages of American newspapers.
The incorrigible triviality of this claim is laid bare when you consider the women targeted for the silence of the grave. Like Bhutto, they come from Islamic cultures. They denounce the jihadist poison flowing through Muslim societies.
But unlike the elegant Pakistani politician, they do not live in exotic faraway locations. They live here, in America, where we may not agreewith what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it. Won’t we?
Yet these women are in mortal peril. Women who speak out about Islam’s depredations are in constant fear of the nighttime intruder, the lunging, knife-wielding stranger, the carload of jihadi wannabe’s hunting them down via the Internet. These women are real, their terrors are justified, and the threat of them being silenced within our own shores should make all Americans furious.
Start with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the eloquent and forceful Somali-born dissident and former Dutch lawmaker who moved to Washington last year.
In 2005 a jihadist enraged by Hirsi Ali’s denunciations of Islam butchered her friend and collaborator, filmmaker Theo van Gogh, on an Amsterdam street. The killer stabbed a letter into van Gogh’s chest threatening Hirsi Ali: “This letter is, God willing, an attempt to … silence you forever.”
Until October, the Dutch government kept its promise to protect Hirsi Ali. But a petulant parliament has now yanked her funding, leaving Hirsi Ali unprotected but for the generosity of Americans who are sending checks as small as $25 to help keep this extraordinary person alive.
Then there’s Wafa Sultan, the Syrian-born Californian who has been tormented by threats against her family since she began speaking publicly against Islam. Writer Irshad Manji, another critic of the “religion of peace” who lives in Canada, sleeps behind bullet-proof windows.
Maybe these women should just shut up? Maybe they should go gratefully into the witness protection system, put on a taxpayer-funded gag, and disappear into obscurity. Maybe if they piped down, the Islamo-fascists who want to punish words with death would leave them alone — would leave us all alone.
If we believe that, we no longer believe in the freedom of speech.
While American feminists wrap themselves in a gauzy phantasm of being “silenced,” women in America who speak out against Islam are trying to survive in a genuinely terrifying reality. And not one of them gets even a mention in Susan Faludi’s book.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal.
