The West’s feminists are wilfully blind to the realities of Islamism

Two kinds of silence have left me cold recently.

The first is the Taliban’s brutal edicts silencing women’s voices. Its Islamist decrees insisting that not only should women not be seen, they should also not be heard. Their sinful hair, faces and bodies have long been hidden behind the oppressive drapery of the burqa. Now the Taliban is passing laws to ensure their sinful voices are shrouded, too.

The latest diktat from his cruellest, most misogynist of governments says that even when women pray they must take care that no passer-by, including other women, hears their whispered words.

Women, says Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, the Taliban’s minister for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice, “are not even permitted to hear [each other’s] voices while praying”.

This comes just two months after the Taliban enforced even stricter rules on how women must dress and behave in public. Dress-wise, they must be utterly covered, including every millimetre of their faces. Behaviour-wise, they must refrain from reading, singing and even speaking when outdoors. Rarely in history has there been such a barbarous gagging of an entire section of society.

And the second silence that has unsettled me? The silence of the woke of the West in response to this vile crime against womankind.

You will search in vain for expressions of solidarity with the women of Afghanistan. The hashtag activists of the very online Left are schtum. Unlike the women who live under the sexist boot of Taliban rule, these people have the right to speak, but choose not to.

There hasn’t been a peep from the keffiyeh classes, those smug crusaders who never leave the house without the Palestinian scarf draped over their shoulders so that everyone they encounter will know what a caring, virtuous person they are. Their concern for “the oppressed” seems to shrivel and die when it comes to the women of Afghanistan.

They beat the streets every weekend in noisy displays of pity for the people of Gaza. They wear Palestine pins. They damn Israel as a uniquely malevolent state for its “mass murder” of Palestinians (what the reasoned among us refer to as its “war on Hamas”).

Yet they run out of moral steam where the Taliban is concerned.

They spend their Saturdays weeping for Palestinians, they raged against Donald Trump for saying dumb things like “grab ’em by the p*ssy”, they put a blacked-out square on Instagram to show how heartbroken they were over the police killing of George Floyd.

Yet for the brutalised women of Afghanistan, nada. Not one measly public gathering to say “Free Afghan women”. The West’s feminists are not much better. Yes, some have spoken out and tried to drag the public gaze to the Taliban’s warped tyrannising of women.

Nothing better captures the dystopian streak in virtue-signalling than the fact that while privileged feminists in the West demand the right to lounge around in swanky clubs, women in Afghanistan can’t even read a novel on a park bench.

How do we explain the wilful blindness of the woke? Their refusal to extend just a little of that fury they feel over Palestine and other causes to the women of Afghanistan?

I think the key culprit is the politics of identity. These people are cagey about slamming the Taliban because they fear appearing “Islamophobic”. Israel, on the other hand, is a “white” nation, in their small minds anyway, and therefore it can be hated without restraint.

The juvenile ideology of identitarianism, which says only “whites” can really be oppressors, has frazzled the minds and broken the moral compasses of a whole generation of activists.

Their deafening silence over the Taliban’s destruction of women’s dignity exposes the cruelty that lurks behind fashionable causes. Having devoted themselves, obsessively, to pitying Palestinians and hating Israel, the puffed-up clicktivists have no moral energy left for Afghan women. Your suffering isn’t fashionable enough. Sorry, ladies.

Let’s ignore these Leftists with their choosy virtue, and instead listen to Afghan women, some of whom are risking life and limb to express themselves online.

The lyrics to one of their songs goes: “Their boots might be on my neck. Or their fists to my face. But with our deep light inside, I will fight through this night.” Now that’s a sentiment that deserves solidarity.