NYT Op-Ed: Democratic Senators ‘Brush Off’ Women Witnesses Because Islam

Asra Nomani 2
C-SPAN
Neil Munro

Four feminist Democratic Senators snubbed female witnesses at a recent Senate hearing because the women witnesses are pro-democracy, pro-free speech, pro-freedom Muslims, says an op-ed in the New York Times.

The op-ed was written by the two female witnesses — Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Q. Nomani — who lived under Islamic governments and who were invited to testify at GOP Sen. Ron Johnson’s unprecedented hearing about the content of Islamic ideology.

The Democrats on the panel, including Senator Harris and three other Democratic female senators — North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Missouri’s Claire McCaskill — did not ask either of us a single question …

Just as we are invisible to the mullahs at the mosque, we were invisible to the Democratic women in the Senate.

How to explain this experience? Perhaps Senators Heitkamp, Harris, Hassan and McCaskill are simply uninterested in sexism and misogyny. But obviously, given their outspoken support of critical women’s issues, such as the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria and campus sexual assault, that’s far from the case…

There is a real discomfort among progressives on the left with calling out Islamic extremism. Partly they fear offending members of a “minority” religion and being labeled racist, bigoted or Islamophobic. There is also the idea, which has tremendous strength on the left, that non-Western women don’t need “saving” — and that the suggestion that they do is patronizing at best. After all, the thinking goes, if women in America still earn less than men for equivalent work, who are we to criticize other cultures?

 Read it all here.

In recent years, “identity politics” has supplanted the older expectation of reason-over-emotion, facts-before-friends Western-style debate in which participants were expected to compliment each other before the debate and not carry any personal grudges after the debate, as if they were playing tennis or baseball.

Instead, modern “identity politics” pressures people to sympathize with and celebrate only the claims by people who represent sub-groups in their political coalition, and to sneer at arguments made by people who can be described as members of groups opposed to their political coalition, regardless of facts or reason, truth or logic.

Also, progressives prefer to promote the views of supposedly victimized minority groups — such as African-Americans, Muslims, gays, immigrants — because they see their coalition as a coalition of suffering minorities led by noble high-IQ progressives. This perspective pressures progressives to ignore testimony from minority people whose pro-freedom, pro-speech views match arguments made by the supposed majority groups that are supposedly victimizing minorities.

Breitbart’s report on the hearing is here.

The Democrats’ snub towards the two women was widely noted on Twitter:

 

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