On March 8 disgruntled women in 30 countries abandoned their jobs, homes, and children. They gathered in various city centers, leaving the rest of the world in peace. For one whole day, men were able to crack sexist jokes without looking over their shoulders.
According to the website for International Women’s Strike USA, the mass walk-out aimed to be “the beginning of a new international feminist movement that organizes resistance not just against Trump and his misogynist policies, but also against the conditions that produced Trump.” The organizers seemed oblivious to the fact that hostile, meddlesome, and radically anti-male feminists are one of the polarizing conditions that drove millions of eye-rolling American voters—including 53 percent of white women—into the groping arms of the Orange One.
The New York Post delightfully noted that the Women’s Strike manifesto, published in The Guardian, was co-authored by convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Yousef Odeh, as well as two admirers of balls-out Communist dictators, Angela Davis and Tithi Bhattacharya. This grim alliance adds a surreal dimension to recent images of Muslim women in stars-and-stripes hijabs marching with bougie Americans wearing knitted vaginas on their heads as a protest against indecency.
Where People Don’t Get the Memo
All of this reminds me of a joke I heard in Palestine last year on International Women’s Day. My companions were a group of lefty academics, and we were in a ramshackle gift shop in the conflict-torn town of Hebron. The shop-owner’s boisterous son, Muhammad, had just given us a tour of the Muslim side of the partitioned mosque/synagogue built over the Cave of the Patriarchs. As he wrapped some fragile items for a sassy Southern belle in our party, she politely reached out to give him a hand. The young buck waved her away derisively.
“This is man’s work.”
Our belle flashed her dazzling smile and said, “It’s International Women’s Day! Yay!”
“Oh, yeah?” Muhammad kept wrapping, holding her gaze. “Did you ask for equality today?”
“No”—she was still smiling—“I demanded it!”
“A man is a man. A woman is a woman,” he stated flatly. “That’s it. You want to work in a factory all day?”
Our belle’s smile disappeared. She told Muhammad to sit with her at the lunch he’d be hosting that afternoon and she’d tell him all about it. He smirked and handed her the gifts she’d purchased, including a fashionable keffiyeh. He looked around at the stiff leftoids lined up at his register, in his shop, on his block, in his country. Earlier, this kid had told us about how his best friend was gunned down by Israeli soldiers right in front of his eyes, where the fire still smoldered.
The academics’ hands were full of Banksy postcards and solidarity scarves and wads of blood-stained shekels. Ten minutes ago my companions had been kissing Muhammad’s ass and pledging their support for his oppressed people. Now all of a sudden they were the PC police.
“Do you know how a girl turns her boyfriend into a millionaire?” He asked us, grinning. Blank stares all around. “She dates a billionaire!” Get it? Because she spends all his money! Ha!
My companions balked, and one of the white knights scolded our host, “It’s hard to universalize these things.” But Muhammad just nodded and never stopped smiling.
Where Utopian Ideology Gets You
A black theology professor stepped up to pay for her keffiyeh with a stern expression, and the Arab said to her, “Don’t cry. Otherwise I’ll have to give you a hug!”
“I’ve dealt with discrimination all of my life,” she replied, shaking her head. “When you were telling us about the Israeli settlers pouring bleach on your people, I was reminded of that iconic image of segregationists in Alabama pouring bleach into a public pool to keep black children from swimming.”
That struck something, but his triumphant grin barely wavered. If I’d been quicker on my feet, I would have pointed out the irony of a Muslim who wants to keep women from working for a living. I mean, didn’t the Prophet Muhammad live off of his wife Khadijah’s wealth for 25 years?
The gall of visiting a foreign land and telling its people how to live is beyond my comprehension, yet I’ve seen it a hundred times. Sure, I was irked when we entered Muhammad’s father’s house and found covered women huddled in a side room, clutching the children. But I’m from the Appalachian foothills. I grew up with the mountain version of that sh-t.
We ate a hearty lunch on the shop-owner’s rooftop and listened to a young, elf-like Dutch activist talk about her work in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Her story was cut short when Muhammad burst onto the scene and started talking over her like she didn’t exist. The poor girl trailed off and timidly took a seat. I felt terrible for her, but if she’s into ethnomasochism, who am I to judge?
The difference between me and the utopian ideologues scrambling to take over the world is that I will fight to the death to protect the women I know and love. Utopians are willing to neutralize everything in their path to make the world safe for strangers.
Back In the United States
That was a year ago. Back in the United States, our culture gets more schizophrenic by the day. At January’s presidential inauguration, we heard the Rev. Franklin Graham proclaim that the dreary rain was a sign of God’s blessing, followed by President Trump’s assurance that the American people would be protected by cops, the war machine, and God Almighty. The next day the streets ran pink with pussy-hats. (In a parallel universe, Clinton won and men’s rights activists marched on DC wearing dickhead hats.)
Just over a week later, I watched mobs of bourgeois Brahmans and selfie-snapping hipsters fill Copley Square in Boston to protest the president’s #MuslimBan. The only thing more baffling than evangelical Christians making excuses for a money-grubbing womanizer is the shaky alliance of the feminists and Islamic traditionalists who seek to destroy him.
Standing on the steps of the public library, a crusty old hippie held up that classic Adbusters American flag—the one where the 50 stars are replaced with corporate logos—while he chanted “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Donald Trump has got to go!” Did he know how many of those companies support his cause? Much like the #TransBathroomRevolution, the anti-nationalist #MuslimBanResistance was loudly endorsed by transnational corporations like Starbucks, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and one-time antichrist Ed Koch. The Left would do well to regain their sense of the absurd.
Victim-Mongering Never Turns Out Well
As the long march continues, A Day Without a Woman seeks to snatch the revolution back from corporate control. The placards cite wage gaps, reproductive rights, and domestic violence—all legitimate issues, to be sure—but I sense that beneath their perpetual grievance is an unquenchable thirst for power. This self-proclaimed “feminism for the 99 percent” recklessly pits the fairer 50 percent against the other half. The movement’s unabashedly Maoist and Stalinist leaders seek to dismantle the oppressive capitalist power structure in order to establish a more centralized, totalitarian power structure. Thanks, but no thanks, ladies.
As demonstrators filled Times Square, we might have seen a few classic pics of their screaming faces beneath the Communism Kills billboard posted above Dallas BBQ on 42nd St., which reads:
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA – 65 MILLION
SOVIET UNION – 30 MILLION
CAMBODIA – 2 MILLION
NORTH KOREA – 2 MILLION
AFRICA – 1.7 MILLION
AFGHANISTAN – 1.5 MILLION
EASTERN BLOC – 1 MILLION
VIETNAM – 1 MILLION
LATIN AMERICA – 150,000
100 YEARS
100 MILLION KILLED
Of course, those regimes weren’t real Marxism. Not like the state-enforced equality espoused by the radical organizers behind A Day Without a Woman. Just ask Rasmea Yousef Odeh, Angela Davis, and Tithi Bhattacharya how they feel about political violence.
What these lifelong activists should be concerned about is that Crusade Fatigue has set in. No one takes their traffic-clogging spectacles seriously anymore. If leftists and liberals considered how they felt about Trump rallies and “Teabaggers” and abortion clinic protesters, they’d have some hint of how the general public sees their endless histrionic displays. Apparently they don’t understand that the louder they scream, the more the weary people in their lives will look forward to a day without them.
The address of the billboard has been corrected to 42nd St. rather than Ave.
