I believe in the equality of the sexes and the inalienable right of women to partake of the same liberty and freedom as men. That should make me a “feminist” but unfortunately academic feminism as convinced the last several generations of women that feminism and doctrinaire Marxism are one and the same so I am not considered a feminist.

Which frankly doesn’t bother me because part of being an adult, and dare I say a man, is not caring what people think of you, especially those who you don’t know and will never meet. I am however irked on occasion when these same modern feminists who claim I’m a misogynist because I eat meat or own a gun or used to enjoy the occasional foray into a gentlemen’s lounge allow real misogyny to go unchallenged and unanswered. Misogyny like Joshua Holland’s latest DailyKos post which claims that Muslim women are not treated badly at all.

What’s that you say? No person in his right mind would dare to make that sort of asinine argument? Perhaps my friend, perhaps:

In the United States, there’s now an almost universally held belief that most women in Islamic societies face wretched persecution and that Islam itself is wholly to blame. But there’s scant empirical evidence to support the claim — mostly, we’re treated to detailed reports of horrific abuses in theocratic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite the fact that just six percent of the Muslim world live in those two countries. If you ask average Americans how they came to their beliefs about how badly women suffer in Islamic societies, most will reply that “everyone knows it.”

But I’ve seen no empirical data to suggest that an Islamic majority itself correlates with the subordination of women better than other co-variables like economic development, women’s ability to serve in government, a political culture that values the rule of law or access to higher education. In other words, you can use a comparison of women’s status in Saudi Arabia and Sweden to make an intellectually weak argument for Western superiority, but there’s little support for the notion that women living in “traditional” Islamic cultures enjoy a lower social status than those in orthodox Christian, Jewish or Hindu communities, to name a few examples. Think of the perfectly backwards Eastern Orthodox Church, the largest Christian communion in the world. Or consider the country where women may be brutalized more terribly than in any other, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is 70 percent Christian and 10 percent Muslim. Or go to Utah, where tens of thousands of Mormon fundamentalists believe that women are literally the property of their fathers or husbands. Of course, Mormon fundamentalists are the exception that proves the endless benevolence and equality of the West, while whatever despicable caricature of justice perpetrated on a woman by the House of Saud is breathlessly recounted as emblematic of Islamic culture as a whole.

The only breathlessness here is the breathless stupidity of an argument that cripples itself from the outset. Mormons? No matter what the theological underpinnings of male and female relations are in the LDS church Mormon women are free to do what they want, including leave the LDS church. Are women free to leave Islam? Can they drive cars, run a business or chose their own husband? Mormon women can and I would put forward that you will rarely hear about honor killings among LDS members.

And exactly what has the Eastern Orthodox Church done comparable to Islamic countries in terms of treating women badly? Are the Janjweed rape gangs in the Sudan Eastern Orthodox? Are Orthodox priests conducting the witchcraft trails in Saudi Arabia?

I’m sure from how he throws around the phrase Mr. Holland doesn’t really know what empirical data is nor do I believe he looked for any, for if he did he’d find hundreds of first hand sources, Islamic sources, that will show that Islam indeed relegates women to social and political inferiority. But that’s not his interest.

He goes on to explain his thesis, which is ridiculously easy to dismiss:

I’d expect, for example, the structure of a country’s economy to play a far greater role in determining women’s status than the religion of its people. There’s quite a bit of research showing that in service and manufacturing economies — those of wealthier states — women enjoy a great deal of personal freedom and autonomy, civil and political rights and access to higher education. That’s because of the high value of their labor outside the home, in the workforce. Women earning their own bread out in the working world demand, and require, full political rights and legal protections. In poorer economies, most of which have large agricultural sectors and many of which rely on extractive enterprises — oil, mining, etc. — women tend to suffer a much lower social status, because their labor is more valuable coerced and sequestered close to home. That’s a structural, rather than a “Clash of Civilizations” explanation of women’s varying outcomes in different countries. It’s the latter view that I find little evidence to support.

Needless to say Holland doesn’t present any evidence of this theory, just rants about the evils of the west. Interestingly if you read through his entire article you find that to make his argument work he has to play fast and loose with the terms “wealthy” and “industrialized”, using the two as interchangeable.

He has to because his poverty argument is shot down by Saudi Arabia’s incredible wealth. Many of the Islamic countries are in fact wealthy, including Iran whose wealth is mismanaged by a quasi-socialist system, but few are industrialized.

This is important because it’s partly the main distinction between the west and Islamic countries. The west’s modernity is the product of The Enlightenment while Islamic kingdoms dwell in medieval backwardness, flush with oil wealth that does little more than allow its leaders to escape the third world backwaters of their birth and spend time enjoying the civilization of the west.

By playing a shell game with the terms “wealthy” and “industrialized” Holland hopes to distract us from the root cause of Islamic countries backward culture which is unreformed Islam. By attempting to paint a picture of Islamic areas as economically deprived he hopes to turn the treatment of women there into a Marxist issue while diverting attention from the Islamic edicts that these women suffer under.

But his theory falls flat in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Dubai and every other Islamic country that has the industrialized world in the palm of their oil soaked hand.

It’s the religion stupid, if I may borrow a phrase, unreformed Islam is the culprit here. That’s why there are honor killings in Canada and England. Holland has a habit of both defending Islamism and attacking women as his long and badly written resume of articles prove (almost empirically).

Like this one where he attacks NOW.

Or here where he implies Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves what she gets.

In this one he claims that western freedom of speech “provokes” Muslims.

Here’s his classic “So What if Iran’s Arming Shiite Militias” post.

It’s almost as if Holland has ulterior motives for his leftism; almost like he’s a self-loathing anti-American misogynist from NYC who’s found an acceptable way to publish women hating screeds while dreaming of having his four veiled wives wait on him hand and foot.

I’m sure the women warriors at Feministing will be taking him to task over his seeming abandonment of the belief that women, especially the “Brown” women they are so fond of talking about, should be freed from the oppressive regimes that force them into generation after generation of servitude.

That is when they’re finished with the all important Charlotte Allen controversy. In the mean time Joshua Holland has done everything but give the Women’s Studies department the finger while yelling “Screw Feminism!” and I get at least one nasty email a week telling me I’m a tool of the patriarchy.