I have never met Ben Stein and harbor no ill-will towards him. But last
week the former TV game show host wrote an article that somehow reminded
me of the Holocaust deniers.
Referring to the precarious situation in Iraq, Mr. Stein posed
this
question: are "we already eager to surrender to the man who murdered
women and children"?
Women and children?
If there's anything we know about Iraq under Saddam Hussein, it's that
men
suffered the most horrific cruelties. Remember the stories about
Saddam's infamous meat cutter machine? About alleged Army deserters who
had their ears cut off? The children forced into combat? And the 600
civilians gunned down in Basra for not having ID cards?
The victims were almost all male.
I have to assume Mr. Stein is a reasonably decent fellow. So how did he
get lured into this sad example of re-writing history to satisfy the
agenda of the politically correct?
The answer can be traced back to Fem-think, which insists that in
patriarchal society, women are not only the biggest victims, women are
its only victims. Despite the absurdity of that proposition, the gender
warriors endlessly advance that idea. Repeat a lie a thousand times, and
people begin to believe it.
And now a major human rights organization, Amnesty International, has
become beholden to that mindset.
Fem-think at AI goes back 10 years when Amnesty
began
to release reports
that highlighted the human rights violations of women.
Before long an unmistakable gender bias began to emerge. The 2001 AI
report, Afghanistan: Making Human Rights the Agenda makes this
statement: "During 2000, at least 15 people were executed in public,
including one woman who was stoned to death."
Why highlight the tragic demise of one woman, and gloss over the deaths
of the 14 men?
Kosovo is another example of a recent civil conflict that killed
thousands of innocent civilian men. One report from the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe
documented
the widescale abductions,
torture, and executions, and noted, "young men were the group that was
by far the most targeted in the conflict in Kosovo."
But don't forget, the notion of male victimization is just another
example of patriarchal revisionism.
So when the matter of the sex-specific slaughter in Kosovo was raised at
a recent meeting of the Canadian section of Amnesty, the issue was met
with derision and contempt. And a resolution calling for the group to
"condemn all large-scale gender selective human rights violations of men
and women" in Kosovo was soundly defeated.
No doubt the correct-thinking AI delegates reasoned, "We certainly can't
approve that, it might distract from the good work we're doing to
highlight the human rights violations of women."
As human rights activist David Buchanan
recently put it,
Amnesty International has "flinched from clearly documenting large-scale
patterns of male-specific conflict during armed conflict."
But Amnesty International is not content to merely ignore widespread
violations against men. Or to sanitize reports of sex-specific
atrocities. Now it has decided to actively suppress men's basic human
rights.
Female-on-male domestic violence is
just as
common as the male-initiated
variety. But that didn't
stop AI from unveiling a campaign called Stop the Violence Against
Women, its one-sided focus being only on the female sex. Now Amnesty
chapters in Sweden and Ireland have published reports on domestic
violence that are filled with tiresome feminist slogans about
patriarchal oppression.
And if anyone still doesn't get the message, last Friday Amnesty
celebrated its
International
Day for the Elimination of Violence Against
Women, designed to kick-start the perpetually downtrodden into a
frenzied "16 days against gender violence."
In the United States, AI has gone on record supporting the Violence
Against Women Act. The concern with this controversial law is not just
that ignores half the domestic violence problem, the real problem is
that it tramples on men's civil rights.
The Violence Against Women Act discourages the provision of treatment
services to abused men. The law bribes local law enforcement agencies to
implement mandatory arrest policies that are targeted to men. VAWA
encourages prosecutors to adopt "no-drop" policies, even if the woman
wants to drop the complaint.
VAWA also encourages judges to hand out back-door restraining orders
based only on the woman's say-so. Referring to the widespread abuse of
these orders, the Independent Women's Forum recently
expressed
the concern that "their issuance and enforcement has troubling implications
for civil liberties."
So as Fem-think spreads and as we slide towards the Feminist World
Order, what will come of the civil rights of men?
