When a beautiful young woman from Somalia wrote a screenplay entitled Submission, about the treatment of women in Muslim culture, and a Dutch artist, Theo van Gogh, then made the film, Muslim fundamentalists in Holland delivered a famously spectacular review.

Van Gogh was shot eight times and his killer was apprehended while attempting to decapitate the body, just in case the message had been too subtle.

As for the screenwriter, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she was taken into police protection and moved from house to house.

The van Gogh murder, committed in 2004, lives on in Europe as an emblem and a threshold in the accumulating body of evidence and incidents of intimidation by Muslims living within Western society. In Australia, our own extreme symptom and threshold in this same trend and cultural struggle was the gang-rapes of dozens of young women by Muslim men in Sydney. Nine trials have worked through the courts so far as a result of these crimes.

In this cultural clash, the treatment of women is the most hotly contested terrain. Not just the treatment of non-Muslim women by Muslim men, but the treatment of Muslim women within Western culture. Many Muslim women live under constraints that are unacceptable to wider society. For years, a symptom of this tension, which is largely submerged, has been the distraught young women turning up at the Australian embassy in Beirut to escape forced marriages.

In the midst of this cultural and moral struggle one element has been conspicuously missing - the feminists - the authors, academics and commentators who rose to prominence as advocates of women's rights. In Australia and Europe, their response to the growing levels of sexual intimidation, harassment or suppression of women by Muslim men has either been a deafening chorus of silence, or denial and blame-shifting.

Instead, the combat has been left to journalists, and the heaviest work has been done, at great risk to themselves, by dissident women inside Islamic culture. Women such as Hirsi Ali, who, before her life in Holland became intolerable and she retreated to the United States, wrote The Caged Virgin, a book in which she comments: "Islam dominated the lives of our family … I was taught that Islam sets us apart from the rest of the world, the world of non-Muslims. They, the others, the kafirs, the unbelievers, are antisocial, impure, barbaric, not circumcised, immoral, unscrupulous, and above all, obscene; they have no respect for women; their girls and women are whores …

Yeah, where ARE you feminist assholes?

Hello?  N.O.W.?

Feminist Majority Foundation?

I thought not.  Plenty about Bu$hitler vetoing Stem Cell research, but not a fucking peep about the hell women in Islamic societies endure.

Hypocrites.

The Sydny Morning Herald