Where are the feminists against the Saudis?

Anne Applebaum ponders the fact that the American feminist movement doesn't seem to be too worked up about the plight of women in countries where a radical form of Islam deprives them of all rights. She compares the lack of interest today with the support generated throught the United States to fight against apartheid.

Thanks to international pressure, the Saudi king has pardoned the woman. And now? In Saudi Arabia women still can't vote, can't drive, can't leave the house without a male relative. No campaign of the kind once directed at South Africa has ever been mounted in their defense.

The comparison of Saudi and South African apartheid, and the different Western attitudes to both, has been made before. Recently the journalist Mona Eltahawy argued that while oil is a factor, the real reason Saudi teams aren't kicked out of the Olympics is that the "Saudis have succeeded in pulling a fast one on the world by claiming their religion is the reason they treat women so badly." Islam, she points out, does take other forms in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and elsewhere. But Saudi propaganda, plus our own timidity about foreign customs, has blinded us to the fact that the systematic, wholesale Saudi oppression of women isn't dictated by religion at all but rather by the culture of the Saudi ruling class.

I think there is another explanation, too. As a nation, we are partial to issues that seem familiar, and the story of apartheid South Africa had echoes in our own civil rights movement. It wasn't that big a leap for Jesse Jackson to support the anti-apartheid movement when it was at its peak in the 1980s, but it wasn't that hard for college students then, either: We had been taught about institutionalized racism in school.

I don't buy this thesis that racism was much more recent so we could react against it in South Africa in the 1980s but that the feminist battles for suffrage are just too far removed to serve as any sort of model for fighting for women's rights in Saudi Arabia. And I don't think that NOW is worried about Saudi oil. I think that people who got motivated about apartheid also liked being able to link what they saw there to what they disliked about the United States. It could be a twofer. Protest against apartheid and throw in some knocks against the man at home also. Surely that road is still open for feminists who want to help women abroad and could tie the supine American response to Saudi support for Wahhabi madrasses around the globe and our looking the other way as Saudi women are denied rights at home. They could get the same twofer as the anti-apartheid protestors had before. The real question is why they are more wrapped up in fighting for little nothings of battles here at home when there is such a wide world of women who might be helped abroad.

The National Council of Women's Organizations' most famous recent campaign was against the Augusta National Golf Club. The Web site of the National Organization for Women (I hate to pick on that group, but it's so easy) has space for issues of "non-sexist car insurance" and "network neutrality," but not the Saudi rape victim or the girl murdered last week in Canada for refusing to wear a hijab.

The reigning feminist ideology doesn't help: The philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers has written, among other things, that some American feminists, self-focused and reluctant to criticize non-Western cultures, have convinced themselves that "sexual terror" in America (a phrase from a real women's studies textbook) is more dangerous than actual terrorism.

These feminists don't want to give up the glory days when they could point to real discrimination in civil and economic rights for women so they get all excited about car insurance or protesting Wal-Mart for not selling the morning after pill. Anne Applebaum is absolutely correct. A perusal of the NOW web site doesn't reveal any concern for the way women in some Islamic countries are treated as true second-class citizens. They're more worried about whether girls are encouraged enough to study math and science. For shame.