There were and possibly still are men with names like Zakaria, or men who come from the part of the world where Zakarias originate, who spent a lot of time denouncing White women as godless whores. Rafia Zakaria is a woman who wants to outdo such men by denouncing White women as godless whores who take an active part in beating and killing Muslim men who try to kill Americans. Why is she doing this? Is it because she wants a pat on the back from the men back home? Or does she know something we don't- viz. the next country to fall to the Taliban will be her own Pakistan? Might as well get in good with them while the going is good.
She writes-
“I’m fine,” the pale, red-haired Jessica Chastain says as she takes off her full black jumpsuit and face mask. The scene is from Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which despite the seeming banality of the dialogue, says a lot about a new flavor of feminism that has evolved in the white and Western world since 9/11 and the War on Terror.
Whereas Rafia's brand of feminism consists of condemning women in her adopted country who take an active role in fighting back against the sort of men, from her part of the world, who would beat her if she dared show her face in the street.
Either women must take on military and other duties so as to protect their own nation or else they have to accept second class status. If they are not risking their lives and getting their hands dirty they have no moral right to claim equality with the men who ensure the nation's security.
Rafia is a lawyer in America. She may think Terror should prevail- provided it is Islamist and spends a lot of time beating women if they show their face in the street and slitting their throat if they bring dishonor on the family- e.g. by refusing sexual services to whomever their father has sold them to.
In the film, Chastain plays a CIA “targeter” named Maya who is physically delicate but tough as nails in every other way, which in this particular conversation also means that she is up for torture.
Rafia is up for assassinating the character of the brave women who have stepped forward to keep her country safe. Many of them are Black or Hispanic. But Rafia sticks to the 'White women are godless whores' script. After all, in America, there is such a thing as the Nation of Islam.
In fact, that is what she and her male CIA colleague have been doing inside a makeshift bunker that also serves as a torture chamber. “Let’s go back in there,” she tells the men after they have rested a minute from the hard toils of inflicting extreme pain on other human beings.
Other human beings who want to kill innocent Americans.
Here, then, is gender equality at its most perverse,
No. Equality involves equality of sacrifice. If women won't fight and refuse to get their hands dirty, then they don't deserve equality. This is not perverse. It is natural justice.
Rafia has a tiny little brain. She thinks 'gender equality' means lots of chocolate for her to eat. It would be very perverse if she were called upon to get her hands dirty protecting the country where she gobbles chocolates. Instead she should be given a Pulitzer Prize for denouncing godless White whores who are so perverse that they are trying to defend their country instead of handing it over to Terrorists.
a white woman trying her best to show a white man that she has as much of an appetite for cruelty as he does.
No doubt, Rafia is hoping for a pat on the back for writing this shite from whichever type of Taliban or Boko Haram is operating in her country of origin.
And the laconic white men appear to approve. “She’s a killer,” her boss says in her wake as she disappears down a hallway. If this had been an entirely fictional film, all of it could have been discarded as the morbid fantasy of some Hollywood director. As it happens, Maya is based on a very real CIA sleuth, whose identity the agency has never released but to whose gritty greatness many have made pointed allusions. Maya (along with others, also mostly women, CIA sources have said) was responsible for the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
But Osama was Muslim! He was living comfortably in Pakistan! You mustn't kill Muslim men in Pakistan even if they have killed your people. Furthermore, women should be lining up to become wives and concubines of such men. They should not be helping bring the thugs to justice.
Rafia does not mention that some of the women involved were Black, Hispanic and Muslim. The fact is most women in America- even if Muslim or of Pakistani origin- are patriotic. If they are pious Muslims, they will never make invidious distinctions of color. But then not everybody has a tiny brain like Rafia.
The film Zero Dark Thirty may be a souped-up, cinematically slick, and action-packed retelling of what the real Maya managed to do, but it is based on fact. For her now-feted heroism, the real Maya won the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, an honor about which she was happy to boast to all her CIA colleagues through a mass email.
Whereas she should have quietly become the concubine of some Terrorist and waged war on her own country. It appears the lady in question has a Slavic name. It is a fact that such women played a big role in liberating their countries from the Nazis. It is also possible that the lady is of Jewish heritage. OMG! No wonder Rafia has her knickers in a twist!
I watched Zero Dark Thirty in a nearly full movie theater in Indiana. Jessica Chastain’s Maya may have been “fine” in makeshift torture bunkers, but I definitely was not.
Indeed. An older generation of Germans was not comfortable watching movies where the Nazis were the bad guys.
Beyond the movie theater, the shopping mall was all aglow with holiday decorations and around me, my fellow moviegoers seemed snug in the cozy darkness of the theater and smug in this elevation of white women as the ultimate weapon in crushing Brown terrorists.
Those 'Brown' terrorists attacked America. They should have stayed at home slitting their daughter's throats and beating any woman who dared show her face on the streets. Thankfully, now the Taliban has prevailed, Rafia will be one happy camper.
The crowd repeatedly cheered, once during a scene that showed a Brown man being waterboarded, another time as Chastain’s Maya inched closer to catching the man whom the Americans had been hunting for a long decade, and of course at the end as she is hailed as the heroine who crushed the most evil man in the world. The whole exercise was an elaborate revisiting of glory designed to puff the chests of patriots.
Whereas ISIS videos of 'kuffar' beheadings puffed out the chests of Rafia's heroes. How sad that they were only good at beating their own women and totally shit at fighting America!
The end of the film was never a mystery, America had won, and at least for the purposes of the film, a slight, flame-haired, delicate-featured “killer” had sleuthed and tortured her way to ensuring the obliteration of the most wanted Brown man in the whole world.
I'm cool with that. Why? That lady doesn't want to kill me just because of my religion. But Osama would have been delighted if peeps like me were slaughtered by his suicide bombers.
I cringed, not just because Maya’s search for parity with men extends to trash-talking
OMG! A woman is using naughty words! What's next? Will she start wearing trousers? Chee Chee, such Godlessness!
and torture, or even because she calls Pakistan “a really fucked-up place”
I know plenty of Pakistanis who would go much further. That's why, like Rafia, they have emigrated.
within the first few minutes of the film, but because it seemed that I was the only person who saw in Zero Dark Thirty an utter perversion of the general project of gender equality.
Which Osama was committed to.
I cried at the end, because the audience stood up to hand the movie a standing ovation.
Rafia cried because she was living in a country which protects itself from maniacs. Why does she not leave?
A few months later, the movie was further regaled at the Oscars. Jessica Chastain won Best Actress. The real and the fictive white women had prevailed, become equal to white men in their capacity to subjugate Brown men.
Women are the equal of men, period. Even India is now letting women undertake combat missions in the armed forces. Since they are just as good as men, nobody is complaining.
In Zero Dark Thirty (and the trueish story behind it), American feminism—once a movement that existed in opposition to the state,
Fuck off! White American women are patriots. So are Blacks and Hispanics and the vast majority of immigrants from Muslim nations. Rafia lives in a fantasy world where being a feminist meant being a secret ally of Osama's.
as a critique of its institutions and mores—was recast as one that served the state’s interests through any means imaginable.
Did Feminists attack the twin towers because of gender inequality practiced there? No. It was Islamists who did so. They think women should not show their faces in the streets.
This identification with state interests, and the idea of going out to conquer the world with the same mindset of subjugation and domination possessed by white men, seems to have become a warped feminist goal.
This stupid woman does not know that non-White women are over-represented in the US Armed forces.
Put another way, white women
and non-white women
wanted parity with white men at any cost,
no. At the price of any sacrifice for the commonweal and the protection of the Nation.
including by avidly taking on the domination of Black and Brown people.
Non-white Americans are as patriotic, if not more so, than Whites. They are over-represented in the armed forces.
As white feminists have progressed within their societies and begun to occupy increasingly important positions, they are constructing a feminism that uses the lives of Black and Brown people as arenas in which they can prove their credentials to white men.
Rafia is trying to improve her credentials with the Taliban. Maybe she knows something we don't. Pakistan may well be the next domino to fall to extreme Islamists.
Sadly, Rafia will still get beaten or have her throat slit if she doesn't give up her Westernized ways. OMG, she has shamelessly put her own photo- that too without hijab!- on internet! Fatwa her! Fatwa her to death!
In Rafia's defense, I should point out that she is saying Feminism is evil because it aims at gender equality. It should concentrate on being a junior partner in a Terrorist assault upon the Nation. But this is best done by staying home and cooking for jihadis.
In her 2019 book A Woman’s Place: US Counterterrorism Since 9/11, Joana Cook writes that feminism, particularly in relation to the state, used to be focused on promoting peace and nonviolence.
Which is done by killing or locking up murderous fanatics. Feminists may not like me, but they don't beat me up because I'm merely ugly and obnoxious. However, if I start killing people, female cops will cart me off to jail with as much alacrity as male cops. That's a good thing.
Being a feminist used to entail a sense of sisterhood with all women,
It still does. Osama wasn't a woman and thus couldn't be a sister.
discouraging actions where one woman hurt the life and livelihood of other women.
Rafia is trying to hurt the life and livelihood of other women. She says 'I only mean White women' but the fact is non-White women are over-represented in the Armed Forces.
The state was understood as propagating and institutionalizing patriarchal norms, and resisting those (rather than adopting them) was considered a feminist act.
Rafia does not seem very interested in going home and resisting patriarchal norms there. I don't blame her. Look at what happened to Malala.
But in America’s War on Terror, the state had subsumed the struggle for equality within itself, giving white women seeming parity with white men in the opportunity to crush Brown, Muslim men, who had become the ultimate antagonist in the white imagination.
Why? Did this have anything to do with 9/11?
The fact is gender equality gives women parity with men in doing all sorts of jobs which involve some degree of disutility or otherwise repugnant actions. If you become a police-woman you have to slap the cuffs on people who don't want to be restrained. If you become a Doctor you may have to look at parts of my disgustingly obese body. These are not things anybody would want to do for their own enjoyment. But, such actions can save lives. Those who do these jobs win our gratitude and respect. I hope they feel good about themselves- they certainly deserve to.
I recently had a colonoscopy. A Muslim Doctor performed it. If I alleged that the fellow had an interest in Hindu backsides and that he had joined the National Health Service to gratify the White Man's insensate desire to bugger up Hindus I would, rightly, be considered insane. Yet, is it not a fact that non-Hindus only exist so as to scheme together about ways to get access to Hindu rectums? Was the British Raj not founded upon the Viceroy's unconquerable passion for Hindu bungholes? Did not George Washington say to Benjamin Franklin, 'Dude, we gotta get rid of the Brits so as to be able to get lots of Hindu immigrants whom we can cavity search?'
Crucially, these white women are allowed to take on the “unfeminine” characteristics of violence and warfare, which would typically threaten the dominant patriarchy they exist under, but only when they exercise this power over someone even lower than them in the white-supremacist hierarchy—that is, on Brown foreigners.
Rafia herself has frequently been raped by butch White wimmin. Black women, however, refuse to fist her. Or perhaps this is just a fantasy of hers.
Clearly visible in this trade-off is the kind of conditional, limited power that wealthy, 19th-century British women experienced when they ventured overseas to British colonies.
e.g Margaret Noble and Annie Beasant and Nellie Sengupta all of whom played a leading role in the Independence struggle.
By contrast the wives of officials and missionaries etc. had no power at all.
In both cases, freedom is a zero-sum game, more for one group (white women) only possible as the reinforcement of less for another (non-white people).
Yet Rafia is in America, not Pakistan. Is she a hypocrite or does she dream of being fisted by White women in uniforms?
It is not just the notion of women being violent that is shocking and antifeminist
to a Muslim woman from a deeply patriarchal country. A Hindu woman might model herself on the Rani of Jhansi.
but the racial dimension that is central to this assumption of greater power by white women.
Very true. White women have reintroduced slavery.
If white American feminists of the 1960s and the Vietnam era advocated for an end to war,
an end to the Vietnam war- sure. Every sensible person did.
the new American feminists of the newborn 21st century were all about fighting in the war alongside the boys.
Ho Chi Minh didn't attack the American homeland. Osama's goons did. Rafia may say 'well, if American women stayed at home cooking and cleaning then 600 of them would not have died on 9/11'. However, she herself has a job.
Warfare, traditionally one of the most starkly gendered activities in human society, was opening its arms to women in even its most gruesome and violent moments,
War has gotten a lot less gruesome- at least for Americans. It is now more about brains than cannon-fodder.
and this was seen as a great step forward for everyone. The War on Terror, at least in theory, was America’s first “feminist” war. It wasn’t just CIA analysts who were glorified, it was also female soldiers. The story of Pvt. Jessica Lynch is another example. On March 23, 2003, Lynch, a 19-year-old truck driver with a maintenance unit of the US Army, was caught in an ambush and captured by Iraqi forces. Eight other soldiers were killed, and Lynch was taken to a hospital, where, according to the Pentagon, she was mistreated by the Iraqis. The US Special Forces launched a secret mission to rescue Lynch; it was alleged that the first words she said when she was found were “I am an American soldier too.”
This was the first successful rescue of an American soldier since the Second World War. Having watched Rambo movies, I can well understand American sentiments in this respect.
The rescue was recorded and a five-minute video was released to the media by the Pentagon. Within hours she became a media heroine, her courage was feted all over the news, she appeared on the cover of Newsweek against a giant American flag, and she was called a “female Rambo” and an “American hero.” It was much later that the heroics of Lynch began to be questioned. The BBC aired a scathing documentary that accused the US government of exaggerating the heroics of her rescue and mistreatment by the Iraqis to bolster public support for the war. Many of these allegations were later proven to be true, but the hero-making the Pentagon set out to do in the immediate aftermath of the rescue was already in play. The female American soldier as heroine in the Iraq war was the image Americans would remember. It was notable that the television film Saving Jessica Lynch, aired on NBC in 2003, told the same heroic story that had been challenged by the BBC and others. America wanted a soldier-heroine, and they got one.
Meanwhile ordinary Brits turned against the Leftists in the BBC. They are now much more circumspect.
I also refer to the war as “feminist” because
you are a cretin
the propagation of women’s rights was front and center as an actual goal. American women were liberated, and now they, along with male service members, would go to Afghanistan to root out the misogynist regime of the Taliban.
This stupid woman does not know that the invasion of Afghanistan occurred first.
America, thus, was not a cruel superpower bombing a small and hapless nation but a force for good that would actually help bring gender equality to a war-torn country. The effort to eradicate terror (read: Islamic terror, not white nationalist terror, despite the latter’s considerably larger tally of dead Americans)
In the last 20 years, Muslims have killed some 500 Americans for every casualty attributable to 'White Nationalist' lunatics.
was one of providing schools and health clinics and even beauty parlors, assisting in legal reform and the development of domestic-violence shelters, drafting progressive constitutions.
How wicked! American forces should have been handing out burqas and beating any woman who showed her face in the streets.
The small matter of devastating bombings
which al-Qaeda was very good at.
that left thousands dead and more disabled, forever splintered families, and wrecked livelihoods was a necessary means to that shining feminist end. When a white American woman (such as Chastain’s Maya in Zero Dark Thirty) did something unimaginably violent or cruel, it was part of the larger noble project of helping Afghanistan or Iraq become countries that valued women just as America valued them.
Yup. That's where America fucked up. Thankfully, Biden is of the same mind as Rafia- let women in her ancestral part of the world rot. But Trump came to that conclusion even earlier. But then Obama too had given up on the Rafias of this world.
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