On the Progressive Double Standard When It Comes to Women’s Rights, Gender Equality and Islam….

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Q. Nomani write in the New York Times today about their experience testifying last week before the  Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs last week on “Ideology and Terror: Understanding the Tools, Tactics, and Techniques of Violent Extremism,” and being completely ignored and treated with cold indifference by the female Democratic senators on that committee:  

The Democrats on the panel, including Senator Kamala Harris and three other Democratic female senators — North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Missouri’s Claire McCaskill — did not ask either of us a single question. Just as we are invisible to the mullahs at the mosque, we were invisible to the Democratic women in the Senate.

How to explain this experience? Perhaps Senators Heitkamp, Harris, Hassan and McCaskill are simply uninterested in sexism and misogyny. But obviously, given their outspoken support of critical women’s issues, such as the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria and campus sexual assault, that’s far from the case.

No, what happened was emblematic of a deeply troubling trend among progressives when it comes to confronting the brutal reality of Islamist extremism and what it means for women in many Muslim communities here at home and around the world. When it comes to the pay gap, abortion access and workplace discrimination, progressives have much to say. But we’re still waiting for a march against honor killings, child marriages, polygamy, sex slavery or female genital mutilation.

Bonus: Venn diagram above displays graphically the inconsistency of the feminists, gender activists and progressives who seem unconcerned about Islamist extremism and its war on women.

Update: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Q. Nomani respond in today’s New York Times to readers who posted more than 1,000 comments about their op-ed. Here’s part of a response from Ayaan:

First, what is needed is critical self-reflection on the morals and agenda to which people on the left say they are committed. Look squarely at the real consequences of that agenda, both good and bad. Second, apply the idea of equality to all individuals regardless of their identity.Human rights are universal. And human rights are held by individuals, not by groups. The left today has a growing tendency to prioritize group rights over individual rights, partly driven by “intersectionality.” This is often what gets them in a moral bind. The rights of individual human beings should always come before those of the tribe or the collective.

If one finds white male sexism intolerable, then one should by definition find all male sexism just as intolerable. Excusing men of color, Muslims, immigrants or men living in non-Western societies for bad behavior toward women is an expression of the bigotry of low expectations.