Julie Burchill writes:
Strangely, for protestors so keen to complain about sexism and xenophobia, there was one female immigrant they didn’t mind stereotyping as a dumb foreigner – Melania Knauss Trump, the new First Lady. The collective slander wasn’t even of the skilful, sarcastic kind that I, as a long-time connoisseur of cattiness, can appreciate. Instead, it was that modern passive-aggressive sliming of pretending to feel sorry for someone when you’re just really cross that they’re not like you – and often as an attempt to transfer your own issues onto them. Hence the ‘Free Melania’ placards, because of course feminists are never in controlling, abusive and/or suffocating relationships. (…)
In the past I’ve compared women who willingly convert to this most sexually oppressive of religions to those sad-sacks who write love letters to crazed sex-killers on Death Row; similarly, the Women’s March looked a lot like a mass wedding of – to quote Christopher Hitchens on the anti-Iraq War protests – ‘the silly led by the sinister’. Or as the writer Nervana Mahmoud heartbreakingly put it: ‘Now we liberal Muslims feel alienated again. Those who are marching against Trump are selective liberals; they remember liberalism when a white man like Trump is the culprit, but happily defend the illiberalism of non-white authoritarian regimes and ideologies. My message to all social activists marching in America is simple: Feel our pain, and stand with our common values. One cannot stand against Trump’s misogyny while condoning or ignoring others’ misogyny as ‘cultural’ or ‘religious’. Such selectivity is what led to the rise of Trump in the first place. Women’s rights are for all, not just for American and other Western women.’
