There’s a group called Follow the Women that’s organized a bike ride through the Middle East in the name of peace. Here’s what a participant wrote last month:
Nearly 250 women, representing 30 nationalities from mostly Europe and the Middle East, but also the United States and Canada, arrived in Beirut last week for the third “Follow the Women” bike tour, which winds through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and – Israeli government permitting- the Occupied Palestinian Territories.Started in 2004. One of the founders is a British woman named Detta Regan, “Follow the Women” is not a race, but a bike tour where women ride in the name of female empowerment and the aim of expressing solidarity with the Middle East. It is also a good place to break down cultural stereotypes and experience woman-to-woman diplomacy, away from official government positions and media hype.
Most of the Western women I cycled with expressed surprise at how calm Beirut is, and how beautiful. “It’s nothing like how it is in the news,” the British woman next to me exclaimed.
Note that the group didn’t plan to show solidarity with the women of Israel. And also note that now that they are in Syria, things aren’t so calm in Beirut anymore. And it’s their current host who’s fomenting the violence.
The utter cluelessness of these women was described nicely recently by Bret Stephens:
For reasons both telling and mysterious, Israel has become unpopular among that segment of public opinion that calls itself progressive. This is the same progressive segment that believes in women’s rights, gay rights, the rights to a fair trial and to appeal, freedom of speech and conscience, judicial checks on parliamentary authority. These are rights that exist in Israel and nowhere else in the Middle East. So why is it that the country that is most sympathetic to progressive values gets the least of progressive sympathies?
How welcome do you figure this woman would be in Tehran or Gaza?
But let them ride their bikes and give cover to the tyrants who are fomenting the strife in the Middle East.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
It is a very large assumption that “progressives” actually do support those things, no matter what they say. Progressives are invariably apologists for tyrants (look how gooey they get over that old murderer Castro), apologists for terrorists, advocates of ruinous and evil ideas, and hold in contempt those countries that do practice the principles thay pretend to espouse. No, they do not support liberal ideas, using the term in its old sense as favoring liberty. They favor tyranny and racism (antisemitism) and fawn over genocidal maniacs. Any support for liberal principles is mere window dressing, propaganda to fool the rubes. They mean to be the Big Chief Commissars. Unfortunately for them, the Islamists are much more intelligent and clever than they are, so the latter will triumph over them if the two allies ever do manage to destroy our civilization, as happened in Iran during the Iranian Revolution.
On top of being clueless and one-sided, isn’t the exercize a little patronizing? Pictures like this make me think so: http://www.daylife.com/photo/06W11Qw7x5fgB/syria_follow_the_women