On Women’s Liberation Day March 8, the Danish activist Tania Groth gave a speech about women in islam in the suburb Tensta north of Stockholm, report in Swedish with clip of Muslim woman harassing speakers.

 

Here is a YouTube clip that covers most of her talk.

Below is the full text:

 

It is a great honour to again be standing here before you and especially on this day “international women’s day”.  I hope I don’t take up too much of your time because it is a subject about which I have much to say.

I stand here because strong Scandinavian women, the REAL feminists, have fought long and hard for equality, in a struggle that has been going on for almost 150 years in every sphere of our society.  I love my life here in Scandinavia – in Europe – as a women and I feel incredibly privileged and grateful for the twist of fate that allowed me to be born into a society where I can freely stand here before you and speak my mind.  But not everybody has the privilege to freely voice their opinion – even if they DO live in our Scandinavian countries!

So…we are here today to take off the veil.  There are, however, other and different veils that need taking off other than the physical veil.  What I would like to talk about today is taking off the mental and spiritual veil that keeps millions of women in perpetual slavery, misery and subjugation or in the case of western feminists creates in them a veil of ignorance as to the plight of their sisters, not just in the Western world but worldwide.

We are in the midst of a cultural battle and one which shows itself in many and various ways – in especially womens lives.

About 8 years I heard a man savagely beating his wife from 4 floors away.

Filled with anger, I yelled at him to stop by saying I SEE WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

He stuck his head out the window and replied in broken Danish “FUCK DIG, DIN DANSKE LUDER, JEG SKAL KOMME EFTER DIG” (FUCK YOU, YOU DANISH WHORE…I’M GOING TO COME AFTER YOU)

He then slammed the window shut and closed the curtains but the screaming stopped.

What struck me about it was that he felt no shame about what he was doing – he just showed anger.  How dare I challenge him!  He was reacting, as I now know, in quite a normal way for a man from a paternal culture where women are worth little.

I’m afraid however that many would not have reacted.  Out of “cultural respect”.  We aren’t really supposed to stick our nose in other people’s “business”.

I am here to say that we NEED to stick our noses in THAT type of business and we need to say NO, I will not accept it.  We must NOT close our eyes and ears nor windows and doors and think that we have no right to interfere because it is another culture that we have to respect!

A culture where it is legitimate to beat up on women deserves no respect.

And yet, that is exactly what we are expected to do.

We do not and MUST not in any way respect that type of primitive and violent behavior whether it be mental or physical.  It is HER right – whether she be from another culture or our own – to demand OUR respect for her life, liberty and well-being and to expect our help – AND our interference.  I am not sure how much my interference helped this particular woman but at least she KNEW that there was somebody who DID care about her well-being!  And that is worth something.

And here is the real heart of my speech.  I ask you, where ARE the collective howls of outrage from women?

 

Why DO we minimize and turn a blind eye to the examples of misogyny that we see ever more in our society?  And why aren’t more non-muslim feminists speaking up about violence against women – ALL women – not just in muslim-majority countries but right here at home?

Why do we ignore the terrible fate of some women who live right here in our own societies.  Not just muslim women but our own indigenous Scandinavian women who are, as we speak, being harassed, and groped and raped at an unprecedented rate by Islamic men who have no cultural respect for women.  It has become, horrifyingly, almost a normal thing to read in the newspaper…oh well just another woman raped, or stabbed, or beaten! More of the same – every damned day!

I am going to read to you a short story I read recently on a blog – by a young muslim woman who is questioning islam:

I am a 19 year old female who lives with two Palestinian Muslim parents. Since I was a little girl, I remember the taste of Islam in my mouth was a sour one. I would have nightmares about Hell and I felt a crippling fear towards God. I was told my nightmares were a warning to stay faithful and that my fear in God was only devotion.

When I was 14, I attended a wedding. The next morning I woke up very sick, and my mother was convinced that I’d received ”evil eyes” from the other guests. For the next year, I went through a severe depression and instead of getting proper help, I was bombarded with religious ”medicine”; I’d been to at least 4 sheikhs who promised to ”heal” me through the will of God. It was all very unsettling and scary for me as a kid and by my 17th birthday, I had become obsessed with researching Islam and the theory of religion as a whole.

For the first time, I felt relief to be wrong, that my parents were wrong. Last month, I openly discussed religion with my mother and father and younger sister, and they rejected almost everything I showed them, barely listening to me, even though I’d been decent enough to listen to them. Their passive aggressiveness turned into full-fledged wrath, and I was told to shut up and never bring this up again by my father while my mother cried and screamed about how her oldest daughter was a ”blasphemy” and she was embarrassed to be my mother and how I was going to send them both to Hell for my selfishness, yada yada.

Things still aren’t good, I am now dealing with them assuming I’ve become an apostate to ”whore” around, do drugs, and abandon them, because that’s what faithless people do – what Godless women do. A woman of Islam is obeying and quiet and compliant and I am none of these things. They have told countless times I am the worst type of woman. As a woman, however, I am more than ever feeling the effects of Islamic misogyny, and as their daughter, I feel forgotten, like the person I’ve always been has been thrown away and replaced with the image of an adulteress demon riddled with disease and perverseness.

I am still me, just not what they wanted. I feel like any confidence I’ve had in my decisions before is gone now, because I don’t want them to think I am doing something bad, even if I’m not. Even though I am so angry with them, their anger towards me affects me more. I feel like I turned my backs on them and that I put my mother, especially, through a lot. I don’t really know where to go now. How do I battle the emotions of guilt with the desire to pursue a life and identity of my own?

That was the story of a young muslim girl who WANTS to be a part of our society.

A huge number of women are imprisoned in this way under a misunderstood government sanctioned politically correct cloak of cultural “sensitivity”.   There is no way of out of this jail for these women unless we become aware and help give them the key to get out.

There are many women living under Islamic oppression who WANT to be a part of our society – who have seen it as an opportunity to gain a measure of freedom when they come here.

Imagine then their distress when they find that they have to live in Islamic enclaves and become even MORE Islamic!  To live even MORE restrictive lives than they did even in their homeland – because their families are afraid that they might become westernized!

And then imagine the ultimate distress…that not even Scandinavian women care about their situation!  They see and hear these selv-indulgent insane modern Scandinavian feminists who do nothing but wallow around in their self-righteousness.

I call them false feminists – pseudo-feminists – because they have made it abundantly clear that they don’t care about what happens to other women, they care about themselves and their own liberty – only.  Never mind that other people get trampled in the process, men, women…who cares.  So long as they can stand, pioius, self-righteous and holy and proclaim themselves a proud FEMINIST!

It is a label that I today would be embarrassed to wear.  I see them making victims of themselves.  I see them passively aggressively trying to claim that they are so hard done by – in order to get special status, protection and attention.  I am woman – hear me roar.  It is not about equality – it is about power – at the cost of others.

Like Frankenstein, todays feminism has become a parody of the real living thing.  A real “feminist” is somebody who is first and foremost a human being.  It is a person who can look beyond her own little miniscule pond and see the other fish as well.  They have forgotten what we are fighting for, not just as women, but as people.  A collective freedom.  They have become selfish and they swim about in their monstrous puddle of perceived persecution and insult.  They attack their own, even their sisters who just want to be home-makers and good parents, they attack men for…well, for just being MEN!  They waste their time on trivialities and stupidities – like insisting that there is no he or she and that boys must play with dolls.

Even as we stand here with the greatest threat to humanity and womanhood and womens welfare – EVER – the islamisation and the increasing violence in our societies – they still wallow in their own self-indulgent pond, swimming in egoistic circles around themselves.  And all the while there are women out there who truly WANT freedom, thirst for it, hunger for it – but who do not know how to break free. Do not have the resources, do not have the advice and help needed.

Many of these women have come to our country in the hope of a free life, a life of liberty. Do we hear about feministic solidarity and the fight for them?

I hear nothing but thundering embarrassing silence.

I say to you feminists of Scandinavia.  You have forgotten what solidarity between people and between women means.  You are letting your sisters down while you navel gaze and holler up about your own rights and privileges.  You are demanding concessions and squabbling about small insignificant issues while women are being raped, dying and their lives destroyed.

I am here to ask you to look into yourself and to look beyond yourself.  I am here to ask you to listen to and learn from women who are WORTH looking up to, listening to and learning from.  Women with REAL messages.  We are talking about the REAL feminists who are trying to help other women out of their prisons – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mona Walter, Wafa Sultan, Sister Hatune, Hege Storhauge, Elmas Berke and thankfully so many more – and their voices need to be heard. They don’t call themselves feminists – they call themselves THEMSELVES and they are too busy dealing with reality.  They don’t mess about and boo hoo hoo with small personal issues in order to work their own narrative about how terribly cruel and how unequal it is for them.

The pseudo-feminists need a real god solid kick in the rear and we all need to wake up from our slumber and make some real changes and to focus on the REAL challenges.

We have to, for example, work toward making our laws reflect a TRUE equality for ALL regardless of gender AND culture. And not just equality for the western woman – but for those of other cultures who share their lives in our countries.

We have to be unafraid to talk about cultural differences and the unique challenges the muslim women live with – misogyny and violence in their culture and in their homes – which is so very much different from the small challenges that we western women face.

We also have to let them KNOW that we DO care about them and want to help them assimilate and gain their freedom.  We have to be prepared to open our hearts and our doors to those women already here who WANT to be a part of our society.  If we do not let them know that we are there for them they will not know where to go and what to do – other than the woman’s crisis centers.  And we will have helped put them there.

We have to establish safe places where they can come and get REAL help in making a new life for themselves or to just get away from abusive families and husbands.  We have to be not afraid to use the law against those who would keep them from realizing their lives as free women.  This is a hard bit because we have to be unafraid to tell their families that they WILL be prosecuted, harshly, if they try to prevent these women from getting a new life.  They have to know that they will be protected.  Because they are worthy of our protection.

We have to challenge their culture.  And we have to dare challenge the screwed up political correct elite who through their “goodness” are keeping the status quo.  We have to challenge our fear of interfering in another culture.

But alas we do not!  We accept that they are repressed because that is their culture and our politically correct environment has ensured that their culture must be respected at ALL costs!

Are we really OK with other women living in our society, right here at home, that are treated like second class citizens and who do not have the same rights as us?

They deserve no less freedom and equality than any Western born woman.

We need to try to help those muslim women who WANT a different life and help them achieve that freedom.  The freedom they as human beings deserve and have a right to enjoy.  We have to become aware of their situation and to stand together and to protect them and help them take off their own veils – even as we take off our mental ones.

And, if WE take the veil of ignorance off and un-blind ourselves – not only will they have a chance.

WE – will have a chance as well!