How the reaction of the ‘feminist’ Women’s March and Women’s Equality Movements to the Emir of Qatar’s London visit contrasted somewhat with their reaction to Trump’s London visit of barely a fortnight earlier        

During the week of 23rd to 27th July, the Emir of Qatar, HH Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani,  was visiting London, ostensibly to ‘strengthen bilateral relations between both countries‘, but also to seek international support in the face of the ongoing blockade, now over a year old, imposed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. 

Included in his schedule, as well as meetings with a delegation of MPs and Peers from both houses of Parliament, was a meeting with Theresa May and also one with Jeremy Corbyn, (who, despite having ostentatiously declined to meet President Trump, the elected Head of State of a democratic republic, evidently had no qualms about meeting HH The Emir, the unelected Head of State of a hereditary absolute monarchy). 

The visit was not uncontroversial. Protests were expected, and duly materialised, not only against Qatar’s alleged role as a promoter and funder of Wahhabism-inspired international Islamist-Jihadist terrorism, but also its involvement in both the Syrian and Yemen conflicts. 

Nor are those its only failings. Were I a woman, Qatar would not be high on my list of desirable places to live. As a society where Shari’a Law is the main source of legislation, women can be flogged for ‘illicit’ sexual relations, by up to 100 lashes for adultery, but punished by death where those ‘illicit’ sexual relations were between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man.

Although never, apparently, used, stoning remains a legal punishment. Apostasy is similarly punishable by death, blasphemy by 7 years’ imprisonment, and proselytising any religion other than Islam by 10 years’ imprisonment. A woman’s testimony remains worth only half that of a man’s. LBGT rights are minimal, if any: ‘sodomy’ is punishable by 1-3 years in prison.        

The ‘Women’s Rights, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity’ section of Human Rights Watch’s 2017 report on Qatar noted that Qatari law on family and personal status ‘continues to discriminate against women‘. A wife’s responsibility to ‘look after the household and obey her husband‘ is enshrined in law, which criminalises neither domestic violence or marital rape.

So, bearing in mind both the Women’s March and Women’ Equality Movements’ calls to arms for vociferous protests against Trump’s visit a mere two weeks earlier. . .    

. . . and particularly their forthright condemnation of his self-evident misogyny. . .

. . . there would surely, I thought, be ‘feminist’ Twitter outrage, condemnation, and protest from them, against the visit of an unelected Head of State of a country as infamous as Qatar for such egregious maltreatment of women, and on a scale at least double or triple that manifested against Trump? 

Alas not. Here, as far as I can discover by back-searching both their timelines, are all the tweets of protest issued by both groups against the Emir’s visit:

Nor, it seems, was I the only one to notice. I fear a potential recruit to the cause may have been lost. . . 

In my earlier ‘Faux-“Feminism” on the March‘, published as recently as 13th July, I suggested that both these movements, despite their names, aren’t political movements about women, but political movements for women, and specifically for women of a certain political persuasion, exhibiting virtually the predictably-standard package of Left-‘Liberal’, fashionably politically-correct, attitudes.

I suggested that both movements present as metropolitan middle-class left-wing movements, principally for metropolitan middle-class left-wing women favouring an aggressive cultural-marxist third-wave iteration of feminism which is viscerally and stridently anti-Western generally and anti-American especially. And, outside what can be included within those parameters, one not much concerned about the rights of other oppressed women at all.

No further questions, M’Lud.

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