Rape and Respect are as compatible with one another as ice and fire. So when a woman who was repeatedly raped should maintain that she was nonetheless respected by her rapists, we know that something terrible has to be wrong. Even if we—and notice that I am saying: even if—we can make sense of a woman “asking for it”, what is surely false, nonetheless, is that she has been shown any respect. A rapist has no regard for the feelings of the woman whom he is raping. His only concern is to impose his will upon her. And there is simply no way to turn that into an expression of respect on his part for his victim.
Well, an instance of the very incongruity that I have just described has been exhibited by the Dutch journalist Joanie de Rijke. She was serially raped for 6 days by a group of Taliban individuals; and her claim regarding them is the following: “I would put things in perspective, the Taliban are not moral monsters”. Indeed, her very claim is that rape and respect can exist side-by-side, stating: “It’s not black and white. These things can exist side by side.”
In view of these remarks, Joanie de Rijke warns people not to assume that she is suffering from what is known as the Stockholm syndrome. This is when a victim comes to identify with very the individuals who have subject her or him to egregious wrongdoing.
Well, clearly she is suffering from something. And the general silence to her utterly absurd claim that rape and respect can exist side-by-side roundly supports Geert Wilders observation that she and Liberals are largely suffering from something.
Imagine a woman in the United States claiming that her husband respects her although he routinely beats her. Why, every feminist in the country would be up in arms, insisting that such a woman has a sense of false consciousness. And if the media would dare to take such a woman seriously, surely there would be protests. And you know, my sympathies are with the feminists here. And that, alas, is just the problem.
What Joanie de Rijke has claimed is simply morally untenable. Yet, there has been no outcry from feminists in the Netherlands. Nor have feminists in the United States, or Europe generally, expressed their revulsion to what de Rijke has said. A Google search does not turn up anything by way of feminist protests.
This brings me to Geert Wilder. He is “causing trouble” because he is daring to speak the truth. The claims of Joanie de Rijke and the silence of Liberals in response to her claims are simply too revealing here.
Because I tend to be so conservative that I am radical, I am sure that there is much that I do not understand. You should know, though, that I have always drawn a completely immutable line in the sand with regard to rape. There are no excuses for it. And if a man thought he was having consensual sex only to hear a woman’s plea to stop or he hears none of the sounds that indicative of pleasure on her part, then I hold that he needs to stop. There are no “free passes” when it comes to rape. There is no story that one can tell that makes rape remotely understandable, let alone compatible with any measure of respect.
Every feminist on this planet ought to have reacted in precisely this way to Joanie de Rijke’s horrendously absurd claims. In general, there should be a widespread outcry against her. There is none in the Netherlands; there is none in Europe; there is none in North America.
This gets to the heart of the problem with Liberalism. They seem to have a penchant for finding a way to excuse one another even when a paradigm wrong, by their very own standards, has been committed. I do not think for a moment that Conservatives are perfect. Of course, they are not. However, they seem much better at towing the line in the case of what they regard as paradigm wrongs. So, for example, when the married Larry Craig and former Republican politician exhibited (what to all the world appears to be) explicitly homosexual behavior in an airport men’s room, Conservatives did not rush to defend him or to make excuses for him. Craig had crossed the line in terms of one of the fundamental values of the Republican Party. Even if it is possible for Republicans to look the other way regarding homosexuality, a married man simply has no business pursuing homosexual interests.
In effect, Joanie de Rijke crossed the line in the other direction by insisting that the people who serially raped her were not only not moral monsters, but they respected her.
Geert Wilders’ point—a point which is causing much an uproar in the Netherlands—is that Liberals are more interesting in accommodating the Taliban than in standing by the fundamental principles which they, the Liberals, espouse.
Joanie de Rijke has presented this truth on a silver platter to Wilders.
I never thought that I would live to see the day when (i) a woman who has been serially raped would claim that those who did such a thing to her nonetheless respected her and, moreover, (ii) there would be nothing resembling a public outcry on account of such a claim. Even in an era when women were sometimes accused of “asking for it”, no one thought to claim that the man who committed the act of rape showed the woman any respect. Against the backdrop of Joanie de Rijke making just such a claim and the deafening silence by Liberals, only the angels of the Lord could give Wilders’ charge against Liberals greater credibility.
More pointedly, Wilders is absolutely right in noting that insofar as Liberals can always find a way to excuse Islamic radicals, then indeed they suffer from none other than the Stockholm syndrome itself. Either that, or something very much like it.
It is perhaps a mistake to say that Joanie de Rijke is an embarrassment to feminism and Liberals. She is, however, a profound embarrassment to the ideal that all women should be respected and, furthermore, every man should conduct himself accordingly. The Taliban is not the exception to the rule here; for there are no exceptions to this moral precept.
Your text is crap. You shouldn’t write stories like that if you have your information from fourth hand. Even the basic information, which you can read in every serious paper, is wrong (by the way: there was no serial rape). So how can you write about how she feels and what she meant with “respect” if you don’t even have the basics correct. I know the real story and you don’t come even close to it. Wilders just exploited people like you. And this was what she blamed Wilders for. Not for his opinion… but because he took advantage of part of the story to get media attention.