This Is What Saudi Arabia's First PSA For Violence Against Women Looks Like

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136. That stance assumes that all women in the Muslim world want the same thing.

There are a variety of women's rights groups in the Islamic world. Not all of them are Muslim. Some of them are probably on just the same page as you.

With regard to the FLDS, that analogy stands except for the reality that we haven't bombed the shit out of Salt Lake City, nor is there a legacy in largely Mormon areas of our installing and supporting oppressive puppets like the Shah of Iran to support our objectives. Imperialism has been justified for a very long time on the basis that the colonizing powers were "liberating women" from "backwards" cultures, when in reality we were quite deliberately eroding their economic systems and ecological bases in order to benefit our own economic development, so women in predominantly Muslim countries have good reason to be suspicious of Western interventions that are supposedly on their behalf.

The legacy of imperialism around the world has been every bit as oppressive and savage as anything that the Muslim fundamentalists could dish out (if you doubt that, check out the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo for just one example of the absolutely horrific things done under the name of "uplifting" the backwards population). Just as women in many Muslim societies are treated as second class citizens because of their gender, indigenous people in the colonized world were treated as second-class citizens on the basis of ethnicity and culture; and these threads have hardly been excised. As a matter of fact there is evidence that fundamentalism around the world (including Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism) was actually a reactive response to Western ideologies of cultural superiority in the former colonies.

Nor can this be viewed as simple history--the relationships of domination and exploitation have not really changed, despite the former end of colonialism. As such, there is a LOT of historical baggage being ignored when Westerners assert that we just need to transform those other countries to be more like us.