JULIE BURCHILL: How do so many women end up as ‘Feminists for Islam?’

Jewish women have had to put up with enough monstrous bullying and belittling from the world generally over the past two years (BELIEVE ALL WOMEN – UNLESS THEY’RE JEWISH, as the saying has it). And now the poison of anti-Semitism seems to have trickled into the very heart of a conference where women of all races and belief systems should feel safe. But sadly, we’ve seen before that Islam and diversity, though often used in tandem by politicians and other clueless scolds, are often strangers to each other. Here at the FiLiA conference was evidence of a strange beast – here was Feminists for Islam.

Those of you of a certain vintage, who as children saw the 1967 film Dr Dolittle starring Rex Harrison, might recall an unfortunate critter called the ‘pushmi-pullyu’, a creation of author Hugh Lofting, which had two heads on opposing ends of its body. As you can imagine, the creature looked miffed a lot of the time. Little wonder then that Wiktionary defines the colloquial use of the term as ‘a person who behaves in a conflicting or contradictory manner’. Feminists for Islam are such P-Ps that they make Queers for Palestine seem semi-sane.

As Mark Steyn has written, “our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists.”