Jan 182 min read

Phyllis Chesler: Gender Apartheid and the Silence of ‘Faux Feminists’

“So, we landed in Kabul. This is a long time ago, long before the Taliban. And the airport official just smoothly took my American passport away and said, ‘No problem, madam. We'll return it to your family.’ Never saw it again. And then I discovered that my father-in-law had three wives and 21 children.”

Phyllis Chesler was born into a Jewish-American family. In 1961, at just 20 years of age, she traveled as a new bride with her husband to Afghanistan, where she entered into a traditional, Muslim household and was quickly stripped of her rights, seen as the property of her male family members. After finally escaping back to the United States, she became what she calls a “politically-incorrect feminist” who advocates for the rights of women and girls, and speaks out against “faux feminists” in the West, who have failed to support the Oct. 7 victims of Hamas’s rape and sexual assault, and remain silent on the gender apartheid afflicting the Arab–Muslim world.

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“She called me up one day, maybe a year later, and said, ‘Do you want to help rescue girls and women from Afghanistan?’ I said, ‘I’ve been waiting for this call my entire life.’ And we did. That’s what we did. It was a group of grassroots feminists who undertook that holy task, and we got 398 out with no help from the government,” says Dr. Chesler. “Israel is fighting the West’s battle by itself—it really is—for the kinds of freedoms from tyranny that the West has been standing for, was founded for, and is now not holding on to.”