Diane von Furstenberg: “I started my business to pay my own bills and sleep with whoever I wanted”

In fact, she’s the epitome of what you might call “a strong woman”. Von Furstenberg is dismissive of that term though. “I never met a woman who wasn’t strong” she declared, “but I think men and religion can make them hide it. It’s telling that when tragedy strikes it’s always the women who take over.”

Diane von Furstenberg started her business so that she didn’t have to rely on a man for a living and didn’t have to marry for security…she could do so, in the West, for love, even if the man was poor as a church, or mosque, mouse.

So women in the progressive West are pretty free to do as they like should circumstances permit…whereas in other cultures women maybe strong except when oppressed by men and religion.  And oppressed by other women….such as Anita Anand whose take on the world is naive and childlike and full of wishful thinking and wilful blindness.  Anand thinks religion plays no part in women’s oppression.

The BBC’s Anita Anand, in this 2002 article, is pretty unconcerned about the Burkha in Afghanistan and elsewhere because, you see, when the Taliban fell the women of Afghanistan didn’t all rush into the streets ripping off their veils, ipso facto, they are happy being clad in what amounts to a body bag…in reality they are in effect dead to the world, locked into that symbol of oppression.

The Taliban had been forced into the mountains. They had been bombed into the ground. They weren’t running the show anymore. And yet – and yet… women still didn’t take to the streets on mass and get rid of the veil. Sure some did. But not the majority. They still chose to wear the veil.

While the West was clapping itself on the back with such enthusiasm they lost sight of one point. The war against the Taliban can only make sense if we take into account the real truth. Their crime, as far as I am concerned, was not their belief in Islam – as my fellow speakers will tell you, women too voluntarily have that belief. The Taliban’s crime was that they didn’t give women a choice!

The Hindu Anand sticks up for Islam and the Taliban, not so bad it seems, as long as they give women a choice….well they do have a choice…being stoned or lashed.  Hurray for the good guys of the Taliban, so progressive.

She says she loves the West and yet criticises it as if it were the evil twin of the Taliban, the equal to its oppression of women.  She does that BBC trick of relativising everything and reducing the argument down to the point of sublime ridiculousness with single extreme points being used to represent whole swathes of culture, history and society…here she tries to suggest that all that suffrage is being presented as if it was purely to enable Jennifer Lopez et al to bare their breasts in public…

Let’s not indulge the idea that 1,000 years of women’s progress was achieved so Jennifer Lopez could display her breasts.

I don’t think any people do reduce the argument for women’s rights down to the right to go topless.  Somehow I think the argument is more rounded and grown up than that.

She reduces the criticism of Islam down to it being an argument solely about women’s rights, and even then she dismisses that as nothing to do with Islam.  In other words the Taliban aren’t so bad, they’re guided by Islam but it isn’t Islam that makes women wear the veil and  the Burkha …so the Taliban aren’t so bad really when compared to the West….the West that still oppresses women, secretly….

And OK – so we in the west have freedoms of choice and expression. Does that make the west a female-friendly place. Don’t kid yourselves for a second.

Ask yourself…if you were a woman where would you rather live…Afghanistan or any Islamic state, or the UK?

Anand then digs out some quotes from the Bible to show how despotic and misogynist Christians are….

We live in a nominally Christian country – and so (as George Dubya is so keen to remind us) do the Americans. Christianity believes that pretty much everything awful is the fault of Eve and her apple.

St Paul in the New Testament says: “ A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I don’t permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam wasn’t the one deceived. It was the woman was deceived and became a sinner, but women will be saved through childbearing.”

The reformer Martin Luther was even more blunt. Speaking of women and childbirth he said: “If they become tired or even die, that doesn’t matter. Let them die in childbirth, that’s why they are there”.

Words like this wouldn’t have been unheard of from the mouths of the Taleban a few months ago, would they? Perhaps the world of Kandahar and that of Big Brother really aren’t as different as we think.

So Mullah Omar [RIP] and Justin Welby…one and the same really, brothers under the skin, under the cassock?

A nonsense as Anand knows, the Christian Church has had its teeth pulled long ago and has been reduced to a ceremonial, ritualistic role that is more worthy godfather to the country than turbulent priest raving about hairshirts and damnation…those wannabe turbulent priests, such as Giles Fraser, have had to turn to Marxism to get their kicks these days, the Church has lost its bite…thankfully.  And that’s the point, Islam has not been neuteured so that it fits in with a tolerant, progressive, Western society.  It is still the ancient, barbaric, bigoted and intolerant ideology that stormed out of the desert 1400 years ago to imprison and colonise so much of the world at the point of a sword.

Which brings us to the latest of Anand’s anti-Western diatribes…for this she has linked up with the ‘Gone native’ William Dalrymple, who seems to have a preference for the Islamist to the Westerner.  This if anything is even more childish and infantile than the 2002 article…its language and use of simplistic and exaggerated representations of British actions as brutal or immoral are the stuff of naive teen essays thinking that sensationalism makes up for lack of argument….

Viewpoint: Koh-i-Noor – a gift at the point of a bayonet

The Koh-i-Noor was taken by the British, by force, from a frightened little boy, his son.

Therefore the diamond came to Britain thanks to dubious legality and very clear immorality.

Those untrustworthy, scheming, bullying British…

Despite signing treaties of friendship with Ranjit Singh, after his death the British began garrisoning troops around the border.

These were deemed acts of naked aggression by the Sikhs and provoked war. Having surreptitiously cut deals with leading members of his court, the British managed to persuade them to betray their King and weaken his army, leading to defeat in the first Anglo-Sikh War.

Inveigling their way into the Lahore Durbar in this way, they separated Duleep Singh from his mother, the Regent, dragging her screaming to a tower and contrived a second Anglo-Sikh war. What was left was a thoroughly weakened realm.

Alone and terrified, this small child was surrounded by grown British men, and told to sign away his future.

Alone and terrified?  Really?  In fact he was well served by his advisors as you’d expect any regent to be.  Anand paints a picture that is designed purely to attack the British, she makes no mention of the previous history of the diamond which would bring into the open the fact that it has changed hands, at the point of a bayonet, many times in its history and the ‘owner’ from whom the British took it was in fact only the owner due to it being forceably removed from a previous ‘owner’.

A previous BBC article makes this plain…

The Koh-i-Noor, meaning “Mountain of Light” in Persian, is the most famous diamond in the Crown Jewels. It has been the subject of conquest and intrigue for centuries, passing through the hands of Mughal princes, Iranian warriors, Afghan rulers and Punjabi Maharajas.

I guess Anand thought that might undermine the argument a bit too much…..winning it in battle is a perfectly normal and expected part of war….Nelson’s sailors were rewarded handsomely with money from the sale of captured ships.

Anand says….

Had the diamond truly been a gift, the Delhi Gazette, a British newspaper, would hardly have printed in May 1848: “This famous diamond (the largest and most precious in the world) forfeited by the treachery of the sovereign at Lahore, and now under the security of British bayonets at the fortress of Goindghur, it is hoped ere long, as one of the splendid trophies of our military valour, be brought to England in attention of the glory of our arms in India”.

But the diamond was not a gift and was never presented as such…it was taken in war as compensation for having to fight the war….as the man who arranged the transfer,  the Marquess of Dalhousie, explained…

The motive was simply this: that it was more for the honour of the Queen that the Koh-i-noor should be surrendered directly from the hand of the conquered prince into the hands of the sovereign who was his conqueror, than it should be presented to her as a gift—which is always a favour—by any joint-stock company among her subjects.

 

Anand finishes with this barb…..

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know of many “gifts” that are handed over at the point of a bayonet.

Can we have America back then from those violent, scheming Yankee rebels who took it from us at the point of a bayonet?…or how about Pakistan?  Can India have ‘Pakistan’ back as it was basically stolen at the point of a bayonet by the Muslims?

 

I note the article was originally titled…

Koh-i-Noor – a gift at the point of a bayonet

It was updated, and had some dates corrected, with this title…

Viewpoint: Koh-i-Noor – a gift at the point of a bayonet

Any thought that such an obviously one-sided article that painted the British in such a bad light without making reference to context and the broad sweep of history was eventually deigned slightly unworkable as ‘news’ and was reduced to a mere ‘viewpoint’ on consideration of its lack of merit as a factual piece?

 

Anand, despite professing her love of Britain, seems to have a few problems with the West…how soon she forgets the reason she is here in Britain….that her parents were driven out of what became Pakistan by the Muslim ethnic cleansing of the Hindus and Sikhs on Partition….the only reference to this was this uninformative comment which hardly gives evidence to the horrors that went on as nearly a million people were murdered and millions more driven from their homes and land in order to create a Muslim state…

 My parents were Hindus from India but before partition they came from the Muslim dominated North West Frontier Province

…and yet the BBC et al demonise Israel and demand its removal from the map and from its place in the world.  Why not then similarly Pakistan?  Anti-‘Zionism’?  Hardly.

Let’s keep the diamond and send Anand to the land of her fathers instead as she seems so enamoured with the culture of the Taliban….it must be terrifying for her to lie awake at night thinking that Justin Welby is planning to launch a religious war of conquest, a crusade, across Britain, teaming up with those extremists of the Catholic Church, expecting to hear the Inquisiton knocking at her door at any moment to test her faith in the one true God and to teach her to be a good Christian woman, quiet, submissive and obedient.