by Giulio Meotti
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has sparked outrage from the left and the newspapers. Sunak joked about Labor leader Keir Starmer’s “definition of woman” in the past. Sunak listed all the times Starmer has changed his mind on some political position. “He even changed the definition of woman – said Sunak – although we must admit that in that case he only changed them 99 per cent”. The joke was alluding to when Starmer said that 99.9 per cent of women don’t have male organs.
Strange West, right? Sunak causes scandal but not Starmer.
“The objective is political” writes Mathieu Bock-Coté this week in Le Figaro. “The theory of gender intends to bring humanity back to a form of original magma, where everyone can create themselves, under the sign of integral self-determination. We end up rejecting the idea of a sexual body: gender theory pushes us to talk about ‘sex assigned at birth’.”
“In other words, sex would not be self-evident, it would be arbitrarily imposed by a hetero-patriarchal political-medical system that would force individuals to accept the sexual duality of humanity, while there would be an almost infinite variety of gender, which the State should recognize in an undertaking of social engineering and psychological re-education of the population.
“Hegemonic in the university as well as on social media and in many administrations that believe themselves obliged to submit or convert to it without which they will face the accusation of intolerance, this ideology explicitly aims to anthropologically reprogram a young generation of guinea pig children, who should embody the promise of the new man, freeing himself from a sexual body now assimilated to a reactionary carcass.This revolution would be unimaginable without the Orwellization of language that accompanies it. One of these fictions consists in particular in multiplying ‘pronouns’ to create artificial genders beyond the masculine and the feminine. Fantasy replaces reality.”
Now, however, this ideology also penetrates the best European armies, starting with the English one.
The British Army will make ranks “gender neutral” to be “more inclusive”, General Patrick Sanders, head of the British Army, has announced. Patrick said “male-coded” terms are “something we need to think about very carefully and very hard.”
On the other hand, the British Army wants to eliminate titles such as “infanteers” and “infantry soldiers” to make them gender-neutral. The British Royal Air Force (RAF) is also adopting gender-neutral pronouns such as “Ze”, “Per” and ‘Hir.’And the RAF’s head of recruitment has resigned following the British Air Force’s decision to impose a ‘pause’ in recruiting ‘white males’ in favor of representatives of ethnic minorities.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an elementary school in California’s Bay Area spent $250,000 of public funds on the services of a left-wing educational organization. Its name? “Woke Kindergarten.” It refers to pupils as “little companions.” “If we eradicate borders, how might we build our communities to include and support neighbors from around the world?” They encourage children to imagine a world without agents of police, armies, landowners, money and schools. Lego figures brandish tiny signs reading “Black Trans Lives Matter” and “No Justice, No Peace”.
For satirical newspaper columnists, this kind of thing is very discouraging. No matter how hard we try, there is simply no way our imagination can compete with Western reality.
Children at some of New York’s elite preschools learn to identify their skin color by mixing the various tsinte in tempera.
In Nicolaigarden, Stockholm, rainbow flags adorn the walls of a kindergarten, boys push strollers and girls play with tractors, there are sexless dolls, one sad, the other happy, and of course no one is called “mom.” ” or “dad”.
In Germany, some kindergartens have the “sex play case” in the kindergarten with the “Lutz” doll or the sex booklet “Lisa and Jan”.
Asya Sigelman writes in City Journal: “About ten years ago, when I was a young assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College and new to academia, I was taken by surprise when one of my students complained about an assigned text—Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Specifically, her concern was about Ovid’s lack of sensitivity on the subject of rape. The Metamorphoses is a poetic compendium of ancient Greek and Roman myths; one of its common motifs is male gods erotically pursuing females.”
“I was particularly surprised by the student’s comment because Ovid’s elegant and witty text is remarkably sympathetic to the female characters. But I knew that Mawrters are famous for the intensity of their beliefs; it makes sense for students at a women’s college to feel so strongly about violence against women. In the years that followed, I discovered that in fact the Metamorphoses is a common prompt for virtue signaling, not only for students but also for professional scholars across American universities.
“It is typical for a public lecture on Ovid’s Metamorphoses to begin with a trigger warning for rape and an invitation to audience members to feel free to step out of the room.
“I could never quite square how listeners could be traumatized by Ovidian descriptions of sexual violence.
“When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, they not only murdered hundreds of children, elderly, and women and kidnapped hundreds more, but also systematically perpetrated brutal mass gang-rapes, complete with mutilation and other forms of inhuman violence against women.
“In one witness account, after terrorists finished raping a woman—and while she was still alive—they chopped off one of her breasts and were kicking it to one another like a soccer ball in the dust.
“In another, a gang-raped woman pleaded with the terrorists to shoot her dead—which they did, once everyone in the group had a turn with her.
“I am deliberately detailing these facts—facts so brutal that it is outrageous even to put them down in writing, and yet whose very brutality demands that they be recorded for posterity. It is especially important to do so, given that much of the world has turned a deaf ear to—or, worse, brazenly denied—these outrages against Israeli women and girls.
“Academics and students across the U.S. praised the October 7 attack as ‘heroic; and “an achievement.; Washington State congresswoman Pramila Jayapal stunned a CNN host when she avoided taking a firm stance against the Hamas-perpetrated rapes. UN Women waited two months before it began to respond to detailed forensic reports of Hamas’s atrocities against females.
“According to State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, Hamas refused to release more female hostages because the terrorists didn’t want the women to detail what they endured in captivity. For the past four months, captive Israeli women have been enduring sexual violence, while many in the academic world have remained silent.
“Victory over Hamas should be a priority for anyone who claims to care about the rights of women. I expected that my own institution, Bryn Mawr, would live up to its mission as a women’s college; that, across the nation, the same students and faculty who cannot bear to hear how ‘Jupiter ravished Io’s chastity’ would turn out in droves to condemn publicly Hamas’s rapes and mutilations and to support the group’s elimination; that these same students and faculty would publicly accuse Hamas of continuing to hold hostages, of using innocent civilians as human shields, and of endangering Palestinian civilians by refusing to capitulate. In all these expectations, I was mistaken”.
At Columbia University – where support for Hamas is very strong – the reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is preceded by a warning to students, because the great book “contains offensive and violent material”. And the New Yorker – the most cultured and noble magazine in the world – wonders whether Ovid deserves trigger warning.
“The enemy is nihilism, not Islam,” wrote the late Charles Krauthammer. It was 2001. He could not have foreseen that, twenty years later, nihilism would ally itself with radical Islam.
And that the West would end up like that joke at which no one laughed.
Offended by Ovid’s Jupiter, but not by Hamas’ rapes | Israel National News – Arutz Sheva