Vic Socotra

28 May 2008

Three Ladies

Malika El Aroud

I’m a feminist, of sorts, naturally challenged by my times and sex. But I have been one since I was first able to understand how remarkable the narrative of my mother and her mothers before her really was.

I think about women a lot, for the usual reasons, and about their lot in particular in these peculiar years of social transition. It has been a long road since the struggle against the empires of Japan and Germany required the mobilization of American women in industry.

Once that genie was out of the bottle, there was no going back, though the battles continue today.

The Goons in Burma extended The Lady’s house arrest by a year. They dispatched some of their thugs to inform her, violating the sanctity of her compound to give her the news ahead of the press release. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has been locked up most of the last eighteen years. It was a privilege to have participated in a diplomatic mission that got her sprung from confinement for a brief period.

And it was thoroughly depressing to see the banality and certainty in the eyes of her captors.

Obviously, her freedom now amid the devastation of the cyclone on the Irrawaddy Delta would be inconvenient for the Junta. It might arouse the passions of the people against their attempt to make their military rule permanent.

The Lady has devoted her life to her nation and her people. She did not have to. In order to care for her ailing mother she left the safety and security of Cambridge, and the life as an academic. She left her husband behind, and her family in the West. Her mother was the widow of General Aung San, the military strongman who ushered in independence from the British Empire.

He was murdered before he could wire the structure of the new nation together, and ever since the lovely country has been trapped in an isolationist hothouse.

It makes me wonder why she goes on, since she has sacrificed so much. It is only her indomitable will that holds the little Generals at bay.

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is the junior United States Senator from New York, and a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Perhaps you had heard. She continues to contest an election that the smart money says she cannot win. She is on a mission, though, and it is one that resonates through a large segment of the American population.

She has been on a crusade since she first attracted national attention in 1969 as the first student to deliver the commencement address at Wellesley College. She embarked on a series of interesting career choices thereafter, including the great national mystery of her marriage to William Jefferson Clinton.

She has blazed a number of firsts in her public and private life. She was the first female partner in the stodgy Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, the major architect of a complete overhaul of the nation’s health care system, and the only First Lady to be subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury. She was never charged with anything, since it was part of a massive constitutional struggle that has continued without abate since Dick Nixon and his staff dug a moat around Executive Privilege, and defended it to almost the last man.

The Democratic Party bequeathed her a safe seat in the US Senate, a signal honor, clearing the field of candidates to succeed the cerebral legend Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It was the first time an American First Lady had run for public office, and with her election, she became the first female senator to represent New York. Re-elected by a wide margin in 2006, she has succeeded in winning more primaries and delegates in this Presidential campaign than any other woman in U.S. history.

It is no wonder that she refuses to quit, and it must be infuriating to have to confront the legacy of another great narrative of injustice who wears such a cheery smile.

Malika el Aroud is a Belgian woman, born of Moroccan parents. She lives now in Switzerland, bastion of neutrality. She is the widow of one of the terrorists who masqueraded as journalists on the orders of Osama bin Laden and killed Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Northern Alliance two days before the attacks of 9/11.

She plays the victim card astutely, and is no fool; she knows precisely how the system works. She was cleared by a Belgian court of charges that she was complicit in the plot in 2003. In 2005 she was detained along with her new Tunisian husband in an anti-terror raid in Switzerland. She was accused of operating a Jihadi website, inciting Muslims of both sexes to acts of violence against the West.

She does not speak Arabic well, and the site is in French. She is careful to maintain no weapons or the physical tools of terror, but she is persistent. She was arrested again in 2007, this time by the authorities in her new home in Switzerland, and found guilty.

She has launched a vigorous defense, accusing the placid Swiss of physically abusing her husband. She says she has a weapon, and knows how to use it within the freedoms guaranteed the citizens of the West, among which are the freedom of speech. She says “you can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.” In the Times this morning she is quoted, in part, as telling the West that “Vietnam is nothing compared to what awaits you on our lands. Ask your mothers, your wives to order your coffins.”

I’m not going to call Mom and tell her to order anything.

Word on the street is that Malika’s prominence is actually a symptom of how wrong things are going for al Qaida. Their supply of martyrs may be starting to dry up, and with the general collapse of their organization in Iraq, new sources of inspiration- and manpower, if I may be permitted the term- are necessary.

I argued a long time ago that the real fight with Islam is about the way that half the race was treated in the more militant factions. Owned like chattel, covered with upholstery, mutilated for the crime of being a woman is something that must change, and will, though not necessarily on the terms we would choose.

Malika is an unlikely choice for a feminist hero, and I hope she is crushed. But her fifteen minutes of fame testifies to the fact that things are changing even in the ranks of the murderers.

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