What feminists make noise about

In reply to my previous post, “Jokuvaan” made the following comment:

What you are missing here is the current double standard of european mainstream feminists treating rapes differently depending of the ethnical background of the perpetrators. So far feminists have made more noise about one man comparing women to cars than about taharrush jamai or taharrush gamae in europe. Just recently a all women college in Germany decided to shut down for the time of the carnival so that the students wouldn’t get raped if they left their homes. Some feminists go even as far as victim blaming like women shouldn’t dress so revealingly to agitate the muslim men to rape. No I’m not shitting you. Sure this cartoon is a exaggeration but its not without a hint of truth. Though I’m not blaming you as it seems you are on the other side of the Atlantic and likely have to rely on english news on the subject and frankly most european countries are not native english speaking. 

My reply:

I have a few disparate points to make in response to that so I’m going to just number them for clarity:

1. Your working definition of “feminist” seems to be “person who makes noise about crimes against women in proportion to what I, Jokuvaan, consider to be their severity.” This is not the definition of feminism. A quick and easy definition of feminism would be “opposition to sexism and enforcement of gender roles.” Being a feminist does not mean one has an obligation to make noise about anything at all, let alone make more noise about some things than others. To say otherwise is to commit a form of moral equivalence fallacy often referred to as “Dear Muslima” after Richard Dawkins famously used those words to commit said fallacy in 2011. You can read more about the fallacy here. You can also read Dawkins’s limp apology for committing it here, though I’d note that he seemed to have forgotten about it completely by the very next day.
2. Following from #1, a feminist’s failure to “make noise” about something cannot be construed as agreement with it, much less advocacy of it. It’s possible to care about more than one thing at a time, and it’s possible to care about something without “making noise” about it. If you declared yourself to be an animal rights activist, and I noticed that you weren’t protesting the fact that an endangered species of animal is being driven further to the brink of extinction, I don’t get to declare that you share a common ideology with trophy hunters. That would be grossly dishonest of me, especially if I wasn’t an animal rights activist myself. I don’t get to tell you how to do your activism, and I don’t get to claim you side with your enemy because you’re not doing activism in the way I’d prefer.
3. I cannot verify your claims about what “some feminists” have or haven’t done regarding victim-blaming or reasons for shutting down carnivals, but I do wonder– if it’s the behavior of these feminist that supposedly lends a “hint of truth” to a video which claims that feminism generally has “much in common” with Islamism, isn’t it rather odd that the person chosen to represent feminism in the video is a Canadian feminist? A person who has absolutely nothing to do with any of what you’re talking about? Doesn’t that seem rather odd, that they picked a woman who has been harassed for years for the “crime” of just yelling at some MRAs, rather than one of these people whom you say are engaging in victim-blaming? 

The cartoon is not an exaggeration– it’s a bald-faced lie. It was created by anti-feminists to claim that feminists are just like Islamists if they do not…I don’t know what. Talk about Islamic misogyny all day, every day? Roam the streets trying to attack Muslim men as punishment for Islamic misogyny? Maybe just become anti-Muslim terrorists?

It’s not clear what kind or amount of opposition to Islamic misogyny would convince an anti-feminist that feminists don’t “share essentially the same ideology” as Islamists, and that’s because anti-feminists don’t actually give a shit about Islamic misogyny. They just hate both Muslims and feminists, and so it’s awfully convenient to pretend that two of your enemies are in league with each other so you can swing the same club and hit them both.

In actuality, Islamophobes and Islamic misogynists are both enemies of mine, because I oppose both religion-based and sex-based bigotry. And if you think I’m not shouting about one loudly enough, it doesn’t mean I agree with the other. It means you should do your own shouting.