The Chicago Tribune, a publication normally as dedicated to championing women’s issues as anyone in the MSM, tossed Muslim women under the bus in the other day. A feature story by Patty Pensa, running under the headline “Many faces under the hijab; photographer aims to educate about those who wear Muslim headscarf,” managed to ignore all of the abuses that Muslim women suffer throughout the world while living under Sharia law, focusing instead on the relative freedom that some Muslim women living in the United States enjoy.

CAIR had to be thrilled with the publication of such misleading propaganda in a once-great American newspaper. For the rest of us, and especially for the millions of abused Muslim women living abroad, this latest example of creeping-Sharia in the United States should be very disturbing.

Pensa’s story championed a book recently published by Muslim photographer Sadaf Syed entitled: “iCover: A Day in the Life of a Muslim-American COVERed Girl.” In it, Syed shows successful American Muslim women who enjoy happy and free lives while living in this country, and who also choose to wear the hijab. For Syed, the hijab isn’t a symbol of oppression at all, it’s rather a celebration of her religion, at least as far as she understands her religion (and she obviously doesn’t understand it very well).

That’s great – for Syed and the women she profiles – but nowhere in the Trib’s story does Pensa even hint at the possibility that Syed’s experience and her views about the hijab don’t come close to representing Islam’s official views about women in theory or in practice. (more…)

The FBI arrested fiery New York columnist, Vicky Pelaez in late June.  An editor and writer for the Spanish language newspaper El Diario/La Prensa, she was charged with being an unregistered agent of the Russian government.  Her far-left, anti-American columns won accolades from American progressives, and from the Hispanic diaspora in the U.S.  Released on bail to home detention during the Fourth of July long weekend, she was part of the spy swap in Vienna today that saw ten confessed Russian agents exchanged for four Russians accused of working for the U.S.

A sample from a Pelaez editorial in El Diario, translated from Spanish scorched the policies of her adopted country:  “…refusing to hear … the popular resistance and the opinion of the majority of countries in the world, the Big Boss [the United States] supported the putschists’ … illegal [Honduran] presidential elections…” Pelaez finished her Dec. 1, 2009 anti-American rant, written in her comfortable suburban house in Yonkers, N.Y., with a tired revolutionary screech, “as long as injustice and poverty remain dominant, the struggle will continue.”

Soviet intelligence operatives (the KGB and its successor, the SVR), starting in the 1920s, recruited agents in the press to influence American opinion.  The goal of the communist influence messages, as directed by Vladimir Lenin, was to destroy “the Main Enemy” from within.  Lenin used this tactic, learned in his own Revolution, because he knew the Soviet army was too weak to take on the American military.

The influence message, boiled down to its essence was, and is, “America is an irredeemably racist, sexist, foreigner-hating, imperialistic, war-mongering country that deserves to be destroyed.”  Repeating this message over and over, like an advertising campaign, rooted the message deep in the psyches of the past several generations.  The ultimate result of decades of propagating this message through the press, education and academia, and Hollywood has been the attitude known as Political Correctness. (more…)

In the Wall Street Journal, Jena Pincott tries to answer Freud’s famous question — “What do women want?” — and comes up with a surprising answer: in developed countries, they want men who look more like women:

Why Women Don’t Want Macho Men

New research suggests that women from countries with healthier populations prefer more feminine-looking men.

… After crunching the data—including the women’s facial preferences, their country of origin and that country’s national health index—the Face Lab researchers proved something remarkable. They could predict how masculine a woman likes her men based on her nation’s World Health Organization statistics for mortality rates, life expectancy and the impact of communicable disease. In countries where poor health is particularly a threat to survival, women leaned toward “manlier” men. That is, they preferred their males to have shorter, broader faces and stronger eyebrows, cheekbones and jaw lines.  (more…)

Five hours before the January 22 March for Life rally even began, Newsweek blogger Krista Gesaman posted a highly misleading piece on the March’s age demographics as well as the route itself.

In a piece entitled, “Who’s missing at the Roe v. Wade anniversary demonstrations? Young women,” Gesaman wrote:

Today is the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case legalizing abortion, and droves of women are prepared to face rainy weather to support their positions during the annual Washington, D.C., demonstrations. But there will be one major difference with the demonstration route this year—it’s shorter.

The organizers are getting older, and it’s more difficult for them to walk a long distance,” says Stanley Radzilowski, an officer in the planning unit for the Washington, D.C., police department. A majority of the participants are in their 60s and were the original pioneers either for or against the case, he says.

So this raises the question: where are the young, vibrant women supporting their pro-life or pro-choice positions? Likely, they’re at home. (more…)