At least someone is speaking out about the real war on women being waged in the Mideast. In an op-ed article, Roya Hakakian explains how misogynists in the Mideast have adopted Ayatollah Khomeini’s tactic of using the chaos created through anti-Americanism, and the resulting reluctance of American leaders to act, to hide their assault on women.

And according to Hakakian, the prospect of democracy in the region is not helping women. Rather, the Arab Spring has “brought a severe frost to women’s rights” in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia:

The notion of an Islamic democracy is merely another euphemism for turning women into lesser citizens, and it ought to be deemed as unjust and anti-democratic as America before the end of racial segregation. “Terrorism” is only one manifestation of the evil that the world hopes to root out from the region where part-time terrorists have always been full-time chauvinists.

Hakakian does not appear optimistic about women’s prospects in the Mideast, which is understandable as Western politicians retreat into passivity (or to coin a phrase, “leading from behind”). It seems that the region is moving back to the middle ages, so perhaps the real question is to what extent the misogyny will spread throughout the Western world.