Seems to me Diane Sawyer — and all other liberal women who tax our indulgence with their yammering about the importance of “tolerance” for the misogynistic and hateful decrees of fundie Islam, most of them while simultaneously caterwauling about “Christianist” oppression, or some imaginary American “theocracy” — has some hard, serious questions to ask herself:

Feb. 12, 2007 — Women in Iran are allowed to vote at the age of 15. They hold 4 percent of the seats in Parliament, and more than half the university students are women.

Women make up more than 30 percent of Iran’s work force.

“There is no hindrances as far as I am concerned for any woman to do anything she wants as long as she is capable of doing it,” said an Iranian woman, Goli Emami, a book publisher.

Yet Westerners are fixated on the law that requires every woman, including foreigners, to wear a hijab, or head scarf, in public.

Every single woman said it was a tradition they didn’t mind.

One young woman said it made her feel safe, confident and modest.

Uh huh. No oppression to see here, folks; just differing cultural traditions, but nothing at all wrong with those differences. If anything, we should all be celebrating such wonderful diversity. And just for the record, anyone who brings up an Iranian woman’s fundamental “right to choose” in any context other than “dangerous threats to, Republican” is just being obnoxious, ‘kay? Let’s move along:

Wonder if Diane felt “safe, confident, and modest” under her little mandatory head-blankie? Nice to see how willing these brave, valiant liberals are to stand up for their rights and their dignity against all usurpers, though. Even if they only ever seem to have the stomach to stand up to the people they know for sure will never, ever cut off their heads, throw them off cliffs, or drop stone walls on them. Stand up to those who might actually, physically hurt them? Uhh, not so much. Say…look! Look, over there! A bear! A house afire! A nude woman! A Rethugnican! Look!!

I’m not suggesting that it’s necessarily our job to liberate all Muslim women worldwide, forever and ever amen. But I do get a little tired of being lectured on the depths of American oppression, and being offered condescending “exposés” about how deliriously happy women are under the hijab or the burka, from spoiled-rotten Western women who so meekly knuckle under themselves wherever the liberated rubber actually meets the Islamist road. It’s deceptive, it’s hypocritical, it’s smarmy, and it’s disgusting. And it’s boring as all hell, too.

On the ABC site, they offer the opportunity to “Send Diane Sawyer Your Question About Iran.” So I did; I posed two questions, as follows:

Were you offered a choice as to whether to wear that scarf?
And:
Do you know what “dhimmitude” means?

I won’t be holding my breath waiting for answers to those.

Updated update! Allahpundit points this Amir Taheri piece out:

The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.

This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shi’ite community.

Sadr’s idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shi’ite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.

Sadr’s neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah’s regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands.

In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that “scientific research had shown that women’s hair emitted rays that drove men insane.” To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.

Sheesh. Quite a hair-raysing tale, eh wot? Fuggin’ freaks. Wear the rag with pride, Diane, you dhimmi-wit dumbass.