Oh put the pearls down and withdraw your exaggerated gasp. My snobby and racist remark of ....."sorry women of the world" is not off the mark considering the state of women's rights in those countries. And its anti-intellectual of me that I don't believe in a god? I dont pay any mind to fairies and gnomes and wizards and unicorns, is that anti-intellectual? Yeesh
Pathetic of you to hide behind concern for women's rights when you don't acknowledge that we, the wealthiest countries have routinely worked against democratic, secular and relatively feminist and progressive elements in the Muslim world, as I say above and to which I referred to as anti-intellectualism.
Did we bring feminism and human rights to Libya when we democratized it with bombs and left it with slave markets for Africans? Maybe people like you and I should speak with some humility?
So its the United States oppressing all those women this whole time? It has nothing to do with the religious leaders of those countries using Islam to oppress women? We dropped some bombs on Germany and Japan and they don't seem to be oppressing their women nearly as hard as the Muslim countries. Enlighten me, if you will.
Japanese women are not particularly free compared to similar wealthy nations.
But you are forgetting history - those countries had their own brands of capitalist expansionism within living memory. They both had periods of time pre-World Wars where they homogenised themselves: Germany formed a nation state out of smaller states and kingdoms, while Japan did similarly, as well as forcefully assimilating it's Ainu ethnic minority groups. As a result of this, a powerful centralised state was able to direct the development of the economy as well as their respective society. Initially fascists exploited this. Then as the US, Soviets and other Western powers repudiated them, they were made to adopt the liberal capitalist model that they'd been on the path towards pre-World Wars.
The Middle East on the other hand has been under the boot of european puppet masters. Iran's democratic PM was couped (1953), in Afghanistan the Taliban was funded by the US against a secular progressive leader, and in Saudi Arabia, their royal family were puppets for Europeans (UK) and for decades now, the US.
You appear to be somewhat progressive from your other comments, but you have a wierd blindspot when it comes to religion. You apparently defend black people but don't realise that minority religious groups can and often have been racialised and attacked in similar ways to how a minority group would be. This is strange behaviour.
It's like you're proud of being ignorant of history.