Cherchez-le-femme means “Find-the-female” in French. It is a term that I got and modified from Charles Krauthammer where he mentioned “Klein's peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif” (find-the-Jew) in reference to the Time’s Joe Klein who decried the odious attempts of "odious attempts by Jewish extremists . . . to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs.". I’m not touching that one now so don’t even try, but ever the thief, I will attempt to crowbar this term into the popular discourse, by which I mean i will use it a lot, so remember who came up with it first, alright?
Before your brain drops out with my inconsequential wittering (hey, I’ve been away a long time), let me introduce this piece from the BBC, Poor women ‘bear climate burden’:
Women in developing countries will be the most vulnerable to climate change, a report from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has warned.
The agency said there was a disproportionate burden on those women and called for greater equality.
They do most of the agricultural work, and are therefore affected by weather-related natural disasters impacting on food, energy and water, it said.
Regular readers will notice similarities to the “Greener Gender: The Greener Gender: Are men worse for the environment?” essay that I wrote some time ago, in which I criticised author Gerd Johnssom-Latham for bandwagon jumping and using climate change to server her ideological agenda. The exact same thing is happening here. Notice the middle paragraph in the quote above. “The agency said there was a disproportionate burden on those women and called for greater equality.“. Call me a fool if you want, but that sounds like a roundabout way to solve the problem. If an deleterious phenomenon is going to disproportionally affect a certain group of people then one would think that the first order of the day is to mitigate the effect, not to propose a social solution targeted at the group of people, people like this are meddlers and they irk me.
This is where the term “Cherchez-le-Femme” comes in. This is the phenomenon we saw in the “Greener gender” report and in this report from the UN. People with an agenda are extraordinarily adept at linking a lot of things that happen in the world to their particular agenda. Certain people are obsessed with Jews, and everything that happens comes back to the Jews somehow, it really is quote boring talking to such people. This is why I am skeptical about climate change. I will accept that it is happening to a certain degree because as I know from defending evolution and science on so many occasions, that it takes a little bit of chutzpah to go against the scientific community. However, as an astute observer said on the Dennis Prager show one time, climate change has become catnip to a bunch of failed “isms”. It is a ripe fruit dangling in the faces of various political groups, to be picked and used to advance their purposes. The imaginary female that will be damaged by the next big thing must be sought by the feminist and identified as a victim to be solved by the medicine they offer. Hence the reason they say “more equality” is needed rather than “stop global warming” or even “raise the standard of living”.
I must also point out for people who don’t know my views. There is a problem in the third world, you’d have to be blind to not see it. Women in many countries around the world have less rights, some people say “therefore feminism” whereas I say “therefore equality”. Contemporary feminism as a solution the the plight of women in the third world is a bad idea. You can look to this and other blogs to advance that particular case. One last observance on this issue, the executive director of UNFPA is Thoraya Ahmed Obaid. If you go to her bio then you will see her dedication to standard feminist causes. I have highlighted the instances of the word “women” in the image below to show this. Now, I don’t normally dig into people’s past but it goes to the central message. Ms. Obaid is clearly a feminists who is looking to climate change as the catnip to sell her cause. It’s sneaky and veiled and will turn people off of her cause in the end.
Posted on: Friday, November 20, 2009 7:10 AM