Female Exceptionality

It is both astonishing and saddening to me to see how women can lose track of their moral compass in celebrating other women who have betrayed the very essence of humanity's moral imperatives. Those women who welcome into their midst, or celebrate the 'courage' or the breakthroughs they recognize that other women have made into formerly male-considered areas of enterprise to challenge the patriarchal system of male privilege, see these women as alpha-lioness role models for all women.

The example coming most recently to the fore, being the decision to celebrate the first woman helicopter pilot, a German woman by the name of Hanna Reitsch, who distinguished herself by her unflagging patriotism to the Fatherland, and her regret that when she had the privilege of being in the bunker with Hitler before his suicide, that she hadn't died at that time too. But that she was the first woman helicopter pilot made her the chosen favourite for the Institute for Women of Aviation International to highlight as an inspiration for future young female aviators.

German aviatrix Captain Hanna Reitsch is greeted by German chancellor Adolf Hitler after she was awarded the Iron Cross second class at the Reich Chancellory in Berlin, in April 1941, for her service in the development of airplane armament instruments during World War II. A beaming Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering looks on.  (ASSOCIATED PRESS file photo)

Much like the admiration given to Leni Riefenstahl, the World War II era German filmmaker, producer, screenwriter, photographer, another favourite of der Fuehrer whose cinematic skills in the production of propaganda for the Nazi war effort were invaluable, and much admired by others in the field, post-history. During the period of the Final Solution, of the half-million guards in Nazi death camps, 3,700 were women, some of whose reputations for brutality transcended those of their male counterparts.

Should their fearlessness in working alongside the Angel of Death as aides of indisputable cruelty utterly lacking humane consciousness be a subject of admiration in inspiring other women to set aside compassion and empathy in a challenge to a hitherto-male-dominated area of psychopathic domination? As proof-positive that anything men can do, women can challenge and demonstrate that they too, have the characteristics it takes to turn humanity and social verities inside-out?

Modern feminists with their very own brand of celebrating female exceptionalism have embraced Palestinian women who bring to the modern catalogue of women challenging the boundaries of traditional female roles, the suicide bombers and throat-slashers of Israeli Jews from children to adults, on either side of the equation, now champion them too, as challenging the bastions of male domination.

So that when American feminists organized a protest rally to march against the installation of a coarse, misogynistic Donald J. Trump, newly installed as president of the United States, it featured the presence of  Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a Palestinian woman who had spent ten years in an Israeli prison for her part in two terrorist bombings in 1970, one of which killed two students. Her presence as a motivational speaker, augmenting that of one of the march organizers, Linda Sarsour, another Palestinian-born, with links to Hamas.

Hamas; that would be the Palestinian terrorist organization occupying Gaza whose statement of mission makes it clear that its indomitable raison d'etre is to complete the enterprise that Nazi Germany began but did not finish. Perhaps an unconscious reflection of Islam itself, which portrays itself as god's final, approved version of his divine message to humanity.

Perhaps the real, possibly subconscious goal of these feminist-inspired women's groups is to prove indisputably that men don't have the existential monopolistic lock on gross manifestations of incurably, incorrigible stupidity.