Who beats who?

One of Margaret Wente's favorite themes is to equate women's rights with white ethnocentrism. In her mind, white culture is the only one that respects women's rights. All others - aboriginal, black, Muslim, and now South Asian are patriarchal and abuse women.

She is able to get away with this because of the stereotypes that these cultures are backward and retrograde compared to white Western culture. It may seem an alien concept to Wente, but how about discarding stereotypes for a moment and looking at actual facts?

• 51% of Canadian women have been victims of at least one act of physical or sexual violence since age 16;
  
• Nearly 30,000 Canadian women report spousal violence each year. And that's just the tip of the iceberg - nobody knows how many cases go unreported.
  
• In Wente's favorite country, the United States, 22 percent of women report being a victim of domestic violence. Fully 60% of the population knows someone who is a victim.
  

Canada is 87 percent white, the United States 75 percent.

For all Wente's pontificating, she has never presented any hard data showing a correlation between ethnicity and domestic violence. An intellectually honest journalist would try to ascertain the facts before casually stereotyping a community, but Wente is neither intellectual, nor honest, nor a journalist. Her agenda is ethnocentrism, and she uses women's rights as a club to bash nonwhites.

When it comes to white women, Wente's feminism disappears. Another of her regular themes is the so-called excesses of Western feminism. She loves quoting anti-feminists, from Anne Cools to Christina Hoff Sommers. She repeatedly claims that Western culture makes fun of men and masculine virtues.

On Google, Wente's most highly ranked article jeers at Naomi Wolf's claim that she was sexually harassed as an undergraduate. And yet, Wente accuses South Asians of being the ones who minimize the problems of women, or ostracize women who report abuse.

Across Canada today, there are thousands of women being beaten. They come in all ages, sizes, and colours. But Wente has no real sympathy for them. They are not people to her, not human beings each with a unique story. If they are dark-skinned, they are political fodder, weapons to use in her campaign to divide ethnic groups against each other, to set fear and suspicion between the nation's many cultures. If they are white-skinned, they mean nothing to her.

This is not journalism. It is not commentary. It is hackery, and both she and the newspaper that employs her should be ashamed of themselves.