Feminism Killed The Pakistani Lena Dunham

Pictured above is the mountain K2. It is the second-tallest mountain in the world, after Mount Everest, and the national mountain of Pakistan. K2 is inspiring, majestic, and humbling. Today’s topic is none of the three, but it does have to do with Pakistan.

Crypto-Islamic news editors at CNN were in shock yesterday: ‘Qandeel Baloch: Pakistani social media star strangled by her brother.’

This was apparently front page news, nestled between stories about Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, the assault-style truck attack in France, and the aborted coup attempt in Turkey. I doubted many of CNN’s readers knew or cared much about Pakistani social media stars, so I dove into the article to see what I could learn about the mass mind-control apparatus that is CNN. What did they want me to think because of this article?

The answer came quickly, in the vein of why we are all constantly force-fed praise about Malala Yousafzai: women are being oppressed in the Indian subcontinent, and you should feel bad about it. This time the oppression took the form of an angry Pakistani man who strangled his sister, who was making a name for herself posting half-naked selfies on Facebook and Instagram. He protested the “kind of pictures she had been posting online.”

CNN described Qandeel Baloch’s online exploits as “brazenly sassy, and increasingly political.” She was “curvaceous and self deprecating.” Here’s a money quote:

In recent weeks, several of her posts encouraged her audience to challenge old practices of Pakistani society. In a July 14 post, Baloch referred to herself as a “modern day feminist.”

Haha, oh man.

Qandeel Baloch’s brother didn’t murder her. Feminism murdered her.

I almost feel bad for Qandeel Baloch. Almost. This chubby female of middling looks, with the desperate need for attention common to her sex, somehow found a way to boost and buttress her own status and popularity. In a traditional Pakistani society, she found the Internet. She found Facebook and Instagram, doubtlessly shortly thereafter followed by Western ideas about “women’s visibility.” She found that, even though she was pretty average and unremarkable, she could do a simple thing to become famous and popular: post half-naked pictures of herself on social media with captions using words like “empowering.”

What happened next? The Cathedral found her, of course. Feminists found her. NGOs found her. Journalists found her. Did they tell her to stop posting such lewd and stupid stuff online? Did they tell her that Kim Kardashian is a warning, not a role model? Did they tell her she’d be better off doing something actually productive, like raising children? No, of course not!

Hamna Zubair, the culture editor of Pakistani newspaper Dawn, told CNN that she had received much criticism for carrying pieces on Baloch. One commentator asked her if she would be “reporting from a brothel” next.

The Pakistani newspaper Dawn is no random publication. It is Pakistan’s oldest and most widely-read English-language newspaper, founded by the same man who founded Pakistan in the 1940s, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. It is a “liberal, centrist, and progressive” newspaper, as if that needed saying. Mohammed Ali Jinnah studied law in London, but that’s a story for another day. Dawn carries syndicated columns from The Guardian and The Washington Post.

That newspaper eagerly encouraged and fueled Qandeel Baloch’s narcissistic endeavours in order to further a political goal: the advancement of feminism and other progressive norms in Pakistan. Baloch made a reckless but predictable deal with the Devil. She would be the cudgel with which the Cathedral would beat traditional Muslim Pakistanis. In exchange, she got attention, fame, notoriety, and money. In theory.

In reality, the deal got messy very fast, and her own traditional Muslim Pakistani brother strangled her before she became a Kim Kardashian. He saw her become the Pakistani Lena Dunham, and he had enough.

Now CNN is eulogizing her as yet another martyr in the global and endless war of feminism and progressivism against human nature.

Pakistani feminists had celebrated Baloch. Madiha Tahir, co-founder of the feminist magazine Tanqeed, called her a “gutsy feminist provocateur” who had exposed “the hypocrisy of the male-dominated establishment, especially the clergy, through her social media videos.”

Tanqeed is not quite a fully-fledged Soros operation yet, but its donor list is suspiciously full of non-Pakistani names: Brady Calestro, David Dencker, Anna Waltman, and so on. Tanqeed, much like Dawn, provided cover and incentive for Qandeel Baloch. Do they reap any blame for her death? Are they at all ashamed or apologetic for pushing her into the role of a crowdfunded Lena Dunham in a country where honor killing is still common? No, of course not!

“She wasn’t rich,” Tahir said. “She was a working class woman who dared to be exactly herself.”

It’s clear she wasn’t rich, because if she was, she would have been writing a feminist column in The Harvard Crimson far away from Taliban and honor killers. She was a working class woman who took the high-risk job of being the Cathedral’s frontline feminist culture war shock trooper in a heavily Muslim country.

Behind the scenes, however, things were a bit different. Hassan Choudary, digital editor at Express Tribune Life & Style, told CNN he had spoken to Baloch on the phone just two days ago, saying she was sobbing and “feared for her life.”

The Express Tribune, needless to say, is another major English-language Pakistani newspaper. It is Pakistan’s only newspaper affiliated with the International New York Times. Its editorial stance identifies with “social liberalism.”

What is the real story here? CNN wants to spin an epic tale of an average woman standing up to patriarchal oppressors against all odds. CNN wants to turn her into a martyr and a heroine. But she is neither of those things, and CNN’s tale is false on its face.

The real story is a sordid one. It is a story of a number of news organizations and NGOs following Anglo-Saxon ideologies of feminism and progressivism, funded and directed from abroad, working on a long-term project to undercut traditional Pakistani society and remake it in the images of Harvard and Oxford Utopia. It is a story of a lower-class Pakistani woman without a husband who got sucked into the pointless spiral of selfies, clicks, and likes that is Western social media, and was then selected and fueled down that path by those same news organizations and NGOs in order to further their political goals.

When she met her inevitable fate in Muslim Punjab, they eulogized her and blamed the patriarchy. And yet, before Qandeel Baloch was having phone calls with journalists at major left-of-center newspapers, she was not likely fearing for her life, nor twerking half-naked for millions to watch on YouTube. Qandeel Baloch was not empowered, she was a political pawn for organizations that did not care whether she lived or died.

Feminism killed the Pakistani Lena Dunham. It’ll kill the American one too, but that inevitable wound will be self-inflicted, unlike in Muslim Pakistan.

Mark Yuray is verified on Gab. Follow him there and on Twitter.

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