Does real feminism look like Linda Sarsour, Hillary Clinton or the first female CIA head?

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

“2018 will be the year of women,” CNN declared last year.

What was the greatest achievement of women in ’17 and ’18? Ask the media and they’ll tell you that it’s Hillary Clinton running on her husband’s name and losing an election before blaming it on sexism. Or the #MeToo movement’s transformation from fighting abuse to #TimesUp calls for Hollywood quotas. Or the Women’s March, whose leader was caught cheering on a Farrakhan speech in which the racist leader told black women that their husbands were fat because they were too lazy to cook.

“You lazy woman,” the man whom a leftist activist behind the Women’s March praised as the greatest, ranted. “Who the hell wants a woman with a good shape and a fat behind that don’t know how to prepare no food for her husband and her children?”

There’s the media’s official feminism.

Hillary Clinton blaming her defeat on white women listening to their husbands, Harvey Weinstein’s pals exploiting the crimes that they kept quiet about for special #TimesUp privileges and a Women’s March in thrall to a man who had declared, “Allah says in the Qur’an that men are a degree above women.”

While the media was chasing fake feminism, President Trump nominated Gina Haspel as the first female head of the CIA. And instead of celebrating this amazing milestone, the media wasted no time before smearing an accomplished woman who had succeeded in one of the country’s most dangerous fields.

The media fed the myth that Valerie Plame, an anti-Semitic socialite who was key to a leftist campaign against the Bush administration, was a covert operative who faced danger every day. Unlike Plame, last seen pushing the Iran Deal and ranting about the Jews, Haspel is the real thing. She joined the CIA in ’85 and received the Intelligence Medal of Merit.

Gina Haspel was on the ground around the world, including in the Thai jungle where captured Al Qaeda terrorists were interrogated. And Haspel proved to be much tougher than some of the male politicians back in Washington D.C. who wanted to fight the terrorists who had murdered thousands of people in this country, but expected them to give up their secrets without any inconvenience or pressure.

Haspel and the people under her did the difficult and unrewarding job they had to do for their country. And, like the Vietnam veterans of a previous generation, they returned from Asia to jeers and smears. The women and men who had gone into the heart of darkness had their names dragged through the mud and their careers destroyed by the Democrats and their radical leftist media allies.

Senator Dick Durbin compared them to the “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags” and “Pol Pot”. CNN’s Anderson Cooper echoed him, “if you envision Nazis doing this, and I even hate to say this, if you envision the Khmer Rouge doing this.” And Senator McCain, who is already attacking Haspel, sleazily compared it to Pol Pot, the Spanish Inquisition and the Japanese torture of Americans during WW2.

Now many of the same activists who originally took credit for stopping Haspel in ’13 are back at it again. And some turncoat Republicans like McCain have joined them. Senator McCain has accused Gina Haspel of being involved in “one of the darkest chapters in American history”.

One of the darkest chapters of American history came when we stopped fighting Islamic terrorists and instead turned on those who did. We have nothing to atone for when it comes to our treatment of terrorists. We have something to atone for when it comes to how we treated the men and women who put their lives and careers on the line from Afghanistan to Benghazi to fight Durbin and McCain’s pals.

The same media that feigned outrage at the myth of Valerie Plame were eager to leak the names and destroy the reputations of those intelligence personnel who had been in the trenches of terror. And the media never tired of its weepy depictions of suffering Islamic terrorists being tortured by Americans.

Despite Obama Inc’s obsession with diversity, Gina Haspel was not allowed to serve as National Clandestine Service director because of her work fighting terrorists. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA boss, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, blocked her in ’13. And so a talented woman was demoted instead.

“CIA director John Brennan apparently has decided to postpone and reverse the appointment of the first woman to head the CIA directorate of operations (which controls all covert operations and spying),” John Yoo wrote. “This is a lot more serious than the hypocrisy of the diversity-crazed Obama administration’s blocking the first woman for this most sensitive and important of intelligence positions. This is the very politicization of the CIA that conservatives feared when Brennan was nominated.”

To maintain diversity, Brennan’s CIA elevated two other women instead. Diversity says that all women are interchangeable elements in a gender quota. It doesn’t matter which woman you pick, as long as it’s a woman. Romney was mocked for his “binders full of women” remark, but it was Obama who actually treated women as an interchangeable bunch of names, rather than as individuals with talent and ability.

While Obama may have kept her down, Trump recognized her merit. Real feminism is not made with #TimesUp style gender quotas, but it is the right to have your individual achievements recognized.

Gina Haspel’s belated recognition is an important moment for her and for the people in our intelligence community, a group that the media has recently begun celebrating in the abstract while smearing them as individuals, who put their reputations on the line after 9⁄ 11 . And it’s also a historical milestone.

Last year we were told that Hillary Clinton, a political hack who owed her entire career to her husband, represented a political milestone. But Gina Haspel is here because she put in the decades of work. She’s one of the many hardworking women who were given an opportunity to rise by this administration. And their authentically historical milestones are being overlooked by a media obsessed with hating them.

“The ‘First Woman CIA Director’ Is a Smokescreen,” an Atlantic smear insists. “Gina Haspel’s gender is the least important fact about her.” Like so many other examples of the pro-terrorist genre, it treats us to piteous images of the poor terrorists and the cruel CIA people who made them feel very bad.

And yet there is something very powerful in the image of a woman standing up to Islamic terrorists.

Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood and the various strains of the Islamic movement envision a world in which women are segregated and enslaved. The female interrogators who turned the tables on captured Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were making a meaningful feminist statement. They were doing what the abused women in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan would never be able to do.

They fought back.

The media’s idea of a feminist heroine is Linda Sarsour. And Sarsour’s idea of feminism was protecting a sexual harasser, praising Saudi Arabia and Farrakhan. That’s also Tamika Mallory’s idea of feminism. Gina Haspel’s idea of feminism was going after the Islamic terrorists looking to realize Sarsour and Farrakhan’s idea of a perfect Islamic society where women and non-Muslims know their place.

Gina Haspel’s nomination sends a message to Islamic terrorists and their domestic collaborators. And it shows that real feminism looks nothing like the Women’s March. It looks like the new head of the CIA.