The van Gogh murder, committed in 2004, lives on in Europe as an emblem and a threshold in the accumulating body of evidence and incidents of intimidation by Muslims living within Western society. In Australia, our own extreme symptom and threshold in this same trend and cultural struggle was the gang-rapes of dozens of young women by Muslim men in Sydney. Nine trials have worked through the courts so far as a result of these crimes. In this cultural clash, the treatment of women is the most hotly contested terrain. Not just the treatment of non-Muslim women by Muslim men, but the treatment of Muslim women within Western culture. Many Muslim women live under constraints that are unacceptable to wider society. For years, a symptom of this tension, which is largely submerged, has been the distraught young women turning up at the Australian embassy in Beirut to escape forced marriages.

In the midst of this cultural and moral struggle one element has been conspicuously missing - the feminists - the authors, academics and commentators who rose to prominence as advocates of women's rights. In Australia and Europe, their response to the growing levels of sexual intimidation, harassment or suppression of women by Muslim men has either been a deafening chorus of silence, or denial and blame-shifting. Instead, the combat has been left to journalists, and the heaviest work has been done, at great risk to themselves, by dissident women inside Islamic culture. Women such as Hirsi Ali, who, before her life in Holland became intolerable and she retreated to the United States, wrote The Caged Virgin, a book in which she comments: "Islam dominated the lives of our family … I was taught that Islam sets us apart from the rest of the world, the world of non-Muslims. They, the others, the kafirs, the unbelievers, are antisocial, impure, barbaric, not circumcised, immoral, unscrupulous, and above all, obscene; they have no respect for women; their girls and women are whores … "Islam is strongly dominated by a sexual morality derived from tribal Arab values dating from the time of the Prophet … a culture in which women were the property of their fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, or guardians …

"[Yet] the adherents to the gospel of multiculturalism refuse to criticise people whom they see as victims … Criticism of the Islamic world, of Palestinians, and of Islamic minorities is regarded as Islamophobia and xenophobia … I cannot emphasise enough how wrongheaded this is. It is racism in its purest form." Her voice was joined by that of Wafa Sultan, a psychiatrist who fled Syria after members of the Muslim Brotherhood gunned down one of her university professors in the classroom. She became a legend on the internet this year after standing up to a fundamentalist cleric on Al-Jazeera TV, brilliantly articulating the real schism facing the Western world: "The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of civilisations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs in the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilisation and backwardness, between the civilised and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

Last year, from the safety of Canada, a Muslim woman dissident, Irshad Manji, wrote The Trouble With Islam, which challenged the Koran's core statements on women (such as, "Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other"). She also raised the issue of double standards among Western liberals: "Why does the legitimate questioning of some people (Muslims, for instance) carry the charge of being racist while legitimate questioning of other people (say, non-Muslim Americans) doesn't?" She was joined this year by other writers, including the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who fled to Europe after her novel Shame invoked death threats from Muslim fundamentalists, when they signed an open letter calling for an end to the double standards of liberal Western intellectuals: "We reject 'cultural relativism' which accepts that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions … Islamism is a reactionary ideology." The most recent and most scathing commentary has come from a British journalist, Melanie Phillips, whose new book, Londonistan, examines the culture which produced last year's terrorist bombings in London by British Muslims. She is outraged by the dangerous hypocrisy of self-styled "progressives": "It is remarkable that the left … with its obsessions with issues like gay rights, equality for women and sexual licence … should have forged an alliance with radical Islamists who preach death to gays, the subjugation of women and the stoning of adulterers. It is an eye-opener to see, on the streets of London, so-called 'progressives' marching shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists under the metaphorical banner of human rights and the literal banners of Hamas."

In Australia, much the same. Prominent feminists have responded to the cascade of reactionary provocations by Muslim men in this country with an ideological forbearance, and a pall of silence. The silence of the lambs.

Paul Sheehan's book "about" the courts and sexual assault, Girls Like You, will be published by Pan Macmillan on Wednesday.