We will kill you if you go to school

I have never heard any western feminist express this position. Names please.

This news literally nauseates me. I firmly believe that were the ways women are oppressed worldwide racist instead of sexist, there would be a deafening outcry. Imagine a country where blacks were not allowed to get an education past the age of twelve under penalty of death, and were not allowed to own property or walk in public. A large number of women around the world are de facto slaves and it doesn’t really seem to concern anyone except feminists. This, more than anything else, demonstrates just how far the struggle against sexism lags the struggle against racism.

As for the matter of feminist ambivalence as a consequence of cultural relativism and, in the current political climate, the reluctance to feed Islamophobia, of course it exists. I struggle with this myself. Indeed, I vividly recall a time in the late 80s when I was in the distinct minority among the feminists I knew in my willingness to condemn FGM unconditionally.

Of course, it’s not as if there’s such a thing as the official feminist position and there are often as many differing opinions as there are self-identified feminists. But trends come and go and I think that recent years have seen, as a result of the rise of Islamophobia in the west, an increased reluctance among feminists to loudly decry sexism in Islamic countries for fear of providing ammunition to the bigoted cultural chauvinists who cynically use the plight of women to disguise their ulterior motives. I watched and denounced and, frankly, despised the Taliban from their inception and while for this reason I applauded their downfall during the US invasion, I was never under any illusions that the US would take seriously the matter of securing the well-being of Afghan women in the long-term. Certainly some of the warmongering conservative Islamophobes here in the US secretly admire a culturally conservative society where women are “put in their place”. The thought of being metaphorically in bed with these conservatives disgusts me.

Yet I think those considerations are ultimately minor and relatively unimportant when placed against the enormity of the horror of the plight of these girls and women in Afghanistan, and elsewhere. I yearn for the day when I see college campuses holding marches and vigils protesting the treatment of women around the world such as I recall back in the day protesting apartheid. Twenty-five years ago I would have expected the world to be farther along in the fight against sexism than it is today.

“…argued that this rhetoric of salvation, which is based on an assumption of Western superiority, needs to be challenged…”

I think it needs to be challenged, but for a different reason. It should be challenged in the context of westerners fighting sexism in non-western cultures…and especially in the context of men, like myself, who fight against sexism.

There is something inherently paternalistic in rescuing someone. There’s no avoiding this. And this is especially pernicious in the context where someone has been methodically and institutionally disempowered—”saving” them, though well-intentioned, may change many circumstances but it unfortunately continues the pattern of disempowerment.

This is why I’ve come to believe that an important distinction should be made between fighting against an injustice and fighting for an oppressed group. I think that only members of the oppressed group should fight for themselves; it’s not appropriate (or helpful in the long-term) for outsiders to fight on their behalf. However, it is appropriate and helpful—indeed, I think everyone’s duty—to fight against injustice. The distinction might in practice seem ambiguous and artificial, but I believe that were everyone involved to embrace this distinction where it is relevant, it would have beneficial consequences and reduce a lot of conflict.

It is not our job, as westerners—as outsiders—to specifically fight to improve the lot of Afghan women and to empower them. Ultimately, an oppressed group must empower themselves. But it is our job, and everyone’s job, to fight injustice and to oppose those barriers which prevent Afghan women from empowering themselves. We can fight sexism in Afghanistan without placing ourselves into a paternalistic position—but only if we are aware of the distinction I am discussing.

Also, of course, I think this is the correct way for men to be involved in the fight against sexism. As it is not the role of westerners to be advocates for Afghan women, it is not the role of men to be advocates for women. Yet all of us can, and should, fight sexism wherever we find it. Fighting injustice and advocacy are two separate things. Being mindful of this will not eliminate the risk of cultural imperialism in the fight against sexism, but it will reduce it.

Ingrid, as a “Western” and European feminist and reader of Crooked Timber for many years, I find your post disconcerting and more than a little intellectually deplorable. You start out, using an outrageous statement (a valid rhetorical technique), appearing to address the in itself interesting issue of how to take a stance about things that happen outside one’s own cultural environment. But then instead of having anything interesting at all to say about it, you turn around and instead talk about the horrible threat from one of the world’s most rabid misogynist groups.

If you have a quote from any prominent Western feminist expressing ambivalence about speaking out against this sort of thing, then say so. I don’t know of any who would excuse killing school girls under the pretext or with the excuse of respecting cultural differences.

Being a feminist doesn’t prevent one from being a xenophobe (or Islamophobe, if you will), but the in-group vs out-group activism issue has much more general roots. See bourgeois feminists vs working-class feminists vs black feminists vs queer feminists.

Question Keith M Ellis: How can people with no power “empower” themselves without help from the outside? Women have almost zero power in these cultures.

I would also disagree that “something inherently paternalistic in rescuing someone”. When a female firefighter comes to my house and pulls me out of a fire is that “paternalistic”?

Yes Roy, didn’t you know that the West only ever kills children by accident?

I second the call to hear who these evil feminists are who don’t draw attention to non-Western oppression of women on principle.

“Question Keith M Ellis: How can people with no power ’empower’ themselves without help from the outside? Women have almost zero power in these cultures.”

I’m making a subtle but important distinction. They could empower themselves because outsiders have fought against the forces which placed barriers against them. Again, it may seem meaningless to distinguish between acting to help someone and acting to remove the barriers preventing them from helping themselves; but I think it’s a crucially important distinction for activists to make because it alters how they think about and deal with the oppressed group. The perspective of “helping” someone encourages the mindsets of pity, condescension, and paternalism. It’s better to think in terms of fighting against injustice and acting to remove barriers which prevent an oppressed group from helping themselves.

This is most clearly shown in the case where outsiders take it upon themselves to act as advocates for an oppressed group. This is often met with distrust and resentment from the oppressed group, and rightly so. It’s not an outsider’s place to advocate for someone else, unless specifically asked to do so. It is not a man’s place to advocate for women; but, in contrast, it is every human’s place—male or female—to fight the injustices which oppress women. There is a difference between the two.

“I would also disagree that ‘something inherently paternalistic in rescuing someone’. When a female firefighter comes to my house and pulls me out of a fire is that ‘paternalistic’?”

I’m curious that you specified a female firefighter, as if it were not possible for a woman to be paternalistic. Of course women can be paternalistic.

At any rate, your example is a bit contrived, it seems to me. That is an example of a situation of imminent danger, which alters the considerations. If I were to see someone about to kill a woman, and I were able to act, I’d act to help the woman and let the politics of it sort themselves out later. Also, the function of a firefighter is a socially sanctioned one, the firefighter has been implicitly invited to help those inside the burning house.

Unasked, self-anointed “saviours” usually don’t realize how insulting they are, how they often do as much harm as good. And there’s certainly a subset of this group which is of a personality type that is attracted to this role specifically because it’s paternalistic and inherently humiliating to those “saved”. My goal is to provide an abstract framework whereby those who are called to action may do so in a productive, non-insulting and appropriate manner—by concentrating on opposing the injustice rather than “helping” the supposedly “helpless”.

#15:
I asserted nothing of the kind, nor did I claim the information was false. I did state a lack of trust in the BBC as an unbiased source.
The presentation of a true thing in a context that leads the unwary reader toward false conclusions is not vulnerable to a flat charge of dishonesty. That was the point of the comment pretty much, the “art form of this time” bit.
As to your second query, my position is that “such a position on the part of local Taleban leadership” is entirely consistent with the extremes of the other two branches of the Abramic tradition, fundamentalist Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity.
Not scholastically, but in a shared misogynist disdain for the feminine, wherever it can be seen.

#16:

“Leads the unwary reader to false conclusions?” . . . . . . and those’d be?

. . . and that deeply mysogynist strain shared by Islamists with fundamentalist Judaism and Christianity? Would that be official government policy, or even the public party position taken by any major participants in governance, in any non-Islamist county? Last I checked, women could drive cars in the U.S., could attend school with men in Italy, and nobody had stood up in the Knesset, and suggested that maybe prosecution of “honor killers” who kill their sisters after their sisters have been raped wasn’t such a good thing.

#18:
You write: “that deeply mysogynist strain shared by Islamists with fundamentalist Judaism and Christianity”
and then go off on some folksy rhetorical whirlies, none of which do anything but prove your allegiance to the very things I excoriated.
As enjoyable as it is follow that, and as much as I like being paid attention to, your dishonesty and lack of intellectual rigor mean I’m going to stop replying to you.

Think about this – some of the world (you decide which nations) do not live in 2009 (soon to be). And our mores and morals do not concern them. That’s a fact.

Think about this – some of the world (you decide which nations) do not live in 2009 (soon to be). And our mores and morals do not concern them. That’s a fact.

i think many of you have dismissed the perfectly valid questions raised by mr belmont.

specifically, the article and news items appear to give no detail as to the reliability or scope of this stated threat. how much area does this commander actually command, if any? how solid is the Taliban’s control over the area in question? these data points would give a more reliable indication as to whether the threat was reasonably expected to be credible or not. it could also be a ploy in order to consolidate greater control over an area that is currently in dispute. reducing it to a soundbite removes context, the understanding of which is absolutely essential to any genuine progress towards equality for women.

Less than a hundred years ago women were being ridiculed and beaten for demanding the right to vote. In the US and the UK. What they were really demanding of course was the right to be treated as the equals of men in the eyes of the law. And that’s what was being denied them, violently.
100 year old photographs of women in the American mid-West and the English midlands show women whose clothes covered them head to toe.
Women who couldn’t vote, who were violently denied that right among others equally central to an independent and equal social being, women covered for decency’s sake from head to toe.
The condemnation of this unjust treatment, and the violent attitudes that underlay and enforce it, in the behavior of our contemporaries as egregious as it may be, needs to be undertaken with some humility.
Especially as concerns those contemporaries who are being killed, man woman and child, in appalling numbers and right now, for reasons that have nothing to do with our, or anyone else’s, enlightened positions on women’s entitlement to lives free of sexist oppression.

I don’t think there’s a problem is saying that what the Taliban is doing is deplorable and we should oppose it. The problem is what can and should we do about it. This was one of the problems in Iraq: the liberal hawks tried to reduce all debate to “Is Saddam or is Saddam not a bastard?” Well, OK, he is, or was. And the implication is that those who were willing to do whatever it took to get rid of him were therefore morally superior to those who entertained doubts. At this point, though, we can see that we should have found more entertainment value in the doubts. Instead of just saying “there is injustice, we must do something!”, which offers a bracing blast of righteousness, we have to ask, “there is injustice, it would be good to do something, but we must calculate the human cost of what we can do?” Even in realpolitik, this seems often omitted. In the recent panel of former SOS’s, James Baker was arguing that the costs of going into Darfur were beyond what was politically bearable. Albright responded that then you shouldn’t call it “genocide”. This strikes me as the worst possible answer, and it is not often I side with the Republican over the Democrat. We need to have the intellectual integrity to describe the world as it is, and not let the need to justify our intended actions distort our picture. But we also have to recognize that sometimes we cannot right every wrong.

In Afghanistan, though, we are in it now, and we might as well try to do right by the society; it is in our interest as well as theirs. So I do favor directly fighting the Taliban on things like this. Much of the costs are, at this point, sunk costs, and the place has been decimated largely because we used it as a pawn. I also think those agonizing about imposing our cultural values on the Islamic society should keep this in mind: Afghanistan was a secular society, or at least a secular government, and we supported an Islamic fundamentalist coup to set a trap for the Soviet Union. Brezinski has admitted this, and Robert Dreyfuss has more detail on it in Devil’s Game.

roy belmont: You failed to really respond to his point. While I would never argue that sexism does not exist in the Western world it is not the same, in magnitude or degree, as the sexism you find in countries like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.

Interestingly, when women are threatened with starvation by the Israeli blockade of Gaza, you hear little about it from Western feminists

Huh?

Roger: You make no mention of the Israeli women killed by Hamas rocket attacks. I wonder why that is….

Mr. Belmont:

Another accusation of dishonesty? I assume you’ll disregard a request for an explanation or example, as you ignored my prior one; instead, you’ve stated that you’re taking your dolly and dishes and going home. I infer that you can’t explain or cite examples, but are engaged in mere trolling…

Infer away R G-S!
I have not gone home!
In this regard.
I have never left home!
In this regard.
As low as my standards of reply have become, i.e. my responding to #33, you have managed to sink entirely beneath them, almost, saving this itself, which has now, itself, come to conclusion.

Roger: You make no mention of the Israeli women killed by Hamas rocket attacks. I wonder why that is….

Well, hmm,maybe it is because the number of women killed by Hamas rocket attacks in the ceasefire that Israel cynically let expire was approximately zero. Although I´m sure that zero woman suffered terribly. Meanwhile, Israel paid no attention to the terms of the ceasefire and continued the food blockade of the one million five hundred thousand people of Gaza, as a form of collective punishment.

So now you know why that is. Time to pretend that this didn´t happen now. Be sure to use the word terrorist, and ¨no other country in the world would be condemned for defending itself¨, one of the laugh lines that excludes almost every other country in the world, including Turkey (which suffers much more from incursions by Kurds from Northern Iraq), India, Afghanistan, Chad, and Lebanon, which has been invaded twice by a certain neighbor from the South.

The deathtoll mounts, and Western governments still do nothing.

This thread is about the schooling of girls and the unbelievable approach by some Taliban leaders to keep females away from education. If you want to bring Israel into this discussion then the on-topic issue is that Israel’s literacy rates are extremely high (the highest in the region) and girls/women enjoy equal access to education as boys/men. (Even if you broke this down to subpopulations, you’ll find that Israeli Arabs as well as female Israeli Arabs have higher literacy rates than their counterparts in neighboring countries.)

Back to schoolgirls scheduled to be killed on January 15th. Assuming our hearts and minds are in the right place to do something about it, does anyone have any suggestions?

Precisely. Where would one even start?

Well, those naughty “western feminists” got a good talking to anyway.

Keith:

This news literally nauseates me. I firmly believe that were the ways women are oppressed worldwide racist instead of sexist, there would be a deafening outcry. Imagine a country where blacks were not allowed to get an education past the age of twelve under penalty of death, and were not allowed to own property or walk in public.

Yeah, imagine a country where Palestinians are kept in concentration camps and slaughtered just because of their ethnicity. Surely there would be a deafening outcry, and the US would pledge military troops to liberating the Palestinians.

Or, you know, maybe not.

It might be worth considering — as the aforementioned feminist scholars have pointed out — that bad behavior is everywhere, but somehow political enemies of the West get singled out to have their bad behavior corrected, especially when they’re behaving badly on top of a big oilfield.

Ingrid Robeyns: I do write that I think this is justified strategy in many instances, since one has to be aware of how one’s (feminist) intervention will be used and abused for other’s peoples agenda’s. I am pointing out that I think that nevertheless sometimes one is so struck by some cases, that the option of staying silent (not because one doesn’t care but because one thinks talking will do more harm), doesn’t look appealing either.

This strikes me as a self-defeating. If right-thinking westerners stay silent except in a few of the most egregious cases (murdering girls for attending school), is their tardy, hesitant, conditional advocacy really of any value (other than, perhaps, to make said westerners feel a bit better)? Suppose the Taleban were only barricading the schools or burning them down at night when empty — would that then tip the balance of staying silent to avoid inflaming Islamophobia? Suppose we took up a collection to have this thread translated into Pashtun, printed up, and sent to the girls and their families? Do you think it would be a morale booster?

Keith M Ellis: Certainly some of the warmongering conservative Islamophobes here in the US secretly admire a culturally conservative society where women are “put in their place”.

No, they absolutely don’t. That’s nonsense. Full stop. Spend some time among culturally conservative U.S. evangelicals. Yes, they’re creationists and pro-lifers, and most probably believe that women should stop working and stay home with young children if possible (which, BTW, is not a belief unknown among feminists). But they educate their daughters, they prepare them for careers, and don’t be mislead by the the male preacher figureheads — women make up a majority of the worshipers and run those churches (as they do virtually all churches in the U.S. not headed by the Pope — and even then…) If it were left up to the men, an awful lot churches would be empty and have to close their doors. To imagine culturally conservative Christians are anything close to the Taleban is to make up convenient bogeymen out of whole cloth.

matt mckeon: Back to schoolgirls scheduled to be killed on January 15th. Assuming our hearts and minds are in the right place to do something about it, does anyone have any suggestions?

Sure — think voice and exit. We’ve been talking exclusively about voice, but in this case exit seems a much more viable strategy. The article mentions that families who can afford to do so are moving. How about financial support to allow poor families move out? Or how about support for girls boarding schools outside the Swat valley?

“No, they absolutely don’t. That’s nonsense. Full stop. Spend some time among culturally conservative U.S. evangelicals. “

My sister is a culturally conservative evangelical. She’s not like this. I know some who are.

Again I say it.
Duh.

Again it didn’t work. Try getting advice from the parrots.

Slocum @51,

To imagine culturally conservative Christians are anything close to the Taleban is to make up convenient bogeymen out of whole cloth

That’s right. The American religious right would never murder a girl for going to school, unless maybe she went on after school to work as an abortion provider.

Can the local leaders successfully resist the Taliban? Right now, Pakistan is gearing up for a dandy war with India.

Matt,
“Can the local leaders successfully resist the Taliban? Right now, Pakistan is gearing up for a dandy war with India.”

I’d forgotten that; the future does look bleak. Still, in some areas the Taliban is not strong.

“My sister is a culturally conservative evangelical. She’s not like this. I know some who are.”

I think you are on to something here, but it seems unnecessary to throw out the evangelical label. Traditionalists (or cultural conservatives) that want to ‘keep women in their place’ are more often than not, merely uneducated small town folks.

Education (or lack thereof) has more bearing on these matters than faith.

#41 Roger “Well, hmm,maybe it is because the number of women killed by Hamas rocket attacks in the ceasefire that Israel cynically let expire was approximately zero”

Oh Really?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1552313/Hamas-rocket-kills-Israeli-woman-in-Sderot.html

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/28/africa/28mideast.php

http://b5.net/news/archives/2008/12-December/27-Saturday/%5B84193%5DMID:-Israeli-woman-killed-by-Gaza-rocket.html

Sorry to bring this up again but I could not let Roger’s comment stand. Innocent people have died on both sides due to the stubbornness of the leaders involved. We do a disservice to the dead when we pretend otherwise.

This strikes me as a self-defeating. If right-thinking westerners stay silent except in a few of the most egregious cases (murdering girls for attending school), is their tardy, hesitant, conditional advocacy really of any value (other than, perhaps, to make said westerners feel a bit better)?

I fully agree with Slocum here – this tactical approach to Human Rights is shameful, all human rights abuses everywhere should be documented and decried on a daily basis.

It’s also completely ridiculous: if the power players in the US or wherever decide to invade a country, I’m sure they don’t check with feminists, left-leaning academics or human rights advocates first. AI and Human Rights Watch have meticulously documented human rights abuses in Iraq under Saddam, yet they were outspoken opponents of the war. It’s really not that difficult to have a principled position on human rights, yet some parts of the left never seem to get this.

So when did CT start recycling 2002-vintage right wing talking points about feminist apathy in the face of the savage Mussulman?

Bubba, no more.
The most immediately obvious difference between you and Mr. Gould-Saltman is he clearly can’t help it.
Which puts you beneath him on my reply-or-not-o-meter.

A further link runs down a list of Pakistani militant groups claiming they all support Mullah Omer; the one coming out in favour of education for girls supposedly has government support.

Minneapolitan:

‘What precisely is the intent behind “highlighting” and “drawing attention to” the perfidy of the Taliban, or indeed, of any officially recognized enemy group? It’s not as though we, as western feminists, can mobilize people to do anything worse to Afghanistan and western Pakistan than is already being done in our name.’

Well, one thing we could (collectively) do is make it easier/harder for families from areas like these who are able to leave and choose to do so to seek refuge or asylum elsewhere; and work towards making doing so a realistic option.

Why assume that the only ways in which ‘we’ can intervene involve guns and bullets? Doesn’t that show a lack of imagination? In fact, why assume that the only way that ‘we’ can help involves states and governments? That shows a lack of imagination too.

No doubt there’s little to be done without some form of collective agency, but to think that acting collectively has to involve acting via state apparatus seems like a mistake. (and for what its worth, an odd mistake for anyone who thinks of themselves as either a feminist or on the political left)

Seriously, this is a rehash of a debate that antiwar liberals already had with the “decent left” back in 2002. Why are you people still running up to kick the football when you know the other side is just going to pull it away?

And I find it pretty revealing that someone on a soi-disant liberal blog would think to themselves, in the middle of a US-approved mass slaughter in Gaza, that the most pertinent thing that needs commenting on in the Muslim world is an isolated instance of thuggery from the Taliban.

Please: don’t let this escalate to one of those hopeless Palestine-Isreal discussions of which we’ve had already too many here at CT.

Oops, but the point I was trying to make was broader than Israel/Gaza: agendas can be hijacked by more than one party for more than one reason. I think it’s worth noting injustices anywhere, but make yourself hard to misquote and be unambiguous about what you think solutions might be.

The cynicism in the above comments is disheartening. There are all sorts of human rights abuses in the world and all of them deserve attention. I happen to care a great deal about the oppression of women, in Afghanistan and everywhere else in the world. The reported story is egregious and horrifying. I’m going to care about and talk about and raise awareness of this kind of oppression of women regardless of where it occurs and how politically inconvenient it might be to myself, my allies, and anyone else. I’m not so cynical and calculating as the rest of you.

Please: don’t let this escalate to one of those hopeless Palestine-Isreal discussions of which we’ve had already too many here at CT.

Right, let’s not talk about subjects about which people strongly disagree, because people might strongly disagree about them. Instead let’s all whistle pleasantly and pretend nothing’s going on, and hope it all goes away on its own.

From a purely practical point of view, it seems to make sense to focus on the lives we can do something to improve, rather than posturing about problems we can’t really do much about.

You could send a few bucks to http://www.futuregen.ca/ which spends money in Afghanistan on development projects. From a purely practical point of view it’s pretty easy to pony up some dollars where the cost of keeping people alive is relatively cheap.

One thing that could be done by anyone and everyone is compassionate recognition of the humanity of even the least human seeming figures out there in the world.
The IDF, the Taliban, Hamas, FARC, Blackwater, whoever.
They’re all made up of people, humans, us.
They all started life as babies.
We’ve been essentially brainwashed in the West to forgive inhuman behavior on the part of the Israelis because of the history of suffering attached to them.
The bombs and guns of the IDF are carried forward on the wheels of the Holocaust.
Islam originated in a physical landscape that was and is very unforgiving, even cruel if you look at the natural world that way. Suffering of a different kind and another order but it’s suffering just the same.
No sane person could say that there is no suffering in the Muslim world today, right now.
Are we to forgive egregious inhumanity because of the suffering borne by its causal agents, but only in select cases?
All these behaviors have an origin in very human responses to what life can be. If we have a better way it needs to be made plain, but without scorn, without an assumption of superiority that’s based on little more than circumstance, and that rises mainly out of insecurity and fear.
Choosing sides is what we’re programmed for, but those programs are failing us.
The real enemy here is invisible, nearly substanceless, more idea than thing, and it feeds on hatred and violence.
All of us can reject that, loudly, and defend against it by care .

Imagine you live in Chicago, and you are surrounded by your dire, implacable enemies in Indiana, Wisconsin, and the rest of Illinois (the scale is about right.) A particularly loony, violent faction starts lobbing rockets at you from Oak Park. Every truce, peace initiative, “land-for-peace”, or cease-fire has, for the past 60 years, has only resulted in more violence. What would you do?

A particularly loony, violent faction starts lobbing rockets at you from Oak Park.

Loony how? They have well-defined objectives. The most egregious common error of twentieth-century conventional wisdom was to try to understand violent acts as evidence of madness, if and only if the violence is committed by someone whose agenda we don’t personally support.

What would you do?

Personally? I’d move. Purely out of self-interest. I’d find out who’s launching the rockets & what they want, and I’d get myself out of the way and help pretty much anyone else who wishes to likewise get themselves out of the way. They want land, they intend to take it by force and by killing its occupants, and I’m not giving my life to prevent a resource-grab, much less a holy-land grab whose value is much more arbitrary. My concern is people, their life and sanity. So I help people get themselves out of the way and reorganize themselves and recover life.

You forgot to mention I’m also supposed to believe I live in a holy land which was carved out of the geography for me by God, which is my divinely rightful place and which I am responsible for defending, by force if when necessary.

Imagine you were born in Chicago, fully fledged, as an adult with no past, no history, yet surrounded by enemies, because those enemies are simply evil, by their nature, as you are simply good, by your nature.
Imagine the atrocities this fantasy will justify, imagine the inhumanity it will excuse.

You’re missing the point: raising awareness and even simply being aware of human rights abuses is “doing something about it”

Do you really imagine that anyone reading this post is unaware that the Taliban is unpleasantly and violently anti-feminist? What kind of awareness was being raised by this post, especially with the gratuitous and ill-informed dig at Western feminists for not caring about Muslim women?

“We’re conditioned by Hollywood and superhero narratives to believe that every international problem can be solved by swooping in and just, you know, fixing it.”

That conditioning started well before the advent of films with institutions like the R Catholic church and the mission to spread the good word and save a few soles and dispense largely with women as being much than servants.

Afghan women’s rights

The rights being discussed in the post are Pakistani.

People are really oddly and personally testy about Ingrid’s accusation that in “some groups of ‘Western’ feminists, perhaps especially within academia, there is a reluctance to draw attention to extreme instances of human rights violations in ‘non-western’ countries.”

I think the truth of that statement ends up resting on a questionably stretched application of “some groups… within academia”* but that’s hardly something to get worked up over. Those of you who are acting personally wounded by this statement should probably at least explain why it wounds you (and receipt of a chain letter isn’t much of an explanation for taking personal offense).

*After all one could truthfully say “some groups… within academia” believe climate change isn’t significantly influenced by fossil fuel use.

really oddly and personally testy about Ingrid’s accusation that in “some groups of ‘Western’ feminists, perhaps especially within academia, there is a reluctance to draw attention to extreme instances of human rights violations in ‘non-western’ countries.”

Is it odd and testy to expect that a serious accusation against a specific group of people will be backed up by evidence? I’m sure Western academic feminists (TM) could do more about the rights of women on the Afghan-Pakistan border region. But as I and others on this thread have ntoed, you are much more likely to hear about the situation of such women from feminists — academic or otherwise — than from most other groups of Westerners, so Ingrid’s singling out of feminists in this case really calls out for anexplanation — or an apology.

I mean, if I wrote in some prominent setting “Crooked Timber bloggers (and especially commenters) take an almost sexual pleasure in the idea of bombing brown people for liberalism,” you would rightly respond that actually CT has had lots of good critiques of liberal interventionism and ask me to come up with some examples of what I was talking about. And “well, somebody who reminded me of Crooked Timber was gushing over JDAMs at this party I was at” wouldn’t do.

People are really oddly and personally testy about Ingrid’s accusation that in “some groups of ‘Western’ feminists…
I never took the time to say it directlybut I’ve been aware since I first read it that what Ingrid was disturbed by, the threat made against girls wanting to go to school, was something that we all should be disturbed by.
It’s just the larger context, which is crucial now. For instance salient above , saying:
I… am newly aware of a specific terrorist threat, and preparations for specific violence that it is said will begin to occur on January 15th….
This is the mind-set that the story works on to the detriment of all of us.
“Terrorist”. Terrorist!. TERRORIST!!
Or the even larger context in which pointing out the egregious ill treatment of women by fundamentalist Muslims in Afghanistan Pakistan ignores completely as if it were irrelevant the sickening carnage being delivered on Muslims, not just in Gaza but worldwide, from Indonesia to Iraq. And by ignoring it helps to rationalize it, if not justify it.
This was spoken to far more cogently than I’m able to by Minneapolitan, and others, above.
A helpful parallel might be from the Civil Rights era in the US, when examples of criminal behavior by blacks were set before an awakening public, without any lines of connection being drawn. Goosing the polarity by implication.

As someone noticed, this specific threat is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, the Taliban existing in both places. As I, and others noted earlier, Pakistan and India are reving up for their own war. I not sure if this will aggravate this specific situation or not, but its a safe bet that it will make things worse. Certainly it will be more relevant than the bloodletting in Gaza. I don’t mean the Gaza killings aren’t of vital concern. Because of the US’s close relationship with Israel, it is also an area where the US could play a more positive and useful role, more feasibly than in Pakistan.

I can understand if some people don’t want to jump on a bandwagon that could be hijacked to justify a military intervention they oppose. But as the original post remarked: there are some things you can’t ignore.

I think lemuel’s point at 87 & 104, that Western feminists have in fact been *more* outspoken on this issue than other Westerners, and for longer, testifies to the importance of roy’s point @65, concerning the overall effectiveness of the original post. Sensitivity to context is a particularly important kind of discipline to maintain when discussing such issues.

Soren @111,
re lecturing, a Nobel Peace Prize went to Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian feminist. I don’t think it’s asking too much to suggest people see what Middle Eastern feminists like her have to say before getting outraged over an article about the Taliban and suddenly forming an opinion on what Afghan women need, from a news environment that considers the evils of the Taliban far more significant than the good done by people like Ebadi.

Censoring yourself out of humility, or worse, to “protect” them from islamaphobes, is true paternalism.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the Islamophobes in question are not rude guys who stare at women in headscarves on the street in Toronto, they are people who can influence a superpower’s decision to drop bombs on the very girls whose access to schools we are talking about. In fact, shutting out the voices of Middle Eastern feminists is one of the major strategic goals of said Islamophobes.

”that is if you believe the new US administration will do things differently.”

Change is coming Bubba. Research in the past half life, err, half decade has stumbled upon a vast improvement to the Neutron bomb; gender specific radiation targeting with blast dampening. Amazing really, and tests should be coming to a country half a world away from you soon assuming the right appropriations are made to continue protecting the homeland. Early tests heve been positive, though the current yields makes the effects only noticeable over a few generations [projected].

(so, that would include Spivak if she indeed said what is attributed to her in the passage above

The Spivak phrase is from ‘The Subaltern Cannot Speak” (on interpretations of sati); I quote further from it

“Obviously I am not advocating the killing of widows”

This fantasy about feminists not caring for muslim women was invented from whole cloth by the neo-cons in 2001, back when they believed the brown chicks were a few bombs away from bikinis and beauty contests. Both ideas were equally wrong. It’s kind of sad to see it repeated in the years hence on left wing websites, and on the (thankfully infrequent) occasions when it rears its ugly head I have never seen any support for the original claim.

I can’t be bothered looking for evidence, but my memory of the response to feminist campaigns for muslim women’s rights in the 90s was that feminists are just a bunch of racist meddlers and anyway its futile because those poor muslims prefer it that way.

Well, noen, all I know is that Oprah is on record as saying that the reason that she donated all that money to set up that school in South Africa rather than in , say, New Orleans for the poor black victims of Katrina, was that American blacks were unappreciative of such help and would inevitably trash the school and steal anything not nailed down.

And I think your FIRST question should be: “How do the economic and military policies of the COUNTRIES IN QUESTION contribute to those injustices? Whiling away your hours pondering THAT question would be a more profitable use of your precious time. America’s contribution to the misery of those you are concerned with
is often not without effect, but the primary responsibility is to be found with the leadership of the nations where these conditions exist and their indigenous populations themselves.

Who knows RB. I’m still trying to parse that. It looks to me like once you remove the racist rant and then the bitter sarcasm you’re left with a big fat zero.

I guess I’m not supposed to ask what role the US has played in creating and promoting the Taliban or Osama bin Laden himself. Clearly the only parties that bear any responsibility are our puppet regimes and the tin pot dictators we install. Most of all, it would seem that Virgil feels the “primary responsibility” lies with the girls themselves. When, Oh when will the rule of 11 year old Islamic girls end??