While reading SusanG
REAL Feminists Love the Bomb, I read the linked Chron of Higher Ed article
"The Failure of Feminism" by Professor Phyllis Chesler.
She should have subtitled it "They hate us for our freedom" or "The liberal east coast elites are ruining higher education" or any of those other tired talking points.
The first clue to the political leanings of Prof Chesler was when she said feminists are
... Republicans and Democrats, right-wing conservatives and left-wing radicals...
More below
Right off the bat, we see where this is going. If they are right wing, they are 'conservative' ; if they are in the left wing, they are 'radical' as opposed to simply being 'liberal'.
To my horror, most Western academic and mainstream feminists have not focused on what I call gender apartheid in the Islamic world, or on its steady penetration of Europe. Such feminists have also failed to adequately wrestle with the complex realities of freedom, tyranny, patriotism, and self-defense, and with the concept of a Just War.
Here, the professor elucidates her political beliefs as she falsely equates the dissent with the Iraq War with a feminist naivete or groupthink that says that we can't intefere with anything that occurs in other countries in the name of global community inclusiveness or because we haven't achieved total gender equality in America including Ally McBeal unisex bathrooms or because we believe that atrocities to women abroad are just cultural differences and we have to accept that other peoples are different. Nothing... Nothing... Nothing could be further from the truth.
Further, the professor demonstrates the right's belief and her condescension toward "most Western academic and mainstream feminists" in that we've failed to "adequately wrestle with the complex realities of freedom, tyranny, patriotism..." Really, professor. We don't understand the very principles that are the foundation and the impetus for the founding of America? Really?
The professor doesn't state which 'Just War' to which she refers. If it is Iraq, then she should be talking about WMD, mushroom clouds, drone planes dispersing biological and chemical agents, 45 minute strike capabilities, mobile laboratories and yellow cake uranium purchases from Niger. To discuss the Iraq War in terms of democracy in the Middle East, women's rights (which are eroding in Iraq and Afghanistan as we speak) and Hussein torturing his own people is revisionist history, plain and simple.
Islamic terrorists have declared jihad against the "infidel West" and against all of us who yearn for freedom.
Talking point. Feminism professor. Focus. To be fair she continues...
Women in the Islamic world are treated as subhumans. Although some feminists have sounded the alarm about this, a much larger number have remained silent. Why is it that many have misguidedly romanticized terrorists as freedom fighters and condemned both America and Israel as the real terrorissts or as the root cause of terrorism? In the name of multicultural correctness...
Now we continue to get to the heart of the matter. Is she on the payroll with Armstrong Williams? Is she apart of the right wing noise machine masquerading in the Chron of Higher Ed?
Multicultural correctness is killing academic debate, they are brainwashing your children in colleges across the country and we can't even make them speak English [insert yawn].
I vehemently reject the violence against American soldiers and innocent Iraqi citizens. I, however, am not naive. Americans building permanent military bases on Iraqi soil provided more fuel for Iraqis (not any outside freedom fighters) misguidedly perpetrating violence than anything Michael Moore did in his crusade against America or any newspaper article on secret European prisons. And those Abu Ghraib pics didn't help matters either.
The reason professor, that there isn't a deluge of news articles on the plight of Islamic women is because this has been occuring for centuries whereas this Iraq War is news because um it is a recent phenomenon, it is descending into hell and we kinda have some responsibility in it. As Susan G stated...
Rights for women took more than a century of painstaking organizing, petitioning and demonstrating - often unsuccessfully, it must have appeared at the time - in our own country.
and
the hard historical struggle of fighting for American women's rights has made our feminists long-term pragmatists. We're willing to use the legislative and judicial processes, we use film and book and music and humor to raise awareness. We confront in our daily lives and on a national level discrimination when we see it. But we don't expect overnight changes because we are in it for the long haul.
The focus now, is the civil war in Iraq and how to keep those women, along with men and children from dying FIRST. Then we will work to erode the religiocultural mores that impede the freedom and full citizenship of Islamic women.
The professor then says that feminists enjoyed talking about the plight of Afghan women to prove Feminism 101 but that the "feminist talking heads" didn't want to "systematically sponsor Afghan women as immigrants" or "launch a military invasion of Afghanistan on behalf of women either." What about Darfur professor? What about Saudi Arabia?
Finally in her "personal discloures" she says...
First, I am a feminist and an American patriot. Yes, one can be both.
Need I say more cuz there's much more.