Krista at Muslimah Media Watch, in the first of a series reviewing the Globe and Mail’s “Behind the Veil” series (about about women in Kandahar, Afghanistan), begins by objecting to the title:

They could not have come up with a more clichéd title if they had tried, and there is absolutely no excuse for such a lack of creativity at such a big newspaper. To illustrate just how overdone this title is, a Google search of “behind the veil” (in quotes) gives about 569,000 results, including articles and books on women in Iran, “Western” journalists’ encounters with “women in conservative Islamic societies”, representations of Muslim women in Indian writings, an Australian woman’s experiences as a nurse in Saudi Arabia, prostitution in Iran, HIV/AIDS in Muslim countries, and even a BBC report from 2001 that also focused on Afghan women. The point is, it’s been done, ad nauseam, especially (but not exclusively) with regards to Muslim women, and “behind the veil” as a name is just plain lazy. Maybe that sounds harsh, but my frustration comes from having seen titles like this time and time again, and the implication that the only reason to pay attention to Muslim women is in order to de-veil them.

In addition to the lack of creativity is the message that this title sends, particularly to Afghan women: “The veil is the only thing that comes to mind when we think of you. It takes us a whole lot of effort to consider that, behind the clothing you wear, there might actually be real people worth talking to.” [...]

Listening to the journalist’s introduction, available in video form from the series’ website, and reading the foreign editor’s note explaining the rationale behind the series, I was struck by just how formulaic it all sounded. Afghan women are to be pitied, and Afghan men and/or culture are at the root of all of their problems. Oppression can be measured by how many layers of clothing women wear. Not that there aren’t problems for Afghan women, but the lack of complexity anywhere in the introduction surprised me.

There’s lots more at Krista’s post (including praising the Globe & Mail for being unusually open about their methodology); I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this series.

This is something I’ve read again and again; women’s activists in Afghanistan, and many other places, are sick of westerners focusing on what women wear as the leading indicator of Muslim women’s oppression. From an article about Sakena Yacoobi, an incredible women’s activist in Afghanistan:

Afghan women “wear hijab because they want to,” she stated. “Yes, there was a time during the Taliban that they had it wear [it], but now if they don’t want to, they don’t have it wear it.” When those outside of Afghanistan see the garb as oppressive and “want to teach us human rights, when they want to teach us democracy, when they want to teach us all these things, [it is] according to Western culture. And that is not right.”

There’s a lot Naomi Wolf says that I disagree with, but this statement (from Wolf’s Facebook) seems on target:

When you travel throughout the Muslim world, listening to women there, you often hear FROM WOMEN THEMSELVES more nuanced views of the headscarf, and of modest clothing, than you hear in the West; and — a point I cannot make often enough — when you actually listen to Muslim feminist or women’s leaders, many of them wish the West, with all its resources and potential for positive dialogue with the Muslim world, would focus its attention more on the life-and-death or survival-level challenges women and girls often face in Muslim countries - and in the developing world generally — from bride killings to legal subjugaton to lack of access to clean water and safety for their kids – than on what women are wearing, as if that is the only possible measure of their wellbeing.

I’m against anyone being forced to dress in a certain way — including using the government to force women and girls not to veil (1 2 3)– but this is not the primary issue facing Muslim women today.

(Many links via Fatemah’s link round-up.)

At Obsidian Wings, Eric Martin discusses how the recent, blatantly fraudulent Afghanistan election effects the prospects of U.S. success there.

Due to the complexity and tenacity of the multi-layered, multi-faceted conflict that we are seeking to address as an outside presence with limited resources and staying power, we are forced to bank on a miraculous combination of luck, good fortune and skill in order to pull off an outcome that, if all goes well, might come to fruition some 15 years and a couple trillion dollars down the road (with many thousands of NATO soldiers lost in the interim). But all is not going well, far from it. One of the most crucial political watersheds has played out in worst-case scenario terms. COIN will not fix this. It’s well past time we abandoned what George Kennan called the “stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives.”

In addition to the other (in my opinion, extremely unpersuasive) reasons for maintaining a huge U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, Democrats may also be motivated to stay in Afghanistan because they’re afraid of the worst-case scenario for future US elections.

Our strategy in Afghanistan cannot prevent future terrorist attacks against the U.S.; there are many failed states in the world other than Afghanistan, which al Qaeda or other terrorists could use as a base while attacking the U.S.. Our presence in Afghanistan doesn’t prevent future terrorist attacks; it just relocates the people planning the attacks, from Afghanistan to other locations.

From the point of view of the Obama administration, however, that prospect must be a pretty big elephant in the room. Suppose the US greatly reduces its presence in Afghanistan, and then there’s a terrorist attack in early 2011, organized by an al Qaeda group which — had we not pulled out of Afghanistan — would have organized the exact same attack from one of the ungoverned areas of Pakistan?

The US wouldn’t be any worse off a result — the US civilians killed in such an attack would be just as dead in either case. But the Democratic Party would be much, much worse off. Any terrorist attack is bad — but a terrorist attack that can be directly blamed on a specific policy decision by a Democratic prescient, would wipe out the Democrats electorally. I honestly can’t imagine a bigger boon to Republicans.

I’m not saying that the Obama people aren’t sincere about their reasons for wanting to maintain our huge military commitment to Afghanistan. But I wonder if the worst-case scenario for the Democratic party isn’t biasing Obama’s people towards thinking the case for war is stronger than it actually is.

Back in February, Dave Kilcullen said this in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

All this suggests that the most appropriate diplomatic strategy is to identify, within Pakistan, our friends and allies (civilian democratic political leaders, some officials, and much of the Pakistani people)….

Kilcullen is an actual expert who has been to the region, so it’s likely he knows something I don’t. But I find that claim more than a little odd. Contrast what Kilcullen is saying to this news story:

After Ms. McHale, the Obama administration’s new under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, gave her initial polite presentation about building bridges between America and the Muslim world, Mr. Abbasi thanked her politely for meeting with him. Then he told her that he hated her.

“You should know that we hate all Americans,” Ms. McHale said Mr. Abbasi told her. “From the bottom of our souls, we hate you.”

According to a Pew poll, 68% of Pakistanis have an unfavorable view of the United States. In fact, of the countries Pew surveyed, there are only four where the US is more hated. If our strategy in Pakistan depends on much of the Pakistani people being our “friends and allies,” then we’re in deep trouble.

(Don’t get me wrong, I’d like ordinary Pakistanis to be friends with America. But for the most part, they’re not.)

That’s a minor point, but it ties into my growing impression that the folks who favor an continued, and expanded, US war in Afghanistan aren’t being entirely realistic. In that same testimony, Kilcullen wrote:

We need to prevent the re-emergence of an Al Qaeda sanctuary that could lead to another 9/11.

That’s just ludicrous. There’s nothing unique about Afghanistan that means that Al Qaeda can plot attacks from Afghanistan and no where else in the world. (Indeed, a significant portion of 9/11 seems to have been plotted in Germany). Even Stephen Biddle — who strongly advocates for the US to remain at war in Afghanistan — admits that preventing Al Qaeda from having a sanctuary in Afghanistan isn’t a very sensible argument.

I’ve been reading about the US presence in Afghanistan — this weekend in particular, with the election going on, it’s been on my mind.

Over the years I’ve read a lot about the human rights situation in Afghanistan, especially for women, but this week I’m trying to read more about the US war in Afghanistan — and in particular, arguments for and against Obama’s planned escalation of the US presence there,and basically our entire strategy.

1. Rory Stewart, “The Irresistible Illusion” The London Review of Books.
2. Gilles Dorronsoro, “The Taliban’s Winning Strategy in Afghanistan” for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
3. Andrew Exum and Nathaniel Fick, “Triage: The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.
4. David Kilcullen’s February congressional testimony.
5. Bernard Finel, “An Alternative Strategy for Afghanistan” at the Flash Point Blog
6. Stephen Biddle, “Is It Worth It? The Difficult Case for War in Afghanistan,” in The American Interest.
7. Bernard Finnel, “The Incoherence of COIN Advocates” (a response to Biddle).
8. Stephen Walt, “Safe Haven (2): A response to Peter Bergen“

I’d also recommend this post by Matt Ygelsias. An excerpt:

This is a map of Afghanistan’s main ethnic groups that abstracts away from the reality that actual populations aren’t homogeneous. The biggest ethnic group is the Pashto. The Taliban is also an overwhelmingly Pashto-based movement. Historically, Afghanistan’s Uzbeks and its small Turkmen community have been very hostile to the Taliban. What’s more, the Hazara are Shiites so they don’t really have any choice but to be anti-Taliban. The Tajiks aren’t necessarily as hostile, but pro-Taliban sentiment is relatively rare among Tajiks, and since the Tajiks are the second-largest group the main leaders of the anti-Taliban coalition in Afghanistan have generally been Tajik.

All of which is to say that waging war against the Taliban means something quite different in the brown-colored Pashto belt than it does in the rainbow of non-Pashto areas.

As well as any Afghanistan-related discussion, please feel free to post any links on this subject you’ve found especially helpful.

(Many links via Matt.)

Top photo: Afghan women protest an earlier version of this law, in April 2009, from the New York Times. Second photo, also from April: Hazara women in Europe protest the Afghan law. From Hazaritan Times.

From Human Rights Watch:

“Karzai has made an unthinkable deal to sell Afghan women out in return for the support of fundamentalists in the August 20 election,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “So much for any credentials he claimed as a moderate on women’s issues.” [...]

The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying “blood money” to a girl who was injured when he raped her. [...]

The law regulates the personal affairs of Shia Muslims - who make up between 10 and 20 percent of the population - including divorce, separation, inheritance, and the minimum age for marriage.

Amazingly, the earlier version of the law was even harsher on Shia women’s rights, and was softened in response to internal protests and international pressure (including protests by Hazaras women of many nations):

The initial version of the law included articles that imposed drastic restrictions on Shia women, including a requirement to ask permission to leave the house except on urgent business, and a requirement that a wife have sex with her husband at least once every four days. [...]

In a rare move, Afghan women took to the streets in April to protest, braving threats and violence. President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, the NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, and many other world leaders condemned the legislation. As a result of pressure, Karzai submitted the law to a consultation process with civil society groups in May, which resulted in some improvements. The legislation still contains some of its most repressive measures, though.

Remember back when we first invaded Afghanistan, when hawks were criticizing feminists for not favoring a war that was, we were told, going to free the women of Afghanistan from misogynistic oppression?

I’m genuinely sorry the hawks were wrong — but not surprised. The problem with hawks in the US is that they think of the US army as a magic wishing lamp, which can be waved at any problem to produce good results. But the truth is, you can’t invade a culture into accepting women’s rights, or — I suspect — into genuine democracy.

I’m also genuinely amazed at the enormous courage of women in Afghanistan who took to the streets to protest in April. I hope that if there are further protests, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, we’ll hear about in the US.

See also: The Czech, Tennessee Guerrilla Women, Gullibility is Bad for You.

Or at least, that’s what the major US media seems to believe. From FAIR:

Early reports of a massive U.S. attack on civilians in western Afghanistan last week (5/5/09) hewed to a familiar corporate media formula, stressing official U.S. denials and framing the scores of dead civilians as a PR setback for the White House’s war effort.

Scanning the headlines gave a sense of the media’s view of the tragedy: “Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War” (New York Times, 5/7/09), “Claim of Afghan Civilian Deaths Clouds U.S. Talks” (Wall Street Journal, 5/7/09), “Afghan Civilian Deaths Present U.S. With Strategic Problem” (Washington Post, 5/8/09).

As is frequently the case with such incidents (Extra! Update, 8/07), the primary fallout would seem to be the damage done to U.S. goals. The New York Times reported that civilian deaths “have been a decisive factor in souring many Afghans on the war.” As CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric put it (5/6/09), “Reports of these civilian casualties could not have come at a worse time, as the Obama administration launches its new strategy to eradicate the Taliban and convince the Afghan people to support those efforts.” Other outlets used very similar language to explain why the timing was “particularly sensitive” (Washington Post, 5/7/09) or “awkward” (Associated Press, 5/7/09) for the Obama administration.

The US media also gladly reported anonymous and seemingly unverified claims that it was the Taliban’s fault, not the US’s. Read the whole thing.

The Bush Administration has led me to stock up on tinfoil hats over the past eight years, and I’m aware of that, so understand that I don’t want to suggest that this cross-border raid into Pakistan might have been timed to coincide with something going on this week. Of course, it didn’t go well, so you won’t hear much about it:

At least 15 people, including women and children, were killed in an attack involving U.S.-led forces in a remote Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan, intelligence officials and a witness said Wednesday.

The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan said it had no report of such an incursion, said to have happened in the militant-infested South Waziristan tribal region. Pakistan’s army confirmed an attack but did not specify if it believed foreign troops were involved.

The U.S. and Pakistan, allies in the war on terror, have had tensions over cross-border attacks, including suspected American missile strikes in Pakistani territory. In one high-profile incident earlier this year, Pakistan said 11 of its soldiers died when U.S. aircraft bombed their border post.

Habib Khan Wazir, an area resident, said the latest incident happened before dawn, shortly after an American helicopter landed in the village of Musa Nikow in South Waziristan.

He said as the owner of a home nearby came outside with his wife, the “American and Afghan soldiers starting firing.”

Khan said later the troops entered the house and killed seven other people, including women and children. He said the troops also killed six other residents.

Two local intelligence officials confirmed the account on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media. One official said 19 people died.

Now, the U.S. is claiming not to know anything about this right now, and I’m sure it will all fade away quickly — because we don’t like to talk about these things we do in the name of freedom and liberty. And I certainly hope that my sneaking suspicion that we launched this hoping to kill one of the 3,429 number-two guys in al Qaeda is wrong. But if I’ve learned one thing in the last seven-and-a-half years, it’s that when in doubt, assume the worst of the Bush Administration, and you’ll be halfway to how bad it actually is.

From The Independent:

More than half of Afghanistan is back under Taliban control and the Nato force in the country needs to be doubled in size to cope with the resurgent group, a report by the Senlis Council think-tank says. A study by the group found that the Taliban, enriched by illicit profits from the country’s record poppy harvest, had formed de-facto governments in swathes of the southern Pashtun belt. [...]

Yesterday’s Senlis dossier coincided with an Oxfam report saying that Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian crisis in which millions face “severe hardship comparable with sub-Saharan Africa”. It highlights the fact that US spending on aid in the country, $4.4bn since 2002, was only a fraction of its military expenditure of $35bn in 2007 alone.

“As in Iraq, too much aid is absorbed by profits of companies and subcontractors, on non-Afghan resources and on high expatriate salaries and living costs,” said the report. “Each full-time expatriate consultant costs up to half a million dollars a year.”

Meanwhile, Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said civilian casualties caused by military action has reached “alarming levels” this year. “These not only breach international law but are eroding support among the Afghan community for the government and international military presence, as well as public support in contributing states for continued engagement in Afghanistan,” she said.

The over 50% figure put forward by this think tank is subject to dispute; the fact that the Taliban is controlling much of Afghanistan cannot, alas, reasonably be disputed at this point.

I went to a reading by Khaled Hosseini last night, at the bay area Book Group Expo. Khaled read from a section of his new book A Thousand Splendid Suns, which someone described as being the history of Afghanistan viewed through the eyes of two women.

The reading was fascinating/frightening: it detailed the search of a pregnant woman and her surrogate mother for a hospital that would take them in while she gave birth. Women had been banned from all the hospitals in Afghanistan, bar one, and that one lacked water, electricity, and basic medical supplies. When the woman’s baby turned out to be in the breech position, the doctor apologized for the lack of anasthetic, and then continued to do a cesarian section anyway.

Khaled Hosseini is a physician who has worked internationally; consequently, the medical details had a frightening heft. He described the way in which the pregnant woman’s mouth stretched back and frothed with pain.

As he passed into this description, the audience, which was full, began to shift. The demographic was mostly women, but with more men than last year (I’d make a guess at 25-30%). Everyone was uncomfortable. As Hosseini described the doctor’s whispered apologies, I heard people exclaiming to each other “There isn’t going to be any anasthetic…!” Everyone appeared to find the idea shocking, unthinkable. Hosseini himself said that when he had gone into Afganistan as a physician, hoping to lend aid, he’d been shocked to hear from doctors that the sheer number of injuries that had been incurred by the war when the warlords entered Afghanistan meant that physicians were constantly running out of basic supplies. A doctor told him that it had, during the war, become expected to perform cesarian sections, and even amputations, without anasthetic. “As a doctor from the west,” said Hosseni, “the idea was wild…”
Read the rest of this entry »

Heart at Woman’s Space: The Margins reports* a great list of ways for people to take concrete steps to help Malalai Joya, who has been suspended from the Afghan parliament for insulting warlords.

Here are some of her suggestions, but make sure to check out her post!

YOU CAN do so in the following ways:

- Write to Afghan officials and file your protest for expelling and prosecuting Joya, while the terrorists and human rights violators in the parliament were provided immunity before any court for their past crimes last month.

- Express your concern for Joya’s security during the court sessions as the fundamentalists currently hold key positions in Afghanistan’s judiciary.

- Circulate this letter and ask lawyers and defenders of human rights in your area and country to come forward and help Joya during her court proceedings and defend her.

- Donate to Joya’s security fund online at www.malalaijoya.com/donor/donor_info.php to help improve her security with necessary equipment and facilities, while she is now deprived of all official facilities.

Letters of protest can be sent to the following sources:

President Hamid Karzai
khaleeq.ahmad@gmail.com
president@afghanistangov.org

Supreme Court of Afghanistan
aquddus@supremecourt.gov.af

Afghanistan’s Parliament
hasib_n786@yahoo.com

Interior Ministry
moinews@gmail.com
wahed.moi@gmail.com

Justice Ministry of Afghanistan
info@moj.gov.af
hidayatr@moj.gov.af

We thank you for your prompt action and support and hope you will forward a copy of your letters to mj@malalaijoya.com.

–

*edited to fix an error.

From WIMN’s Voices: Malalai Joya is Suspended from Parliament.

A few excerpts:

Twenty eight year old intrepid Afghan MP, Malalai Joya, has just been suspended from Parliament for comparing warlords in power to donkeys. Joya is the youngest and most outspoken member of Parliament and has survived 4 assassination attempts for denouncing warlords, many of whom were funded at various times by the US government in the fight against the Soviets (1980s) and the Taliban (post-9-11).

…It is clear that the US’s post-Taliban experiment in Afghanistan intended to fool Americans into believing that Afghan women were being liberated. We were convinced by the Bush administration and the mainstream media that “democracy” and “women’s rights” were the new buzzword in Afghanistan. But the US government did several things that ensured women’s political, economic and social rights would never be realized: they empowered the misogynist pre-Taliban warlords who now sit in government, they installed a pro-warlord puppet President into office (Hamid Karzai), and they have fought a futile war in the countryside against “Taliban remnants” that has achieved nothing but a legitimizing and strengthening of the Taliban. How could women possibly have any rights in such a situation?

…Today women in the Afghan Parliament have two options: they can remain silent and betray the people they are supposed to represent, thereby ensuring their personal safety. Or they can speak out in defiance of the blanket of silence surrounding the war criminals, and risk their lives like Malalai Joya. In such a context do words like “democracy” and “women’s rights” have any meaning?

Read the rest.

–

Headline fixed per a correction provided by Lu. Thanks, Lu!

Different people observe the changing seasons in different ways. For gardeners spring means planting things, for sports fans it means the beginning of the cricket season,* for students spring means avoiding studying for exams, and for Wellington activists spring is celebrated by protesting the conference of the New Zealand Defence Industry Association.

Every year the New Zealand Defence Industry Association holds a forum. To quote from their website:

NZDIA organises the New Zealand Defence Seminars, generally held annually in October/November. This Seminar brings together Australian and New Zealand commercial companies, Asian, Australian and New Zealand Defence purchasing interests together with high level New Zealand Ministerial involvement.

Isn’t nice that they manage to leave off references to the purpose of the ‘defence’ industry is to kill people, and the current wars.

Now obviously on a global scale New Zealand arms trade is insignificant. One of the members of the NZDIA makes grenates in his garage. But that doesn’t make them any less repsonsible for the products they produce. Rakon (while not part of NZDIA), is the most used example of a New Zealand company that makes products to kill people. Their GPS crystals are used in US made Smart bombs, some of which were dropped on Palestine and Lebanon this year (more here.

For the last few years the Defence industry has been held at Te Papa (New Zealand’s national museum. This has angered some people even more - Te Papa’s branding is ‘Our Place.** The Defence Industry conference has become one of the focal points of peace organisation, the other being the war against Iraq. Organising against the New Zealand defence industry brings the links between capitalism and war home.

I’ve been protesting the defence industry conference since 2001. I have to admit that I haven’t had a huge amount of enthusiasm for the protests for the last few years. You organise small protests at things year after year, and in the end you just don’t have the energy to do it again.

So I can say that yesterday’s protest was truly fantastic without blowing my own trumpet (all I did was turn up).

The police were really worried about protesters and had put up blockades all around Te Papa. This made it really easy for protesters outside each entrance to stop those going to the conference getting in or out. There were over 200 people there for most of the afternoon (people came and went), and every entrance to Te Papa was blockaded

In order for this to work the police closed the museum for the afternoon. Which shows where the priorities are, it’s more important that the weapons conference goes ahead than that people can actually use the museum.

What was really amazing about the protests was that no-one got arrested. The trick at a protest is to know your strength. The vast majority of people who have been arrested on protests I’ve been at have got off - they hadn’t done anything wrong. But police arrest people on protests because they can - if the crowd is big enough they don’t arrest anyone because it’ll just make more trouble. It’s often really hard to judge your strength - I’m always very cautious. But this time people knew exactly when to back down - when we were weakening. It was an incredibly well organised and effective action.

*Or not - I could be wrong about either of these facts, since I know slightly more about sports than I do about gardening.

** Personally I don’t think it matters that much where it’s held and I occasionally find the arguments against it being held at Te Papa a little bit precious. It’s not like the museum doesn’t have problems of its own: Women? Kind of absent. Work and the people who do it? Not so much. Struggle over these things? Five minutes in one film.

Also posted on Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA vet who specialized in studying bin Laden, answers six questions for Harpers. The bit that will be quoted the most, I think, is this: “In the long run, we’re not safer because we’re still operating on the assumption that we’re hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we’re hated because of our actions in the Islamic world.”

I’m posting a couple of excerpts, but it’s worthwhile to read the whole thing.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Kitchen Cabinet’s Lily Malcolm links approvingly to an anti-feminist screed by Kay Hymowitz, “Why Feminism Is AWOL on Islam.” The article gives a broad overview of the horrifying conditions women live under in “Islamic fundamentalist” countries, and has a good sidebar on Islamic feminism.

I’m glad conservatives are finally paying attention to how women are abused under Sharia law - but the article’s critique of feminism is nonsense. Ms. Hymowitz’s critique consists mostly of the usual recycled antifeminist cliches (a dab of Who Stole Feminism, a riff on pomo academic feminists, etc). That fluff aside, Hymowitz does float a (relatively) new antifeminist claim: According to her, feminists haven’t said a word about how women in countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia suffer under Sharia law; feminists never mentioned the women sentenced to death in Nigeria, feminists have never objected to honor killings. Instead, we’ve all been worrying about if women can golf at Augusta.

Ms. Hymowitz’s thesis is ridiculous. Not only have feminists (including the academic feminists Ms. Hymowitz disdains) been speaking on these issues for decades, until recently feminists have been almost the only Westerners speaking. There have been literally thousands of feminist speaking (in books, websites, articles, fundraisers, letter-writing campaigns, conferences, etc) about women under Islam and Sharia law.

Let’s address one of Ms. Hymowitz’s specific claims:

[Feminists] have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

Have feminists paid more attention to Augusta and lacrosse than to the oppression of women under Sharia law? I decided to search the websites of the two largest feminist organizations in the US; how many hits would I get for Sharia versus Augusta?:

Contrary to Ms. Hymowitz’s accusation, feminists overwhelmingly pay more attention to women under Sharia than to women golfing. Her entire argument is based on a factual mistake - and one that she could have easily have corrected herself, if she had bothered to do fifteen seconds of research. (That feminists pay more attention to the plight of women in Saudi Arabia than the plight of women excluded from Augusta is no surprise; conservatives have been far more obsessed with Augusta than feminists. Body & Soul has an excellent post about the “feminists-only-pay-attention-to-Augusta” silliness.)

(Of course, none of the many right-wing bloggers who blogged this article checked to see if Ms. Hymowitz’s thesis was true, either.)

Statistics aside, there’s a deeper issue here: Is it ridiculous for American feminists to be concerned about American problems when women elsewhere have it worse?. Ms. Hymowitz wants us to answer “yes,” but the same criticism could be applied to Ms. Hymowitz’s work. In the mid-1990s, when the Feminist Majority Foundation was gearing up their campaign against the Taliban, Ms. Hymowitz was trying to show that Sesame Street doesn’t help kids learn to read. By her own standards, shouldn’t she have been ignoring that issue, concentrating instead on more urgent educational problems faced by Afghani children (especially girls)?

Well, yes - but Ms. Hymowitz wouldn’t dream of living up to the standards she measures feminism by, because those standards are ridiculous. It’s human nature to pay more attention to what’s going on in our own culture; and if anything, feminists have been less insular than most Americans. (Even Ms. Hymowitz has to admit that the Feminist Majority Foundation was focusing on the Taliban years before 9/11).

Perhaps it would be better if Americans paid less attention to American issues, and more attention to people who have things objectively worse abroad. But is it fair for Ms. Hymowitz to hold feminists to a standard she doesn’t hold anyone else - including herself - to?

Let me make a prediction: Five years from now, Ms. Hymowitz will have moved on to some other issue-of-the-moment; but feminists will still be working to help women under Sharia law (alongside the thousand other issues feminists worry about). Feminists were almost the only Westerners who gave a shit about women under Sharia law before 9/11 (Dworkin was writing about it in the 1970s), and we’ll still give a shit when it’s no longer fashionable.

The truth is, feminists haven’t been silent; Kay Hymowitz just hasn’t been listening.

Update: Boy, am I late! Off the Kuff and The Sideshow were covering this question back in September.

Second Update: There’s a little discussion of this going on over on Eschaton (whose post on this subject sums up what’s happening well). The funniest comment comes from Carpeicthus: “Ah yes, how well I remember my pre-9/11 college days, when the Young Republicans were constantly holding rallies and passing out flyers decrying the Taliban.” Hee hee.

Update the third: Body and Soul picks up the ball (is it a golf ball?) and runs much further with it; if you liked this post, you’ll love Jeanne’s.

Via Barroom Philosophy comes this Guardian article by Katharine Viner.

Just as he bombed Afghanistan to liberate the women from their burkas (or, as he would have it, to free the "women of cover"), and sent out his wife Laura to tell how Afghans are tortured for wearing nail varnish, so now Bush has taken on the previously- unknown cause of Iraqi women - actually, look at the quotes, it’s women everywhere! - to justify another war. Where next? China because of its anti-girl one-child policy? India because of widow- burning outrages? Britain because of its criminally low rape conviction rate?

At home, Bush is no feminist. On his very first day in the Oval office, he cut off funding to any international family-planning organisations which offer abortion services or counselling (likely to cost the lives of thousands of women and children); this year he renamed January 22 - the anniversary of Roe vs Wade which permitted abortion on demand - as National Sanctity of Human Life Day and compared abortion to terrorism: "On September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life… Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life."

[...]"feminist" George Bush has abandoned the women of Afghanistan: where is his concern (or Laura’s, or Tony Blair’s, or Cherie Blair’s, who was also wheeled out by her husband) for the very many Afghan women who live in fear of the marauding mojahedin who now run the country and are in many ways as repressive as the Taliban? Where were their protests when Sima Samar, Afghanistan’s women’s affairs minister and one of only two women ministers in Hamid Karzai’s western-installed government, was forced from her job this summer because of death threats?[...]

And in the west, feminists are left with the fact that their own beliefs are being trotted out by world leaders in the name of a cause which does nothing for the women it pretends to protect. This is nothing less than an abuse of feminism, one which will further discredit the cause of western feminism in the Arab world, as well as here. When George Bush mouths feminist slogans, it is feminism which loses its power.

Of course, anything bad for the Taliban is wonderful for the world. But helping the women of Afghanistan requires more than overthrowing the Taliban; it requires a level of commitment and follow-through that the US is lacking.

(Cartoon I drew last December which is unfortunately still relevant.)