My message to the organizers: Please do not use my movement to prop up your racist bullshit.
“Islamo-fascist Awareness Week” (yeah, really) is rapidly approaching, and conservative bed-wetters everywhere have decided to target universities for being hotbeds of Islamo-fascist-loving liberals. They’ve also decided to make the plight of Muslim women their theme this year. Reading their website will guarantee a vigorous head/wall connection, and is not only predictably prejudiced and ugly, but is mind-bendingly stupid. For example, a link titled “Put Islamo-fascism into the college curriculum” is summed up with:
Six years after 9/11, not a single Middle Eastern Studies Department in the United States offers a course on Islamo-Fascism or Islam and Fascism, although the founders of the modern jihad Hassan al-Banna and Sayd Qutb were both admirers of Hitler as are the current rulers of Iran.
The awareness week is necessary because:
According to the academic left, anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the war on terror is an “Islamophobe.” According to the academic left, the Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are “oppressors.”
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is a national effort to oppose these lies and to rally American students to defend their country.
The stupidity actually causes me physical pain.
Tonight I went out to dinner with a Greek friend, and we got around to discussing politics and the War on Terra. I mentioned this argument to her — that many conservatives are apparently under the impression that Muslims world-wide hate us because we are a free society, and that’s why they attacked us on Sept. 11th. I wish I had recorded the look on her face — it was a great mixture of confusion, revulsion, and disbelief. Her response (after “No… really? Really?”) was, “Then why aren’t they flying planes into the Netherlands?”
Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week sounds like a joke, and Ali is right that we should be laughing. But the people organizing these events have the ear of some of the highest people in government; hell, one of the scheduled speakers is former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum.
And they’re using “feminism” to prop up their cause. Because, you know, all Muslim women are totally oppressed and need white Western women who don’t think women deserve voting rights to come in and save them. As Ali points out,
Further, one has to wonder what someone like Ann Coulter will be able to accomplish while discussing feminism in the Muslim world when it appears she doesn’t find women intellectually capable of having the right to vote. While on the subject of Coulter I find it quite interesting that in the span of a year she has gone from calling Muslims “ragheads” to turning into a Mother Theresa for Muslim women.
No, Ann Coulter does not care about the rights of Muslim women. Neither do Rick Santorum or Daniel Pipes or any of the other half-wits organizing these events. If they did, they may have considered that the universities they so revile have been the very places where some Muslim women have been able to make huge gains:
Yet, the reality is that the American universities are some of the staunchest supporters of the rights of Muslim women. It was at a university where I met Riffat Hassan, the well-known anti-honor killing activist from the University of Louisville. It was at a university where I met Amina Wadud, the Quran scholar, who was the first woman to lead a mixed-congregation prayer in recent Muslim history and quite courageously challenged Muslim patriarchy. It was at a university where I met Abdullahi An-Naim, the Sudanese Islamic scholar whose message calls for the equality of men and women in and whose teacher was executed in 1983 for such ideas. It was a university where I met Rafia Zakaria, the feminist activist whose commentary on issues affecting Muslim women is published in Pakistan and India. It was at a university where I heard of Laleh Bakhtiar who has now published a feminist translation of the Quran (and we know how important translations of the Quran are in the fight against extremism). It was at a university where I encountered the work of Ziba Mir-Hosseini, the Iranian activist whose speciality is Muslim divorce law, with a focus on women’s rights.
It is these universities that the organizers of this initiative are calling “enablers and abettors” of terrorism.
In fact, the universities have been on the forefront of supporting many Muslim reform projects, and the area of Muslim women is not the only one they have supported.
It was at a university where Iranian dissenter and Nobel Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi went to make her speeches (where she extolled not attacking her country). It was at a university where Akbar Ganji, the Iranian dissenter, went to consult with leading left wing philosopher Richard Rorty. It was at a university where a Jewish Studies professor Deborah Lipstadt started to translate anti-holocaust-denial books into Arabic and Farsi. It was a university that gave shelter to Muslim scholars from South Africa whose homes were firebombed.
But I suppose that those universities aren’t telling Muslim women that their religion is evil and oppressive and freedom-hating, and so they are propping up Islamo-fascism. And of course, it’s worth pointing out that the same people who are now championing the cause of Muslim women are the first to seek to oppress women in the United States. In other words, feminism is good if we can use it as a tool for bigoted propaganda. Not so good if the uppity bitches actually get to thinking they’re all entitled to things like human rights.
Go read Ali’s whole article.