With friends like these . . .
April 23, 2008
David Mamet, the writer behind Wag the Dog, is the latest to join the ranks of Arthur Koestler to Kinglsey Amis to Christopher Hitchens: people who have moved to the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David Edgar challenges the new generation of deserters (thanks Paulo).
One striking aspect of the 1968 and post-1968 generation has been overlooked in the current nostalgia fest. Despite Robert Frost’s stern warning against the dangers of youthful idealism (”I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old”), remarkably few of those formed by 1968 and its aftermath have moved to the right in middle age. That is, until now.In the same way that a surprising number of Thatcher and Reagan’s key thinkers were former communists, the ideological campaign for the war on terror abroad and against multiculturalism at home has been dominated by people who were formed by the student revolt, feminism and anti-racist movement of the 1970s. As with the political defectors of the past, their critique of the left is validated by personal experience. Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with fascism as totalitarianism), so, now, influential writers seek to redraw the political map of our own time. And, intentionally or not, they are undermining the historic bond between progressive liberalism and the poor.
Charity Begins at Home
February 16, 2008
So much concern has been shown in the West in recent years for the plight of women in the Muslim world that feminists have actively supported aggressive wars against sovereign countries. Presumably they want to bring the same rights to the Afghan, Iraqi or Somali woman enjoyed by an American or a Brit. Just yesterday the main story on MSN Video was the chain of American restaurants where people have their Sushi off naked women. Very dignified, since the woman was actually referred to as a ‘model’. Now we see yet another right enjoyed by American women. For some reason I am not very sure if these rights should be introduced in the Muslims world. But maybe I’m just an unreconstructed misogynist from a premodern patriarchal culture.
You most probably didn’t hear about this, but imagine the headlines had the same thing happened in a Muslim country? Where are those Colonial Feminists?
Iraqi Women Liberated
December 31, 2007
Rejoice colonial feminists. You have liberated Iraqi women both from their country, and their dignity.
I have already witnessed the women of Afghanistan face the same fate as a result of never ending war. Now courtesy of the feminists who cheered on Bush’s armies, we have Iraqis subjected to the same indignities. I hope I am not the only one revolted by the sight of the Gulf Arabs who enabled this war through material assistance now swoop in like vultures on their morally emaciated prey.
Damsels in Distress?
December 19, 2007
‘The west should stop using the liberalisation of Muslim women to justify its strategy of dominance‘, writes Soumaya Ghannoushi.
It seems that Muslim women - particularly those living in western capitals- are destined to remain besieged by two debilitating discourses, which though different in appearance, are one in essence.
The first of these is conservative and exclusionist, sentencing Muslim women to a life of childbearing and rearing, lived out in the narrow confines of their homes at the mercy of fathers, brothers, and husbands. Revolving around notions of sexual purity and family honour, it appeals to religion for justification and legitimisation.
The Oppressed Women In Iraq II
December 11, 2007
The born-again feminists who have a way of emerging out of the woodwork prior to every recent war on a Muslim country at least got it right this time. There are indeed some oppressed women in Iraq who deserve liberating — such as, the female US soldiers, some of whom have died of thirst in the desert heat rather than drink water and get raped on the way to the toilets at night. Or the following Halliburton/KBR employee who was gang-raped by her fellow liberator-feminists.
Over two years ago, Jamie Leigh Jones was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad’s Green Zone when she was drugged and gang-raped, allegedly by several co-workers. According to Jones, instead of attending to her injuries and bringing her assailants to justice, she was held by KBR for 24 hours in a shipping container without food or water and then told she would lose her job if she left Iraq. Now, it’s unclear whether the case will go to trial, and her attackers may escape punishment due to a legal loophole regarding U.S. contractors working abroad.
Engaging Hamas and Hizballah
October 29, 2007
Ali Abunimah remains one of the most effective and astute analysts of the I-P conflict. He is also immensely effective in his media appearances and debates. Here he looks at a problem that I had discussed earlier in a different post, how ‘colonial feminists’ and other liberals undermine the Palestinian cause.
Nothing could be easier in the present atmosphere than to accuse anyone who calls for recognition of and dialogue with Hamas, Hizballah and other Islamist movements of being closet supporters of reactionary “extremism” or naive fellow travelers of “terrorists.” This tactic is not surprising coming from neoconservatives and Zionists. What is novel is to see it expressed in supposedly progressive quarters.
Arun Kundnani has written about a “new breed of liberal” whose outlook “regards Muslims as uniquely problematic and in need of forceful integration into what it views as the inherently superior values of the West.” The target of these former leftists, Kundnani argues, “is not so much Islamism as the appeasing attitudes they detect among [other] liberals.” [1]
