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| The Phyllis Chesler Organization |
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What to Say to the Totalitarian Left on 9/11/11by Phyllis Chesler http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/1033/what-to-say-to-the-totalitarian-left-on-9-11-11
Excerpt: I recently heard from a Canadian school psychologist who lives in Toronto and who has dual citizenship in Canada and the United States. He was "dismayed," outraged, saddened, and puzzled, and wanted me to explain to him how a feminist academic could have "hijacked a feminist conference in Quebec to express her feelings about how American foreign policy was totally responsible for the events of 9/11." Ever since then, Brooks Masterton has written to this particular academic every 9/11 about her "lack of compassion for the victims" and about her hypocrisy, given that she "Uses the freedoms she has in Canada as well as public funding to express outrageous ideas. I long ago asked her to consider how she would be received in Afghanistan if she pontificated about feminism and the need for female freedoms against male domination in all aspects of life. She would not survive for a week. While I defend her right to an opinion, I detest the way she goes about making her points and the extremely disrespectful, provocative and poisonous comments she makes. I am near retirement… but I still get angry enough to write to her every September to reminder her that she cannot make these comments without expecting to be called to account by others. I do believe that all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to stay silent." Good women too, dear Dr. Masterton. Well, he had come to the right woman and to the right feminist. It so happens that I am actually, although only slightly, familiar with Sunera Thobani's so-called work. In 2006, I had been invited to keynote an international feminist conference at Cambridge University but was soon disinvited. Therefore, my critique of the multi-culturally relativist and postcolonial feminist academy's tragic failure to take a stand against Islamic gender apartheid coupled with its sacrifice of universal human rights and its essentially racist obsession with anti-racism rather than with sexism was never heard in England. A year later, I was asked to rebut a 2007 attack that Thobani at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, had launched against American feminists, myself included. She titled her piece: "White Wars: Western Feminism and the 'War on Terror.'" The Britain-based journal Feminist Theory published it but then approached me as well as two other feminists (Zillah Eisenstein and Judith Butler) for a response. I was the only one who agreed to respond. Here was a potential forum for what I might have said in Cambridge as well as my response to Thobani's attack. | |||||
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