>--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>> stilted); but her thesis and criticism of the
>> Feminist Majority
>> campaign, with which the Revolutionary Association
>> of the Women of
>> Afghanistan (RAWA) has been aligned, is valid.
>
>Thanks for posting this article. It's interesting.
>What are the specific criticisms of the FMF and
>"liberals" that you think are valid? I'm thinking
>that certain criticisms like these . . .
>
>*feminists in the US are trying to "save their brown
>sisters from brown men,"
If US feminists were trying to "save brown sisters from brown men" _on their own_, the criticism would be a minor (though significant) one, but in the context of the current war on Afghanistan, the same problem becomes magnified: trying to ask "US & other armed forces to save brown sisters from brown men." Some US feminists, it appears, have either become co-opted or willingly enlisted into U.S. war efforts (therefore the state of US feminist affairs is now worse than was described by Shahnaz Khan).
***** November 19, 2001
WHITE HOUSE LETTER
The Politics of Plight And the Gender Gap
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The American women coming out of the State Department last week were using words like "amazing" and "unbelievable" to describe what they had heard. The Bush administration, in a worldwide offensive kicked off on Saturday by Laura Bush, was not only publicizing the brutality toward women under the Taliban - no news there - but promising that the United States would insist that women have power in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. That, the American women said, is remarkable news.
In a meeting on Friday with Paula Dobriansky, an under secretary of state for global affairs, American women's rights advocates were given the message that the Bush administration believed there could be no civil society in Afghanistan without the full participation of Afghan women, who once held important positions in government, education and medicine. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is to deliver a similar message in a meeting today with American and Muslim leaders who are women.
Karen P. Hughes, the senior presidential adviser who dreamed up the information campaign publicizing the plight of Afghan women, put it this way: "A society cannot be peaceful and harmonious if one-half of its members are imprisoned in their homes." The view of the administration, she said, is that "improving education, improving access to health care and improving economic opportunity are an important part of making a nation more stable."
Critics lost no time in pointing out that this was the very same White House that has banned aid to international groups that even discuss abortion as a family planning option. The administration also looks the other way, they said, while women in Kuwait cannot vote and women in Saudi Arabia cannot even drive.
But on this issue, at least, the White House has silenced its critics. "I felt their positions were very strong," said Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority, who attended the State Department meeting. Theresa Loar, a senior adviser on international women's issues in the Clinton State Department and now president of the Vital Voices Global Partnership, agreed. "The genie is out of the bottle now," she said.
Neither woman wanted to publicly address any questions of White House motivation. Political cynicism is out of fashion right now in Washington, particularly when an administration appears to be so obviously doing and saying the right thing. Who could be against rights for the long-oppressed women of Afghanistan?...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/politics/19LETT.html> *****
>*feminists in US are "sensationalizing" the plight of women "over there"
Yes, without taking note of differences in women's conditions depending upon their classes, educational levels, political persuasions, ethnic affiliations, social geographies, etc., in an ahistorical fashion, as criticized by Khan.
>*feminists are deluding women in the US into believing
>that they no longer need to direct their feminist
>activism to women's conditions in the west
Perhaps in some cases, though not intentionally so -- by making US women feel complacent, "Ain't I fortunate, compared to Afghan women!"
>. . . were these kinds of criticisms levelled at
>African-American activists working to end apartheid in
>South Africa? Of Chicanos supporting the Zapatistas &
>various struggles in Latin America? If not, why not?
If they haven't been, they should be, if and when the same problem (= looking to the US power elite to conduct a civilizing mission by wars, economic sanctions, etc. _when no mass movement on the Left in nations-to-be-affected by them [e.g., the ANC] are demanding them_) exists. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Anti-War Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Anti-War Organizing in Columbus Covered by the Media: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/media.html>