>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>What colonialism invented is the idea that the veil -- especially
>>of the sort that covers the entire face and body -- was universally
>>worn by Muslim women across classes, regions, and relations of
>>production. The idea was subsequently adopted by Islamists. The
>>irony is that Islamists, who rail against the decadence of the West
>>and consider local feminists to be purveyors of Western
>>corruptions, are the ones who are the most taken in by an
>>essentially Western colonial invention. Islamists = the biggest
>>suckers for all orientalist nonsense.
>
>And what exactly is your point?
The point is as it is spelled out in my posting <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040517/011166.html>. If you don't care to respond to it, that's your own affair, not mine.
>That veiling has nothing to do with the repression of women? That
>women in many Islamic countries don't exhibit high levels of
>illiteracy? That feminizing a man isn't an extreme form of
>humiliation? That there aren't a lot of odd rituals around
>menstruation, such as these detailed on Sistani's website
>(<http://sistani.org/html/eng/main/index.php?page=3&lang=eng&part=1>,
>section "Kinds of blood seen by women"):
What do such facts have to do with torture, though? Even if the tortured individuals at Abu Ghraib had been all flaming drag queens and professional strippers from San Francisco who are into S/M in their free time, their rape, torture, and murder would be as much of an outrage as the rape, torture, and murder of Abu Ghraib Iraqi detainees (some of whom, for all you know, may be liberal gay men like Salam Pax) is.
Anyhow, you find it objectionable when Mahathir bin Mohamad twists the fact that some ruling-class individuals -- including a few who are wealthy enough to make a difference in the currency market -- are Jewish to spread paranoid propaganda about the Jewish power bent on world domination. You rightly call such propaganda anti-Semitic. You don't seem to be able to see -- let alone remove -- the beam in your own eye when it comes to your ideas about Arabs and Muslims. -- Yoshie
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