Leftist Feminism Fails Again

Cinnamon Stillwell pulls back the veil on Miriam Cooke's pro-oppression "feminism". And I thought Naomi Wolf was clueless. But Ms. Cooke takes the cake.

Cooke mocked “the campaign to democratize the Middle East,” that she claimed, “deployed women as victims to save or to empower.” Empowering Muslim women would seem to be a good thing, but according to Cooke, if Western interests are involved, women’s liberation is no longer valid. Cooke opposed the war in Iraq for this very reason, fatalistically predicting that Iraqi women would end up “like the Shiite women who were driven out of their homes in southern Iraq in March, 1991, to enter refugee camps in Saudi Arabia and then went on to exilic futures outside the Middle East.”[7]

In fact, none of this happened and the numbers of asylum-seekers from Iraq and Afghanistan have been drastically reduced from pre-war levels.[8] Most mportantly, no longer are Iraqi women captive to Saddam Hussein's rape rooms, or to having their husbands taken away in the middle of night.[9] And six female ministers in the new Iraqi government demonstrate that women are making strides in that country.[10] But for Cooke, none of this seems to matter. All that matters is keeping those nasty “imperialists” (America) at bay.

And Stillwell is right to ask:

So what exactly does Cooke have to offer to Muslim women as a concrete course of action to better their lives? It turns out, not much. Not only are her ideas vague and overly academic, all too often she falls back on concepts steeped in the terminology of Islamism. For instance, throughout her career, Cooke has written extensively about the idea of a “women’s jihad.”

During a lecture at Wellesley College in November, 2003, Cooke elaborated on this concept. [11] This jihad, she maintained, is not for an “Islamist state,” but rather for “an Islamic community.” Subscribing to a pacifist model, she insisted that women’s role within the Islamic world should be “drawing attention to the consequences of war, not advocating violence.” Yet somewhat contradictorily, she also sanctioned, “the defense of the community when attacked by outsiders.” Which outsiders exactly she was referring to is unknown, but it's a safe guess that American soldiers and their allies were involved.

Indeed, Israeli civilians appear to be fair game for this “women’s jihad.” When Wafa Idris, a 27-year old Palestinian woman, perpetrated a suicide bombing, killing an 80 year-old man in January, 2000, Cooke’s thesis about women and war were put to the test. But Cooke managed to justify this atrocity by falling back on her old “blame the imperialists” mindset. In typically garbled language, Cooke said, “for those of us who really are concerned with women’s role in the Arab public square, in the way in which women have been trying to empower themselves vis-à-vis the U.S., vis-à-vis old colonial powers, vis-à-vis their own men, the situation has become so desperate that now women’s participation in war is a mark of absolute hopelessness. [12]

As usual, Cooke jumps through hoops to blame anyone other than the culture that created suicide bombers - female or otherwise. And she conveniently overlooks the use of sexism in Palestinian society to coerce women into becoming suicide bombers as penance for the shame of having sex out of wedlock, being raped or unable to marry.

That would be your tax dollars - and your tuition dollars - at work.