[NYTr] Forget Halloween: It's Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Nation - Oct 22, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071105&s=ehrenreich

Forget Halloween: It's Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

by BARBARA EHRENREICH

I've never been able to explain Halloween to the kids, with its odd
thematic confluence of pumpkins, candy and death. But Halloween is a
piece of pumpkin cake compared to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which
commences today. In this special week, organized by conservative pundit
David Horowitz, we have a veritable witches' brew of Cheney-style
anti-jihadism mixed in with old-fashioned, right-wing anti-feminism and
a sour dash of anti-Semitism.

A major purpose of this week is to wake up academic women to the threat
posed by militant jihadism. According to the Week's website, feminists
and particularly the women's studies professors among them, have
developed a masochistic fondness for Islamic fundamentalists. Hence, as
anti-Islamo-Fascist speakers fan out to the nation's campuses this
week, students are urged to stage "sit-ins in Women's Studies
Departments and campus Women's Centers to protest their silence about
the oppression of women in Islam."

Leaving aside the obvious quibbles about feminist pro-jihadism and the
term "Islamo-Fascism," which seems largely designed to give jihadism a
nice familiar World War II ring, the klaxons didn't go off for me until
I skimmed down the list of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week speakers and
found, incredibly enough, Ann Coulter, whom I last caught on TV pining
for the repeal of women's suffrage. "If we took away women's right to
vote," she said wistfully, "We'd never have to worry about another
Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream; it's a personal fantasy
of mine."

Coulter is not the only speaker on the list who may have a credibility
problem when it comes to opposing oppression of women in Islam or
anywhere else. Another participant in the week's events is former
Senator Rick Santorum, whose book, It Takes a Family blamed "radical
feminism" for pushing women into the workforce and thus destroying the
American family. A 2005 column on that book in the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, began with: "Women of America, I hope you look good
in a burqa. If Senator Rick Santorum,R-PA, has his way, we will all be
wearing the burqas discarded by our recently liberated sisters in
Afghanistan..." (This was the before the Taliban re-emerged.)

Not quite in the burqa-promoting league, but close, is another official
speaker for the week, Christina Hoff Sommers, who has made her name
attacking feminism for exaggerating the problem of domestic violence
and eliminating opportunities for boys. These are the people who are
going to save us from purdah?

Another disagreeable feature of jihadism--anti-Semitism--is also
represented on the list of speakers for Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week,
again by the multi-faceted Coulter. Just last week on CNBC, she
referred to America as a "Christian nation." Asked where this left the
Jews (not to mention the Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Wiccans and
atheists), she said they could be "perfected" by converting to
Christianity.

You might imagine that this view of Jews as "imperfect" would bother
Horowitz, who is famously alert to any hint of anti-Semitism on the
left. But no, he defends Coulter, writing that "If you don't accompany
this belief by burning Jews who refuse to become perfected at the stake
why would any Jew have a problem?" Sure, David and if that's the
threshold for intolerance, Osama bin Laden could probably win an award
for humanitarianism.

Maybe none of this should be surprising. When Mel Gibson, who is not
known to be a member of the Hollywood left, unleashed a drunken
anti-Semitic tirade on his arresting officers, Horowitz also rose to
his defense, arguing that ensuing outrage reflected a "hatred"--not of
anti-Semites but of Christians.

As for the anti-feminism of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week: This fits in
neatly with the thesis of Susan Faludi's brilliant new book, The Terror
Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. She shows that, in the
wake of an attack by the ultra-misogynist Al Qaeda, Americans
perversely engaged in an anti-feminist campaign of their own, calling
for an immediate restoration of traditional gender roles. Coulter was
part of that backlash, opining in 2002 that "feminists hate guns
because guns remind them of men."

Before you put on your costumes to celebrate Islamo-Fascist Awareness
Week, let me set the record straight. American feminists do not
condone, defend, or ignore jihadist misogyny. In fact, we were warning
about it well before Washington turned against the Taliban and have
been consistently appalled by the gender dictatorships of Saudi Arabia
and Iran.

But if the facts don't fit in with Islamo-Fascist Awareness, they have
to go. For example, in a May '07 column in The Weekly Standard
Christina Hoff Sommers listed me as one of the "feckless" feminists who
refuse "to pass judgment on non-Western cultures." What? If Sommers had
even done ten minutes of research she would have noticed, among other
things, a column I wrote in the New York Times in 2004 stating that
Islamic fundamentalism aims to push one-half of the Muslim world--the
female half--"down to a status only slightly above that of domestic
animals."

Yes, feminists tend to hate war and sometimes even guns and this may be
why Horowitz and company hate us. They should know, though, that we
especially hate a war that seems calculated to inflame Islamic
fundamentalism worldwide. If many Muslim women around the world
willingly don head scarves today, it's in part because our war in Iraq
has, tragically, pushed them to value religious solidarity above their
feminist instincts.

Or maybe I'm missing the point of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week. Maybe
it's really an effort to show that our own American anti-feminists (and
anti-Semites) are just as nasty as the ones on the other side. If so,
good job, guys! No need to continue with the trick-or-treating, you've
already made your point.