Thursday, May 12, 2005

A New Counterterrorism Strategy: Feminism

I think this is an interesting article for the following reason: I've read other blogs that said since feminism wasn't initiated in Islamic countries or in Islam that indicates that feminism isn't necessary in Islam because women have equal rights under Islam (something to that effect). Whenever I read those entries - I always chuckled because I was thinking somebody is really lying to themselves. Anyway, this article proves my point and is a fresh new way of fighting terrorism.

A sustained and serious effort to gain human rights for women worldwide could be the start of a brand new approach to fighting terrorism

I've been reading Bin Ladin--Carmen, that is, not her brother-in-law Osama (she spells the last name with an "i")--and I'd like to present a brand-new approach to terrorism, one that turns out to be more consistent with traditional American values. First, let's stop calling the enemy "terrorism," which is like saying we're fighting "bombings." Terrorism is only a method; the enemy is an extremist Islamic insurgency whose appeal lies in its claim to represent the Muslim masses against a bullying superpower.

But as Carmen Bin Ladin urgently reminds us in her book Inside the Kingdom, one glaring moral flaw of this insurgency, quite apart from its methods, is that it aims to push one-half of those masses down to a status only slightly above that of domestic animals. While Osama was getting pumped up for jihad, Carmen was getting up her nerve to walk across the street in a residential neighborhood in Jeddah--fully-veiled but unescorted by a male, something that is an illegal act for a woman in Saudi Arabia. Eventually she left the kingdom and got a divorce because she didn't want her daughters to grow up in a place where women are kept "locked in and breeding."
posted by Cynthia   Permalink| Comments(0)|

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