Phyllis Chesler
I recently heard from a Canadian school psychologist who lives in Toronto and who has dual citizenship in Canada and the United States. He was “dismayed,” outraged, saddened, and puzzled, and wanted me to explain to him how a feminist academic could have “hijacked a feminist conference in Quebec to express her feelings about how American foreign policy was totally responsible for the events of 9/11.” Ever since then, Brooks Masterton has written to this particular academic every 9/11 about her “lack of compassion for the victims” and about her hypocrisy, given that she,
Uses the freedoms she has in Canada as well as public funding to express outrageous ideas. I long ago asked her to consider how she would be received in Afghanistan if she pontificated about feminism and the need for female freedoms against male domination in all aspects of life. She would not survive for a week. While I defend her right to an opinion, I detest the way she goes about making her points and the extremely disrespectful, provocative and poisonous comments she makes. I am near retirement… but I still get angry enough to write to her every September to reminder her that she cannot make these comments without expecting to be called to account by others. I do believe that all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to stay silent.
Good women too, dear Dr. Masterton.
Well, he had come to the right woman and to the right feminist. It so happens that I am actually, although only slightly, familiar with Sunera Thobani’s so-called work. In 2006, I had been invited to keynote an international feminist conference at Cambridge University but was soon disinvited. Therefore, my critique of the multi-culturally relativist and postcolonial feminist academy’s tragic failure to take a stand against Islamic gender apartheid coupled with its sacrifice of universal human rights and its essentially racist obsession with anti-racism rather than with sexism was never heard in England. A year later, I was asked to rebut a 2007 attack that Thobani at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, had launched against American feminists, myself included. She titled her piece: “White Wars: Western Feminism and the ‘War on Terror.’” The Britain-based journal Feminist Theory published it but then approached me as well as two other feminists (Zillah Eisenstein and Judith Butler) for a response. I was the only one who agreed to respond. Here was a potential forum for what I might have said in Cambridge as well as my response to Thobani’s attack.
Writing this rebuttal was not easy. I had to accept more than twenty demands for changes from the politically correct feminist editorial board. For example, I was not allowed to write about “Islamic imperialism” or to name Cambridge as the university that had disinvited me. I was also prevented from writing “people of olive, brown, black, yellow, and red skins’” because, the editors insisted, that could be perceived as “racist.” My attacker Thobani could write about “whiteness,” but I was only allowed to write “different ethnicities” as if skin colors do not exist or mentioning their obvious existence is, by definition, somehow “racist.” However, to their credit (and at the insistence of some British academic Jews), they did publish what I wrote. Perhaps 100 people read it. If so, not a single one ever wrote to me.
I have just reviewed what I wrote four years ago. It has withstood the test of time. What I say may be applied to every pro-Islamist, anti-American, anti-Caucasian, and anti-Israeli academic. I have just updated this piece ever-so-slightly.
Masterton and I both plan to send this piece to Tanzanian-born Sunera Thobani on 9/11.
My Response to a Critic
by Phyllis Chesler
Feminist Theory
I thank the editors for allowing me to comment upon this article by Sunera Thobani, which appears in this issue of Feminist Theory.[1]
Thobani’s article condemns me and two other American feminist scholars (Judith Butler and Zillah Eisenstein) as racially “superior” white women who collaborate with the “imperial imaginary” and with “colonialism.” Thobani also condemns us for daring to present “whiteness” as “vulnerable.” She mocks the alleged “racial paranoia of imperial subjects” (that’s us), claiming that in our work we three experience our own “imperial” aggression as a form of victimization which then allows us to justify the aggression as self-defence.[2]
One might wonder why I am taking the time to respond to this inflammatory article. There are four reasons. First, her diatribe is typical but has rarely been answered in the pages of a feminist academic journal. Second, I could not allow her condemnation of three Jewish feminist theorists to pass unchallenged. Third, I had recently been invited to deliver a keynote address at a distinguished British university as part of an international feminist conference. When I raised questions about security and about the utter absence of kindred spirits, and despite the fact that I had stressed that neither factor would keep me away – I was summarily disinvited. These feminists have invited me to lecture alone at some future date, but not within the context of an international conference. (They were only covering their legal backsides because they never did invite me.) I therefore decided that responding to Thobani might be one way to be “heard” in the UK and in international feminist circles. Finally, I felt it was important to explain how Thobani’s paper (and so many others like it) is the written equivalent of what happens today on campuses when genuine dissent or non-politically correct feminist speech dares appear.
Instead of a respectful hearing what ensues is this: the politically incorrect feminist speaker is peppered with hostile questions, then silenced by boos, catcalls, foot-stamping, and name-calling; she might even be physically menaced. Security might be required. This is hardly an atmosphere in which a free exchange of ideas can occur. Similarly, like the Mearsheimer-Walt[3]and Joan Wallach Scott[4] papers, Thobani’s seemingly sophisticated paper, replete with footnotes, is trying to pass for an academic or even intellectual work. But hers are ideological, not scholarly, views. The attempt to pretend that one is the other is what I have characterized as a new totalitarianism among Western intellectuals.
Thobani’s article is an angry and self-righteous declaration of war. She does not have one positive thing to say about any of our work. Responding to Thobani in kind — with rage and condemnation — gives me no pleasure, for what do we gain? Two warriors growling, slicing the air with paper swords while millions of Third World women and men of diverse skin colors and ethnicities are indeed being tormented and slaughtered — but mainly by other Third World men and women of diverse skin colors and ethnicities — while we do nothing because to intervene or even to acknowledge that this is happening is politically incorrect? (By the way, “white” folk have sorrows too, but enough about that.)
Ethnic Arab Muslims are genocidally slaughtering black African Muslims, Christians, and animists in Darfur; Muslims are blowing each other up when they pray in mosques in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia; Muslim men are shooting down and beheading their own intellectuals and dissidents in unimaginable numbers. According to one compelling source, such numbers far outpace anything the combined American and Israeli forces have done in the last 50 years. The estimated number of Third World Muslim violent deaths at the hands of other Third World Muslims, country by country, vastly exceeds that of Third World Muslim deaths in so-called “white imperial” wars.[5]
Thobani seems to believe in racial purity and therefore in the rights of racially oppressed victims to engage in apocalyptic “resistance.” Thobani is not deterred by the fact that “white” and “colored” skin color are not pure, have no significant scientific basis, and often have different meanings as a function of other variables such as class, caste, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, religion, educational level, marital, national, and immigrant status, birth order, character, destiny, etc. (Haven’t feminist academics said so over and over again?)
Reality does not conform to Thobani’s ideological “imaginary.” The American population (we three “white” feminists are American citizens), the victims of 9/11, the members of the American Armed Forces, and the large number of immigrants to America, including those from Muslim and Third World countries, are not all “white.” As of 2005, over 73 million Americans (or 25 per cent of the population) were “non-white.” An additional 40 million Hispanic-Americans do not identify themselves as either “black” or “white” but as “Latino.”[6] (Latino skin color ranges from white to black.) Also, nearly 36 per cent of American soldiers are “nonwhite” Americans[7] and about 15 per cent of American soldiers are women.[8] (As of 2010, according to the U.S. Census, 28% of Americans are “nonwhite.” There are now fifty million Hispanics in America too).[9]
Thus, Thobani’s alleged “white” perpetrators are not all white.[10] Nor are the victims of Islamic Holy War all white. However, such real-life distinctions about color do not matter to Thobani. For example, approximately 24 per cent of those murdered in the 2001 World Trade Center attacks were identified as “non-white.”[11] In London, almost one-third of the population (which one assumes uses public transport) identified itself as “nonwhite.”[12] On July 7, 2005, 52 people were murdered and nearly 800 injured by Islamic jihadist attacks on the London transportation systems. France’s 2005 version of the Palestinian intifada against Israel was characterized by nearly two months of rioting, attacks on the police, and car burnings — and by the exceptionally horrific torture of one young North African-Jewish man, the olive-skinned Ilan Halimi (may his memory be for a blessing). Over a three-week period, black African and ethnic Arab North African criminals slowly tortured him to death, while many people came to watch or to participate.[13] One year later, in 2006, this France-based jihad was commemorated by bus and car burnings.[14] I am particularly haunted by the fate of one young, black-skinned, French-African woman who was torched when the bus she was riding on was set on fire.[15] (She turned white.) The rioting arsonists have yet to be tried. Although their ethnicity has, carefully, not been described, I predict that if and when we find out who they are, they will probably not be “white” feminists.
Image courtesy Stockstudios / Shutterstock
I wonder whether Thobani realizes that all three of her alleged “traitors” are not only major and original feminist theorists and activists but also Jews. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, someone named “Goldstein” is designated as the permanent traitor whom Big Brother denounces for monstrous crimes, thereby brainwashing the masses into extraordinary group hatred against him. Are we meant to be Thobani’s version of “Goldstein”? Does she not understand that Jews come in all colors, and that even when we have white skins we are still not considered “white” but exotic, Oriental, Semitic? (This does not mean that anti-Semitism, or Judeophobia, which is primarily about Jews, is the same as or even analogous to “Islamophobia” which is a false concept of recent vintage and with a different historical trajectory.)
Thobani specializes in the postcolonial work that has increasingly come to dominate what once used to be called feminism or women’s studies. I document this unfortunate, even tragic trend in The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (2005). It is a trend that ultimately justifies an isolationist position vis-à-vis the rights of women and dissidents in the Third World. Westernized Third World feminists and their Western feminist counterparts all refuse to view any formerly colonized culture of “color” as barbaric, even when it is, because all cultures are presumably equal.
Thobani views the cause of women as served only by a Marxist-Stalinist-Islamist critique of Western foreign policy and by virulent anti-Americanism. She does not seem to address any core or burning emergency issues that concern women.
In this paper, Thobani is utterly silent about the international trafficking in women and children (female sexual slavery) that may far exceed all other illegal enterprises. She is also silent about female genital cutting, wife- and daughter-beating, honor murders, forced veiling, purdah (segregation – sequestration), and arranged and polygamous marriage. These barbaric customs are normalized, not criminalized, and they characterize what I term Islamic gender apartheid. These practices also preceded Western imperialism and colonialism.
Thobani is also silent about the high rate of AIDS with which young girls and women are being infected by their male partners (especially in the Third World), and about sexual, reproductive, and physical violence, including incest and within marriage, and about both economic discrimination and rape in general (again, especially in the Third World). She is silent about the repeated public gang-rapes of genitally infibulated girls and women in the Sudan which have been carried out against black African Muslims, Christians, and animists by ethnic Arab Muslims. (In my writing, I have referred to this as “gender cleansing.”) She is silent about the history of Muslim slave traders, about the current black African slave trade among ethnic Arab Muslims, and about the genocide against black Africans being carried out in the Sudan by ethnic Arab Muslims.
What matters to theorists like Thobani is this: she will condemn Third World deaths only if they have been caused by “white” people, but not if those deaths have been caused by Third World people of “color.”
Thobani is perfectly free to criticize, even to demonize the West, in the West, because she is living in a democracy where academic freedom and free speech are (still) taken seriously. Were Thobani to dare criticize the barbarism, misogyny, and despotism of Third World countries, were she to do so in Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Bangladesh, or Saudi Arabia (to name only a few such countries), she would be in serious danger of being shot to death in her own home, as happened recently to an Afghan woman journalist, or of being imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. This has happened to many Muslim dissidents and feminists. In 2003, Wajeha Al-Huwaider was barred from publishing in the Saudi Kingdom; in 2006 she was arrested, interrogated, and forced to sign a statement agreeing to cease her human rights activities.[16] Bangladeshi writer Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury had his office bombed, was jailed for two years and is now on trial for his life. His crime? “Praising the Jew and Christians,” “attempting to travel to Israel,” and “predicting the rise of Islamist militancy.” These charges may carry a death sentence.[17] (Guess what? Choudhury has since been exposed as a fraud, a double agent, and as someone who preyed upon Jewish women for their money.)[18]
In The Death of Feminism, I describe what I mean by Islamic religious and gender apartheid in Muslim countries and I document how such customs have penetrated both Europe and North America through immigrant communities. Let me mention two Muslim-world examples that I cite in the book. In 1990, Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam published a carefully rendered account of how, on August 16, 1986, a thirty-five year old woman was stoned to death in a small village in Iran. Soraya was savagely lynched and then stoned to death by the villagers with whom she had lived all her life. Her own father, her two sons, and her husband all threw the first stones.[19] I also describe another incident which took place in July 2001 in Hassi Messaoud, Algeria, in which a mob of three hundred men conducted a three-day pogrom against thirty-nine economically impoverished Algerian women. In his Friday sermons, the local mullah, Amar Taleb, had described these women as “immoral” because they were working for a foreign company. The men tortured, stabbed, mutilated, gang-raped, buried alive, and murdered these women.[20]
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