Would you by any chance live near Howard Street and Cowley Road? My old stamping ground. Wonderful place, glorious atmosphere. Watched it go from dull English working class area to upwardly mobile Asian suburb through bthe sixties and seventies. If I had stayed there I would have just finished paying off a £12.5k mortgage on a house worth £400k +. Life chioces. :dubious:
Here’s a debate, then: should the feminist left be more feminist or more left? In other words, if those core values come into conflict, which way should they lean?
Take , for instance, the Israel/Hizballah conflict. Left wing movements generally oppose Israel, so perhaps feminists should stick to the party line. However, Israel has a much, much better record vis-a-vis women’s rights the radical Islamist movements like Hizballah. In that case, perhaps they should support Israel. Or maybe they should just stay away from the debate?
It’s an interesting question, and it’s not just limited to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Do you oppose the agressors who share your values? Do you support the oppresed who don’t? What’s more important, the really big issues that everyone’s arguing about - like Iraq - or the issue that you personally care about the most - like women’s rights? Are you general interest or Special Interest?
I invite you to read the literature of the mid-nineties. Look among the Westerners offering the strongest criticism of the Taliban, and among the Westerners calling for the strongest responses to the Taliban’s violation of human rights. Try to find someone in that crowd who wasn’t a leftist, who wasn’t a feminist. Happy hunting!
We leftist feminists aren’t as mushy-headed as your caricature of us. We (well, most of us) can recognize when folks in a particular society are being treated shittily. We can recognize that certain ideologies are hateful and harmful.
The difference between us and rightwing demagogues is that we don’t overgeneralize.
Daniel
Quite. And who was it in the 80’s who was marching against Saddam while Reagan and Thatcher were arming the bastard or extending massive trade credits ?
And of course, the UK just couldn’t help itself even in 2002.
I
I remember clearly when the first allegations of Kurd gassing came out in a TV documentary the UK govt of the day denied it and attacked the programme makers.
Unlike the Right, some of us don’t need Big Brother to tell us who it okay to hate.
I’ve hated Saddam and pretty much loathed Islamic attitudes to women all my adult, aware life. And i’ve hated apologists like Galloway too.
And when I was marching with Campaign Against the Arms Trade it sure as hell wasn’t alongside tories and other denizens of the right. They were too busy making out like bandits from the Iran-Iraq War. Like good ol’ Rumsfeld.
So for the Right to start making out they are anything other than part of the problem is pretty rich.
Me too! I left over seven years ago and visit every two years or so. Difference is, I still own a house there, on Charles Street. Last time I was on the Cowley Road the Eastern European influence had joined the tapestry, and it seemed a little more gentrified.
/end hijack
I’m confused by the inclusion of ‘feminists’ in the title of the OP.
In what way have feminists ‘eyes been closed’ up to now, w.r.t. Islam’s treatment of women?
Or is it that ‘left’=tolerant=tolerant of interolance, feminist=women’s rights=lefty cause=‘the left’, therefore feminist=supporter of oppression of women? IOW, a massive fallacy of, errm, ‘monolithism’. Here is THE LEFT, and this is what THE LEFT believes. Are you one of THE LEFT, or one of THE RIGHT?
Well at least you put ‘the left’ in quote marks.
<cough>
It was considerably more insightful than your OP.
What do you want us to debate here? Surely your proposed subject for debate can’t simply be “Have feminists and ‘the left’ finally opened their eyes?” You’re not really silly enough to believe that this constitutes a reasonable thesis, are you? Especially when you yourself have offered no coherent argument whatsoever in this thread.
Had you given an outline of why the publication of this book might be significant, or made an argument about the overlap between feminism and the left, and about the attitudes of these groups to Islamic fundamentalism, you might have risen to the level of Debate.
As it is, however, you’ve offered little more than “Hey, look at this book. Maybe feminists and the left aren’t all stupid bozos after all.” It’s MPSIMS, at best, and probably The Pit. I can’t believe it’s been allowed to remain in GD.
Anyways, isn’t “naivist” the term for a painter who wasn’t didn’t go to art school (doesn’t know proportions, perspective and color theory), doesn’t work as a full-time painter and isn’t much influenced by others? Sort of like Grandma Moses? Certainly in Sweden it is. Most likely in Denmark as well.
And anyway the word is kind of a cheap shot at people who just don’t realize what a grave threat the muslims/Commies/Republicans/mole people/lizard men from the 5th dimension/<insert nefarious group here> really are. I think the word “alarmist” is already well established though.
ALmost a nice catch. If I’d said “us and rightwingers,” you’d have a point–that’s why I included the word “demagogues.” If you think that some rightwing demagogues don’t overgeneralize, I’d like an example–but overgeneralizing seems to me to be almost part of the definition of demagoguery.
And if you think I’m including all liberals in “us,” well, you’re overgeneralizing :).
Daniel
Although now I reread and I see that my previous paragraph referred to “we leftist feminists,” which is probably the antecedent for “us,” so it WAS a good catch, even if I included a disclaimer in the previous paragraph: “(well, most of us)”. Of course I did not mean to refer to the leftist feminist demagogues out there.
Daniel
I’m talking about the systematic opening of threads for the express purpose of slamming Muslisms.
Although I have little to no use for any religion, I very much doubt you’ll find our cases to have much similarity. For starters, I doubt that in my almost six years here I’ve started – if that – more than one or two threads on the topic. Have I posted to religious threads? Sure, if I have an opinion I feel worth expressing, I don’t curtail myself from expressing it. OTOH, I doubt you’ll find a single warning when it comes to my postings on religion.
Thus I fail to see the aptness of your conparisom AFAIAC.
But that’s exactly the point, Red Fury. You haven’t gotten warned for your critiques of Christianity or Christians. And you wouldn’t get any official moderator warnings even if such critiques were wrong-headed and bigoted. Gum may or may not be making a wrong-headed and bigoted critique of Islam…but your charge that if she made such a critique of Christianity she’d be banned is nonsense.
It may be true that we have more defenders of Christianity here on the Dope than we have defenders of Islam. Hardly surprising, since this is an english-language board. But what does that have to do with her getting banned?
Name one person who has been warned or banned for opening anti-Christian threads or making anti-Christian posts. OK, you’re one person who hasn’t been so warned. And I’m another. And Der Trihs is another. We can make a pretty big list of people who haven’t gotten in trouble for making bigoted or non-bigoted comments about Christianity. Where’s the list of people who WERE banned?
You mean it doesn’t creep you out to see a woman wearing a burka (an unfortunate experience that I’ve had several times in my own neighborhood)?
I respect the right of people to wear it, even though I don’t particularly find it pleasant. However, globally speaking, a small minority of Muslim women actually wear burqas. Most wear hijab, some wear jilbab, and some don’t bother at all. I have the same attitude towards hijab and jilbab as I do towards the sheitel: weird, but whatever. Happily for me, I haven’t seen any burqas where I live.
I’ve debated with myself all day as to whether or not to dignify this sophomoric rhetoric with a reply. I suppose I will.
- You cannot conflate my statement about disagreeing “with many views of households around me” with being “fine” with sexual assault, domestic abuse, maiming, and actual bodily harm. I did mention that I would not want “the cultures expressed therein” to “transgress the laws of the country”; additionally, thankfully, my personal moral code coincides with the laws that prevent such abuse. I am sure you’re as tolerant of the American culture in which I guess you exist, yet intolerant of wife-beating, murder and rape within that same culture. It is the same thing with me and my neighbours.
- By mentioning FGC in a thread about Muslims, you are again perpetuating the myth that this is an exclusively Muslim practice. Educate yourself:
I would be as disgusted were this going on in a Bantu or Christian household as a Muslim one, and would want the perpetrator banged up in jail, and the abhorrent practice destroyed with extreme prejudice. Same goes for honour killings et al.
(pjen, Martha, you’re dead on - I live off Cowley road. It’s buzzing. Us Oxonians share the area with Tibetans, South Caribbeans, Jamaicans, Thais, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese, Albanians, Polish, Japanese, Moroccans, you name it. Awesome place - and even better restaruants. I’m very happy to be here!)
I lived very nearby there last year, and was impressed with the restaurants and particularly the Arab and Greek markets, as well as the mosque just down the street from the Methodist church with weekly services in an Indian language (I think - which language precisely has slipped my mind). Cowley definitely shows the successes of ‘multiculturalism’. Even that most hated of breeds - we students - were treated well! 
::::grudgingly:::
Yep, you have a point…and so does Tom. There goes my fifty year streak of being right. Damn it! 
PS-Abeldaran? Naw…he was always cruisin’ for a bruisin’
:::sigh:::
Let us observe a hushed silence please to commemorate this moment.
It’s a bit of a stretch to assume that every woman wearing a burka is only doing so because out of fear of a beating from her father/husband/brother or whatever. But hey, big broad brushtrokes is what cultural relations are all about, right?
If you honestly believe that Europeans should fret the coming “conquest by Islamic fundamentalists”, it may be helpful to step back and think for a minute. What conquest? When? Where? Why? No conquest of Europe is in progress, or in planning stages, or even on the distant horizon. The phrase would only make sense to a handful of mostly American right-wing blowhards who think that the Turkish immigrants looking for jobs selling candy in French shopping malls are all secretly conspiring to enforce Islamic law. (Or something.) Having spent most of the summer working at Sophia-Antipolis and living in Nice, I can testify that that corner of France, at least, remains the same delightful place that it always was, and I fully expect it to stay that way. Certain Republicans seem to honestly think that roving bands of Jihadists are marching through French cities suppressing non-Muslims and beheading their own daughters. If these people ever went to France (fat chance of that) they’d be surprised and probably disappointed to find the cities clean, safe, more open to free expression than American ones, and the few Muslims remarkably polite and well-behaved.
It takes a certain level or arrogance to believe that Americans who’ve never set foot in Europe can know “what is about to happen to their continent” better than Europeans do.