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 nyone
who thinks that American academics are bad (and they are)
ought to consider the diatribe spewed out on Monday by one Sunera
Thobani, a women's studies professor at the University of British
Columbia. Thobani — the former head of Canada's National Action
Committee on the Status of Women, whatever that may be — was
addressing a gathering of the Women's Resistance Conference in Ottawa.
With Canada's Secretary of State, Heda Fry, sitting silently by,
the good professor offered up the following thoughts on the current
international situation:
This new
war against terrorism that's being launched, it's very old. And
it's a very old fight of the West against the rest. Consider the
language which is being used to mobilize people: calling the perpetrators
evil doers, irrational, calling them the forces of darkness, uncivilized,
intent on destroying civilization, intent on destroying democracy.
They hate freedoms, we are told.
But Thobani
isn't buying it. "Every person of colour, and I would want
to say also, every aboriginal person, will recognize that language.
It was used to justify our colonialization by Europe. We were colonized
in the name of the West bringing civilization, democracy, freedom
to us." And the same thinking, she insists, is at work today
— a "thinking based on dominating the rest of the world
in the name of bringing freedom and civilization to it."
So what's a
good member of the Women's Resistance Conference to do? Well, Thobani
says, that's simple enough. Women must
reject this
kind of jingoistic militarism and recognize that as the most heinous
form of patriarchal racist violence that we're seeing on the globe
today ...The women's movement has to stand up to this. There is
no option for us. We have to fight back against this militarization.
We have to break the support that is being built in our countries
for this kind of attack ... The West for 500 years has believed
that it can slaughter people into submission and it has not been
able to do so. And it will not be able to do so this time, either.
So, to sum
up, Professor Thobani believes that the U.S., not the Taliban, practices
"patriarchal racist violence." (Apparently, stoning people
for adultery doesn't make the cut.) She believes that the U.S.,
not the Taliban, wants to "slaughter people into submission."
She believes that the U.S., not the Taliban, represents the "forces
of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying civilization, intent
on destroying democracy." And she believes that her fellow
feminists, champions of women's rights all, ought to ally themselves
with the Taliban, and not the U.S.
Oh, and apparently,
for these ever-so-profound thoughts, she received several standing
ovations from the 500 delegates in attendance.
Feminists
for the Taliban. It's got a certain ring to it.
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