Kumbaya Watch: Feminists for the Taliban
The latest in foolish commentary.

By Ross Douthat
October 5, 2001 12:45 p.m.

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.