Tuesday, February 17, 2004

In her book, Women and Gender in Islam, Leila Ahmed talks about "colonial feminism." It refers to those colonial officers who used and abused the issue of the plight of Muslim women when they were stationed in Muslim countries while those men fought against women's rights and suffrage in their home countries. Paul Bremer is a colonial feminist. He is being lauded by the New York Times and hailed as if he is a feminist. He is calling for a generous quota for women in Iraqi legislature. Would he dare propose that idea in the US which has one of the lowest percentages of women in legislature. US ranks no. 57 behind those countries: (listed in descending order in terms of percentages): Rwanda, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Cuba, Belgium, Costa Rica, Austria, Germany, Argentina, Iceland, Mozambique, South Africa**, Seychelles, New Zealand, Spain, Viet Nam, Grenada, Namibia, Bulgaria, Timor-Leste***, Turkmenistan, Australia, Switzerland, Uganda, Lao People's Democratic Rep., Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, Mexico, Eritrea, Pakistan, United Rep. of Tanzania, Latvia, Monaco, Nicaragua, Canada, China, Poland, Bahamas, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Guinea, Slovakia, Senegal, Portugal, Dominica, Estonia, Bolivia, Burundi, Peru, The f.Y.R. of Macedonia, United Kingdom, Croatia, Philippines, Suriname, Dominican Republic, Botswana, Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Luxembourg, San Marino, Ecuador, Singapore, Angola, Israel, Sierra Leone, and Andorra. Don't get me wrong: I am in favor of such quotas, and support the French parite movement. But the US has no credibility here. And then you have the horrible white-supremacist organization, known as the Feminist Majority, which urged the US to drop bombs and rockets over the heads of the people of Afghanistan--in the name of women's liberation, of course, and who still is obsessed with veiling, and is now urging for the US to exercise its colonial powers in Iraq, also in the name of women's liberation. You now see why the mainstream liberal "feminist" groups in the US have failed in attracting poor women, women of color, and women from around the world to their movement?