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Trawling for signatures, Oliver Stone, etc.

Feb 4, 2008, Vol. 13, No. 20
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Hear Them Roar...Not!

You may remember Christina Hoff Sommers's powerful indictment of the feminist establishment that was featured on our cover last May, "The Subjection of Islamic Women and the Fecklessness of American Feminism." Her stirring conclusion: "The women who constitute the American feminist establishment today are destined to play little role in the battle for Muslim women's rights. Preoccupied with their own imagined oppression, they can be of little help to others--especially family-centered Islamic feminists. The Katha Pollitts and Eve Enslers, the vagina warriors and university gender theorists--these are women who cannot distinguish between free and unfree societies, between the Taliban and the Promise Keepers, between being forced to wear a veil and being socially pressured to be slender and fit. Their moral obtuseness leads many of them to regard helping Muslim women as 'colonialist' or as part of a 'hegemonic' 'civilizing mission.' It disqualifies them as participants in this moral fight."

Well, Katha Pollitt certainly remembers the piece. She has been organizing a response for lo these many months--an "Open Letter from American Feminists" that begins: "Columnists and opinion writers from the Weekly Standard to the Washington Post to Slate have recently accused American feminists of focusing obsessively on minor or even nonexistent injustices in the United States while ignoring atrocities against women in other countries, especially the Muslim world. .  .  ."

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