[Mb-civic] A New Counterterrorism Strategy: Feminism

[Mike Blaxill]

A New Counterterrorism Strategy: Feminism

By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet. Posted May 10,
2005.

Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from 'Stop the
Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and
Terrorism (Inner Ocean),' edited by Code Pink
co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans.

I've been reading Bin Ladin--Carmen, that is, not
her brother-in-law Osama (she spells the last
name with an "i")--and I'd like to present a
brand-new approach to terrorism, one that turns
out to be more consistent with traditional
American values. First, let's stop calling the
enemy "terrorism," which is like saying we're
fighting "bombings." Terrorism is only a method;
the enemy is an extremist Islamic insurgency
whose appeal lies in its claim to represent the
Muslim masses against a bullying superpower.

But as Carmen Bin Ladin urgently reminds us in
her book Inside the Kingdom, one glaring moral
flaw of this insurgency, quite apart from its
methods, is that it aims to push one-half of
those masses down to a status only slightly above
that of domestic animals. While Osama was getting
pumped up for jihad, Carmen was getting up her
nerve to walk across the street in a residential
neighborhood in Jeddah--fully-veiled but
unescorted by a male, something that is an
illegal act for a woman in Saudi Arabia.
Eventually she left the kingdom and got a divorce
because she didn't want her daughters to grow up
in a place where women are kept "locked in and
breeding."

So here in one word is my new counterterrorism
strategy: feminism. Or, if that's too incendiary,
try the phrase "human rights for women." I don't
mean just a few opportunistic references to
women, like those that accompanied the war on the
Taliban and were quietly dropped by the Bush
administration when that war was abandoned and
Afghan women were locked back into their burqas.
I'm talking about a sustained and serious effort.

We should announce plans to pour U.S. tax dollars
into girls' education in places like Pakistan,
where the high-end estimate for female literacy
is 26 percent, and into scholarships for women
seeking higher education in nations that
typically discourage it. (Secular education for
the boys wouldn't hurt, either.) Expand the
grounds for asylum to all women fleeing gender
totalitarianism, wherever it springs up. Reverse
the Bush policies on global family planning,
which condemn seventy-eight thousand women to
death each year in makeshift abortions. Lead the
global battle against the trafficking of women.
I'm not expecting such measures alone to incite a
feminist insurgency within the Islamist one.
Carmen Bin Ladin found her rich Saudi
sisters-in-law sunk in bovine passivity, and some
of the more spirited young women in the Muslim
world have been adopting the head scarf as a
gesture of defiance toward American imperialism.
We're going to need a thorough foreign policy
makeover--from Afghanistan to Israel--before we
have the credibility to stand up for anyone's
human rights. You can't play the gender card with
dirty hands.

If this country were to embrace a feminist
strategy against the insurgency, we'd have to
start by addressing our own dismal record on
women's rights. We'd be pushing for the immediate
ratification of the UN Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women, which has been ratified by 169
countries but remains stalled in the U.S. Senate.
We'd be threatening to break off relations with
Saudi Arabia until it acknowledged the humanity
of women. And we'd be thundering about the
shortage of women in the U.S. Senate and House,
an internationally embarrassing 14 percent. We
should be aiming for a representation of at least
25 percent, the same target the Transitional
Administrative Law of Iraq has set for the
federal assembly there.

If we want to beat Osama, we've got to start by
listening to Carmen.


Barbara Ehrenreich has written more than ten
books, including Blood Rites and Nickel and
Dimed. She is a frequent contributor to Esquire,
Harper's Magazine, Mirabella, The Nation, the New
Republic, The New York Times, and Time.
Ehrenreich became involved in political activism
during the Vietnam War and has been an activist
and feminist ever since.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/21973/