Politics and Culture

Barbara Ehrenreich continues the new left tradition of unserious, tabloid-style, dishonest discourse by lowering the intellectual level of the debate over Islamic terrorism to Ann Coulter jokes:

Follow up:

Leaving aside the obvious quibbles about feminist pro-jihadism and the term "Islamo-Fascism," which seems largely designed to give jihadism a nice familiar World War II ring, the klaxons didn't go off for me until I skimmed down the list of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week speakers and found, incredibly enough, Ann Coulter, whom I last caught on TV pining for the repeal of women's suffrage. "If we took away women's right to vote," she said wistfully, "We'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream; it's a personal fantasy of mine."

As if Coulter was being serious. She made a point with a joke!

Yes, feminists tend to hate war and sometimes even guns, and this may be why Horowitz and company hate us. They should know, though, that we especially hate a war that seems calculated to inflame Islamic fundamentalism world wide. If many Muslim women around the world willingly don head scarves today, it's in part because our war in Iraq has, tragically, pushed them to value religious solidarity above their feminist instincts.

So, if it weren't for the U.S., Muslim women's feminist instincts would take over and they'd demand freedom- and Muslim men would just give it to them. I mostly care about Muslim terror because they want to kill me (and Barbara, especially), but what was the status of women in Iran and Saudi Arabia on September 10, 2001? Iraq may not have been as religious, but only because Saddam was a secular terrorist victimizing his own people.

As for the anti-feminism of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week: This fits in neatly with the thesis of Susan Faludi's brilliant new book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. She shows that, in the wake of an attack by the ultra-misogynist Al Qaeda, Americans perversely engaged in an anti-feminist campaign of their own, calling for an immediate restoration of traditional gender roles. Coulter was part of that backlash, opining in 2002 that "feminists hate guns because guns remind them of men."

By this she means the typically idiotic feminist premise that 9/11 was anti-feminist because the heroes, firefighters, etc, were men and the nation felt it needed protecting. Such reality-challenged observations make me wonder if feminists ever talk to women. When people, including women, feel they need protecting, THEY TURN TO PROTECTORS, not columnists, bloggers, or college professors.

It's as appropriate to draw attention to Islamic terrorism as it is to draw attention to Darfur (in fact, the two are very related since the murderers are Islamofascists) and Tibet, not to mention gay rights, date rape, and other issues.

Listen to Ehrenreich not only avoid the question, but make a morally idiotic comparison:

You might imagine that this view of Jews as "imperfect" would bother Horowitz, who is famously alert to any hint of anti-Semitism on the left. But no, he defends Coulter, writing that "If you don't accompany this belief by burning Jews who refuse to become perfected at the stake why would any Jew have a problem?" Sure, David, and if that's the threshold for intolerance, Osama bin Laden could probably win an award for humanitarianism.

But wait, she does see the problem:

But if the facts don't fit in with Islamo-Fascist Awareness, they have to go. For example, in a May '07 column in The Weekly Standard Christina Hoff Sommers listed me as one of the "feckless" feminists who refuse "to pass judgment on non-Western cultures." What? If Sommers had even done 10 minutes of research she would have noticed, among other things, a column I wrote in the New York Times in '04 stating that Islamic fundamentalism aims to push one-half of the Muslim world -- the female half -- "down to a status only slightly above that of domestic animals."

So, she just hates conservatives more?

the term "Islamo-Fascism," which seems largely designed to give jihadism a nice familiar World War II

Hitler: Jew hatred, mass murder, anti-Democratic, expansionist: Check, check, check, check. Yeah, I think it's a fair comparison, except that Hitler believed in a sort of pagan religion and didn't cover women up in Burqas. Maybe Ehrenreich reserves the term "fascist" for Republicans. Using it for Osama would just cheapen the term.