Friday, May 18, 2007

Political correctness marginalizes history

Being the editor of a magazine often gives me the opportunity to talk to publishing houses and their representatives about new book releases. At a recent meeting with one regarding the publication and release of a book dealing with a particular state's military history, I was told their company had enjoyed little success with "counter-culture" material and were being cautious as to how they approached marketing this new book. Now being a writer for most of my life, I was used to hearing phrases such as "there's no interest," "no market for it" or "not our specialty," but saying a collection of stories on the individual accomplishments of citizen-soldiers was "counter-culture" came as a shock to me.

How many generations were raised on stories of the biblical David, Samson and Gideon, the story of Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Al Saladin, Admiral Nelson, George Washington, Patton, and so forth? The stories of their individual accomplishments and lives have been rather definitive of the cultures we became or a result of it - not counter to it.

One could deduce this is a simple pacifist mentality that will fade in time, but this is a flesh and blood example of political correctness working itself into the marketplace. Reader Rick Williams came across this stunning definition of political correctness on the Yorktown University web site in Denver, Colorado. It states: "Political Correctness is an ideology that politicizes scholarship by holding it to standards other than the pursuit of truth, amazement in discovery of reality, and inquiry grounded in reason."

In short, it is an Orwellian prophecy come true that seems to be going viral and spreading like a cancer. If it was only a national phenomenon, it would not be of concern, but U.S. influence is felt around the world and the disease is worsening.

Last year Mongolia decided it wanted to erect a statue of Genghis Khan outside their embassies as a symbol of their nation. They take pride in Genghis Khan, whom they regard as Mongolia's most famous contribution to the world and, by all accounts, they are correct. After more than 60 years as a Soviet satellite, which was bent on revising and outright destroying the history of the Asian nation, Mongolia decided they wanted to reestablish themselves culturally in the world and create a viable, attractive tourist venue that told the Mongol story. The little nation had managed to hang on to it's precious past in darkened corners and, once the Soviet Union dissolved, they began the long road back to reclaiming their colorful heritage.

With that knowledge, who could deny this little nation in noting, with some measure of pride, it had once been a major world player and gave rise to a man, who will live forever in the annals of human history? The U.S. "P.C." machine is the short answer to that question.

It was a firestorm among supposedly dispassionate college and university professors inter-viewed by news organizations. They claimed it improper for Mongolia to choose "that man" as a national mascot because of Genghis Khan's "ruthlessness and imperialistic" attributes. They said he conquered and killed untold thousands of people and individuals such as that do not deserve recognition. The story of Genghis Khan, who started off in life completely impoverished and ended up controlling most of the known world of his time, is a story of incredible individual and military achievement. The Mongolians will hopefully ignore what's been said here in the states and move forward with their project.

The academic distaste for military heroes has been evident in this nation since the anti-war protesters of the 1960s and 70s started moving into the ivory towers and becoming professors and teachers. There has been some "scholarly" work over the years, but it has been marginalized in most corners. In fact, according to surveys, many modern professors of history and government believe and have instructed students in the philosophy "had there never been a Genghis Khan, a George Washington, a Thomas Jefferson or a George Patton, history would have created one. Therefore their stories are less important than the social movements of the era in which these men lived."

It is such a wonderful collectivist mentality that strips away the essence of individual achievement and truly strikes at the heart of this nation's identity, especially in matters of military achievement and history. It won't be long before this insidious historical philosophy is applied to artists, businessmen and women, scientists, statesmen, and inventors. We have even allowed the word "hero" to be redefined in this culture as anyone who puts on a uniform of any kind or has a good thought. It no longer describes a man or woman who faces adversity and overcomes incredible odds and circumstances to succeed.

The "P.C." mentality, which is so prevalent among modern scholars and their students, is dangerous and threatens this nation's existence by rewriting a glorious past to conform to a collaborative academic standard that almost seems embarrassed by America's success. It is time to end it and time for U.S. citizens to sit up and start putting our historical house back in order. We have one Hell of a story to tell the world and, if we let it sink into the mire of politics, posturing and academic intolerance, it will be lost forever.

Source



A religion of evil

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is arguably the bravest and most remarkable woman of our times. To understand why this 37-year-old woman is extraordinary, she must be assessed in the context of the forces pitted against her in her twin struggles to force the Western world to take note of Islam's divinely ordained enslavement of women, and to force the Islamic world to account for it.

A series of incidents this week placed the forces she battles in stark relief. Sunday Muslims shot up the Omariyah elementary school in Gaza. One man was killed and six were wounded in the onslaught. The murderers attacked because the UN-run school in Rafah had organized a sports day for the children, in which little boys would be playing with little girls. The idea that that boys and girls might play sports together was too much for the righteous believers. It was an insult to Islam, they said. And so they decided to kill the little boys and girls.

On May 3, in Gujrat, Pakistan, Muslims detonated a bomb at the gate of a girls' school. Their righteous wrath was raised by the notion that girls would learn to read and write. That too, they felt, is an insult to Islam.

On April 28, US soldiers in Iraq discovered detonation wires across the street from the newly built Huda Girls' school in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. They followed the wire to its source and discovered the school had been built as a deathtrap. The pious Muslims who constructed the school had filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath the floor. They built artillery shells into the ceiling and the floor. To save the world for Allah, they decided to butcher little girls.

And the brutality is not limited to the Middle East. Last month in Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women's rights activist Kadra was brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously calling out "Allah Akhbar." She was attacked for exposing the fact that inside their mosques in Norway, Norwegian imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of Allah.

LATE LAST year Hirsi Ali published her memoir, Infidel. In describing her own life, what she actually explains are the two competing human impulses - conformity and individualism. In her own life, the clash of the two has been played out on the stage of Islamic ascendance and Western cultural collapse. Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia to a politically active father who sought to free his country from Said Barre's Marxist dictatorship. Forced to flee the country with her family, Hirsi Ali's childhood in Arabia and Africa revolved along the axis of Islamic ascendance at the hand of the Saudi-financed Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini's Iran.

Hirsi Ali's rebellion against Islam was personal, not political. As a young girl and later as a young woman, she found herself abused and stifled by the dictates of Islam just as her youthful spirit wished most to take flight. As a five-year-old in Somalia, she screamed in pain and shock when her grandmother tied her down and had a man with a knife mutilate her genitals. Living in Saudi Arabia she was struck by the oppressiveness of the "true Islam." Why, she wondered were she and her mother and sister prohibited from leaving their apartment without a male relative escorting them? As an adolescent in Nairobi she wondered why the enjoyment she felt in the company of boys was sinful.

Why did her mother need to suffer the humiliation of polygamy? Why could she not choose her own husband? Why was she told by one and all that her normal human impulses to seek love, respect and compassion and think for herself were sinful and evil?

More here



The Subjection of Islamic Women -- And the fecklessness of American feminism

The subjection of women in Muslim societies--especially in Arab nations and in Iran--is today very much in the public eye. Accounts of lashings, stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news, and searing memoirs by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi have become major best-sellers. One might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening.

If you go to the websites of major women's groups, such as the National Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the National Council for Research on Women, or to women's centers at our major colleges and universities, you'll find them caught up with entirely other issues, seldom mentioning women in Islam. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today's campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world.

It is not that American feminists are indifferent to the predicament of Muslim women. Nor do they completely ignore it. For a brief period before September 11, 2001, many women's groups protested the brutalities of the Taliban. But they have never organized a full-scale mobilization against gender oppression in the Muslim world. The condition of Muslim women may be the most pressing women's issue of our age, but for many contemporary American feminists it is not a high priority. Why not?

The reasons are rooted in the worldview of the women who shape the concerns and activities of contemporary American feminism. That worldview is--by tendency and sometimes emphatically--antagonistic toward the United States, agnostic about marriage and family, hostile to traditional religion, and wary of femininity. The contrast with Islamic feminism could hardly be greater.

Writing in the New Republic in 1999, philosopher Martha Nussbaum noted with disapproval that "feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States." Too many fashionable gender theorists, she said, have lost their dedication to the public good. Their "hip quietism . . . collaborates with evil."

This was a frontal assault, and prominent academic feminists chastised Nussbaum in the letters column. Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton pointed out the dangers of Nussbaum's "good versus evil scheme." Wrote Scott, "When Robespierre or the Ayatollahs or Ken Starr seek to impose their vision of the 'good' on the rest of society, reigns of terror follow and democratic politics are undermined." Gayatri Spivak, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia, accused Nussbaum of "flag waving" and of being on a "civilizing mission." None of the letter writers addressed her core complaint: Too few feminist theorists are showing concern for the millions of women trapped in blatantly misogynist cultures outside the United States.

One reason is that many feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism and find it very hard to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. They are far more comfortable finding fault with American society for minor inequities (the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club, the "underrepresentation" of women on faculties of engineering) than criticizing heinous practices beyond our shores. The occasional feminist scholar who takes the women's movement to task for neglecting the plight of foreigners is ignored or ruled out of order.

Take psychology professor Phyllis Chesler. She has been a tireless and eloquent champion of the rights of women for more than four decades. Unlike her tongue-tied colleagues in the academy, she does not hesitate to speak out against Muslim mistreatment of women. In a recent book, The Death of Feminism, she attributes the feminist establishment's unwillingness to take on Islamic sexism to its support of "an isolationist and America-blaming position." She faults it for "embracing an anti-Americanism that is toxic, heartless, mindless and suicidal." The sisterhood has rewarded her with excommunication. A 2006 profile in the Village Voice reports that, among academic feminists, "Chesler arouses the vitriol reserved for traitors."

But Chesler is right. In the literature of women's studies, the United States is routinely portrayed as if it were just as oppressive as any country in the developing world. Here is a typical example of what one finds in popular women's studies textbooks (from Women: A Feminist Perspective, now in its fifth edition):

The word "terrorism" invokes images of furtive organizations. . . . But there is a different kind of terrorism, one that so pervades our culture that we have learned to live with it as though it were the natural order of things. Its target is females--of all ages, races, and classes. It is the common characteristic of rape, wife battery, incest, pornography, harassment. . . . I call it "sexual terrorism."

The primary focus is on the "terror" at home. Katha Pollitt, a columnist at the Nation, talks of "the common thread of misogyny" connecting Christian Evangelicals to the Taliban:

It is important to remember just how barbarous and cruel the Taliban were. Yet it is also important not to use their example to obscure or deny the common thread of misogyny that connects them with Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. . . .

In a similar vein, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich characterizes Christian evangelical movements as "Christian Wahhabism," using the name of the sect that is the state religion of Saudi Arabia and the inspiration for Osama bin Laden. Eve Ensler, lionized author of The Vagina Monologues, makes the same point somewhat differently in her popular lecture "Afghanistan is Everywhere":

We all have different forms of enforced burqas. Every culture has it. Whether it's an idea or a fascist tyranny of what women are supposed to look like--so that women go to the extremes of liposuction, anorexia and bulimia to achieve it--or whether it's being covered in a burqa, we all have deep, profound, ongoing daily forms of oppression.

On most American campuses there are small coteries of self-described "vagina warriors" looking for ways to expose and make much of the ravages of patriarchy. Feminists like Pollitt, Ehrenreich, and Ensler can cite several decades of women's studies research supporting the charge that our culture is ruinous for women. Many scholars--including Camille Paglia, Daphne Patai, Noretta Koertge, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Christine Rosen, and myself--have questioned the quality of the findings and warned that the studies are twisted and unreliable. But academic feminists rarely engage with such criticism. They dismiss it as "backlash."

Soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Katha Pollitt wrote the introduction to a book called Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror. It aimed to show that reactionary religious movements everywhere are targeting women. Says Pollitt:

In Bangladesh, Muslim fanatics throw acid in the faces of unveiled women; in Nigeria, newly established shariah courts condemn women to death by stoning for having sex outside of wedlock. . . . In the United States, Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists have forged a powerful right-wing political movement focused on banning abortion, stigmatizing homosexuality and limiting young people's access to accurate information about sex.

Pollitt casually places "limiting young people's access to accurate information about sex" and opposing abortion on the same plane as throwing acid in women's faces and stoning them to death. Her hostility to the United States renders her incapable of distinguishing between private American groups that stigmatize gays and foreign governments that hang them. She has embraced a feminist philosophy that collapses moral categories in ways that defy logic, common sense, and basic decency.

Eve Ensler takes this line of reasoning to equally ludicrous lengths. In 2003 she gave a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University in which, like Pollitt, she claimed that women everywhere are oppressed and subordinate:

I think that the oppression of women is universal. I think we are bonded in every single place of the world. I think the conditions are exactly the same [her emphasis]. I think the nature of the oppression--whether it's acid burning in one country, or female genital mutilation in another, or gang rapes in the parking lots in high schools of the suburbs--it's the same idea. . . . The systematic global oppression of women is completely across the globe.

Though Ensler's perspective is warped, her courage and desire to help are commendable. She went to Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban and smuggled out now-famous footage of a terrified woman in a burqa being executed at close range by a man with an AK-47. Ensler has firsthand knowledge of the unique horrors of Islamic gender fascism. But her "feminist theory" obliterates distinctions between what goes on in Afghanistan and what goes on in Beverly Hills:

I went from Beverly Hills where women were getting vaginal laser rejuvenation surgery--paying four thousand dollars to get their labias trimmed to make them symmetrical because they didn't like the imbalance. And I flew to Kenya where [women were working to stop] the practice of female genital mutilation. And I said to myself, "What is wrong with this picture?"

A better question is: What is wrong with Eve Ensler? These two surgical phenomena are completely different in both scale and purpose. The number of American women who undergo "vaginal labial rejuvenation" is minuscule: There were 793 such procedures in 2005, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. By contrast, a World Health Organization 2000 fact sheet reports: "Today, the number of girls and women who have undergone female genital mutilation is estimated at between 100 and 140 million. It is estimated that each year, a further 2 million girls are at risk of undergoing FGM."

The women who elect laser surgery, moreover, are voluntarily seeking relief from physical irregularities that cause them embarrassment or inhibit their sexual enjoyment. The practitioners of genital mutilation, in countries such as Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, believe that removing sensitive parts of the anatomy is the best way to control young women's sexual urges and assure chastity. Genital cutting causes great pain and suffering and often permanently impairs a female's capacity for sexual pleasure. Thus, the intentions of the handful of American adults who choose labial surgery for themselves are exactly the opposite of those of the African parents and elders who insist on cutting the genitals of millions of girls.

Given her capacity for conceptual confusion, it is perhaps not surprising that Ensler cites "gang rape in a suburban high school parking lot" to show how women in America are menaced. Yes, that is an atrocity. But it happens rarely, and America's allegedly "misogynist" culture reacts to it with revulsion and severe punishments.

Happily, not all women's groups follow the lead of the Enslers, the Pollitts, and the women's studies theorists. The Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) has been intelligently fighting the mistreatment of women in the Muslim world for several years. In 1997, in a heroic effort to expose the crimes of the Taliban, Eleanor Smeal, the president of FMF, with the help of Mavis and Jay Leno, created a vital national campaign complete with rallies, petitions, and fundraisers. It was a good example of what can be achieved when a women's group seriously seeks to address the mistreatment of women outside the United States. The FMF, working with human rights groups, helped to persuade the United States and the United Nations to deny formal recognition to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It helped convince the oil company UNOCAL not to build a pipeline across Afghanistan, and it brought the oppression of women living under radical Islamic law into clear relief for all the world to see.

But Smeal and her organization soon found themselves attacked by the same monitors of rectitude who disparaged Martha Nussbaum. Ann Russo, director of women's and gender studies at Chicago's DePaul University (writing in the International Feminist Journal of Politics), accused the FMF of practicing a kind of "imperial feminism." Said Russo:

The FMF's campaign narrative is one of colonialist protection rather than of solidarity. . . . [It] capitalizes on the images of prominent white Western women, like Mavis Leno, Eleanor Smeal and other women politicians and celebrity figures, who construct themselves as "free" and "liberated" and thus in the best position to "save" Afghan women.

Today, the Feminist Majority Foundation continues to support Muslim women around the world, but the effort has lost much of its momentum. Most of the foundation's current work is directed against what it perceives as injustices suffered by women in America.

On February 20, 2007, a Pakistani women's rights activist and provincial minister for social welfare, Zilla Huma Usman, was shot to death by a Muslim fanatic for not wearing a veil. And he had a second reason for killing her: She had encouraged girls in her community to take part in outdoor sports. The plight of women like Usman does not figure in NOW's "Six Priority Items," although Global Feminism is one of the 19 subjects it designates as "Other Important Issues." NOW hardly mentions Muslim women, except in the context of the demand that the U.S. military withdraw from Iraq. So what sort of issue does the flagship feminist organization consider important?

NOW has just launched a 2007 "Love Your Body" calendar as part of its ongoing initiative of the same name. The body calendar warns of an increase in eating disorders and includes a photograph celebrating the shape of pears. There is also an image of the Statue of Liberty with the caption, "Give me your curves, your wrinkles, your natural beauty yearning to breathe free." The calendar bears these inspiring words: "None of us is free until we are all free."

To breathe free, college women are encouraged to organize "Love Your Body" evenings. NOW suggests they host "Indulgence" parties: "Invite friends over and encourage them to wear whatever makes them feel good--sweat suits, flip flops, pajamas--and serve delicious, decadent foods or silly snacks without the guilt. Urge everyone to come prepared to talk about their feelings and experiences."

This is pathetic. To be sure, serious eating disorders afflict a small percentage of women. But much larger numbers suffer because poor eating habits and inactivity render them overweight, even obese. NOW should not be encouraging college girls to indulge themselves in ways detrimental to their well-being. Nor should it be using the language of human rights in discussing the weight problems of American women.

The inability to make simple distinctions shows up everywhere in contemporary feminist thinking. The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World, edited by geographer Joni Seager, is a staple in women's studies classes in universities. It was named "Reference Book of the Year" by the American Library Association and has received other awards. Seager, formerly a professor of women's studies and chair of geography at the University of Vermont, is now dean of environmental studies at York University in Toronto. Her atlas, a series of color-coded maps and charts, documents the status of women, highlighting the countries where women are most at risk for poverty, illiteracy, and oppression.

One map shows how women are kept "in their place" by restrictions on their mobility, dress, and behavior. Somehow the United States comes out looking as bad in this respect as Uganda: Both countries are shaded dark yellow, to signify extremely high levels of restriction. Seager explains that in parts of Uganda, a man can claim an unmarried woman for his wife by raping her. The United States gets the same rating because, Seager says, "state legislators enacted 301 anti-abortion measures between 1995 and 2001." Never mind that the Ugandan practice is barbaric, while the activism surrounding abortion in the United States is a sign of a contentious and free democracy working out its disagreements. Besides which, Seager's categories obscure the fact that in Uganda, abortion is illegal and "unsafe abortion is the leading cause of maternal mortality" (so states a 2005 report by the Gutt macher Institute), while American abortion law, even after the recent adoption of state regulations, is generally considered among the most liberal of any nation.

On another map the United States gets the same rating for domestic violence as Pakistan. Seager reports that in the United States, "22 percent-35 percent of women who seek emergency medical assistance at hospital are there for reasons of domestic violence." Wrong. She apparently misread a Justice Department study showing that 22 percent-35 percent of women who go to hospitals because of violent attacks are there for reasons of domestic violence. When this correction is made, the figure for domestic-violence victims in emergency rooms drops to a fraction of 1 percent. Why would Seager so uncritically seize on a dubious statistic? Like many academic feminists, she is eager to show that American women live under an intimidating system of "patriarchal authority" that is comparable to those found in many less developed countries. Never mind that this is wildly false.

Hard-line feminists such as Seager, Pollitt, Ensler, the university gender theorists, and the NOW activists represent the views of only a tiny fraction of American women. Even among women who identify themselves as feminists (about 25 percent), they are at the radical extreme. But in the academy and in most of the major women's organizations, the extreme is the mean. The hard-liners set the tone and shape the discussion. This is a sad state of affairs. Muslim women could use moral, intellectual, and material support from the West to improve their situation. But only a rational, reality-based women's movement would be capable of actually helping. Women who think that looking like a pear is an essential human right are not valuable allies.

More here

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

***************************

No comments: