The Failure of Feminism?

There is an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week by Phyllis Chesler, author of The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle for Women's Freedom. The article (only available through a subscription), entitled, The Failure of Feminism, speaks volumes about why feminist academics and journalists in the US fail to support women who are truly being abused in the Islamic world:

Islamic terrorists have declared jihad against the "infidel West" and against all of us who yearn for freedom. Women in the Islamic world are treated as subhumans. Although some feminists have sounded the alarm about this, a much larger number have remained silent. Why is it that many have misguidedly romanticized terrorists as freedom fighters and condemned both America and Israel as the real terrorists or as the root cause of terrorism? In the name of multicultural correctness (all cultures are equal, formerly colonized cultures are more equal), the feminist academy and media appear to have all but abandoned vulnerable people Muslims, as well as Christians, Jews, and Hindus to the forces of reactionary Islamism.

Because feminist academics and journalists are now so heavily influenced by left ways of thinking, many now believe that speaking out against head scarves, face veils, the chador, arranged marriages, polygamy, forced pregnancies, or female genital mutilation is either "imperialist" or "crusade-ist." Postmodernist ways of thinking have also led feminists to believe that confronting narratives on the academic page is as important and world-shattering as confronting jihadists in the flesh and rescuing living beings from captivity.

It is as a feminist — not as an anti-feminist — that I have felt the need to write a book to show that something has gone terribly wrong among our thinking classes. The multicultural feminist canon has not led to independent, tolerant, diverse, or objective ways of thinking. On the contrary. It has led to conformity, totalitarian thinking, and political passivity. Although feminists indulge in considerable nostalgia for the activist 60s and 70s, in some ways they are no different from the rest of the left-leaning academy, which also suffers from the disease of politically correct passivity.

I guess for these postmodern feminists, it would be seem too "masculine" to take any real action to help the women in Islamic countries. God forbid, they might be accused of the same type of imperialistic behavior they have been blaming on the current administration. Then they might have to admit to themselves that the United States is not so bad afterall. In their mind, what a failure of feminism that would be.