{"id":3012,"date":"2005-01-06T13:04:22","date_gmt":"2005-01-06T20:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2005\/01\/setting-the-record-straight\/"},"modified":"2005-01-06T13:04:22","modified_gmt":"2005-01-06T20:04:22","slug":"setting-the-record-straight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2005\/01\/06\/setting-the-record-straight\/","title":{"rendered":"Setting the record straight"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tInstapundit points to a Max Boot column<\/a> reviewing films from Afghanistan and Iraq which makes the following observation<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Ultimately, Osama’s masquerade unravels, and she faces a gruesome punishment from an Islamic court. The ending, which I won’t give away, is enough to make anyone shudder ? and give thanks that U.S. troops have toppled the Taliban. Yet I don’t recall a single Hollywood feminist expressing gratitude to the U.S. military or its commander in chief for the liberation of Afghan women. No doubt Streisand, Sarandon & Co. were too busy inveighing against the horrors perpetrated by John Ashcroft.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To which Matt Yglesias responds with a bit of misdirection<\/a> that’s obviously intended to make us believe the people Boot mentions actually supported the invasion:<\/p>\n

\nThe notion that the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in order to help Afghan women is, of course, preposterous. Look at his remarks from the time and you’ll see that though the Taliban’s oppression was certainly mentioned, the war was motivated by the small matter of 9-11 and al-Qaeda. Equally preposterous is the suggestion that feminists are or were unconcerned with the fate of Afghan women. When I heard this stuff in the winter of 2001-2002, I assumed it reflected a kind of ignorance coming from the right. Years after the evident, it’s just a kind of malicious slander. Check out the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Afghanistan page and take note of the fact that, unlike Boot and his friends, their interest in this topic didn’t begin in September of 2001.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The truth is that Boot is right and Yglesias is wrong. The Hollywood Feminists Boot mentions opposed the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban, a fact that can very easily be checked:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

The peace position was also taken by the Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism and War, an organization of about 80 feminists that includes women from Central Asia as well as such U.S. notables as Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, and Susan Sarandon. In a petition headlined “Not in Our Name,” the group declared, “We will not support the bombing or U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, for it would only punish suffering people and increase the hatred on which terrorists feed.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yglesias, consider yourself busted. The reversal of direction on Afghanistan on the part of some in the feminist establishment is one of the most shameful partisan flip-flops of recent times, but fortunately it wasn’t universal. Ellie Smeal apparently supported the invasion privately, contrary to my memory of events at the time and her public statements:<\/p>\n

Perhaps it’s no surprise that some feminists, including Smeal, now feel the backward and violent regime deserves whatever it gets. The rare overlap between feminist and military interests made for particularly warm relations in the greenroom at an NBC station in Los Angeles when Smeal met up with three generals who were about to appear on Chris Matthews’s Hardball. “They went off about the role of women in this effort and how imperative it was that women were now in every level of the air force and navy,” says Smeal, who found herself cheered by the idea of women flying F-16s. “It’s a different kind of war,” she says, echoing the president’s assessment of Operation Enduring Freedom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s too bad she didn’t go public with this sentiment, because if she had there wouldn’t be so much reason to point out that the position of the feminist establishment on Afghanistan was driven more by partisanship than by principle.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Instapundit points to a Max Boot column reviewing films from Afghanistan and Iraq which makes the following observation: Ultimately, Osama’s masquerade unravels, and she faces a gruesome punishment from an Islamic court. The ending, which I won’t give away, is enough to make anyone shudder ? and give thanks that U.S. troops have toppled the … Continue reading “Setting the record straight”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-MA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}