Alison:

I haven't shut up for long unfortunately. But this is important, I think.

<snip>
Not responding to your post at all, Candice, but to Tim's, and to various
implied or explicit accusations that feminist perspectives are
reductionist, ridiculous, over simplistic, irrelevant or whatever...
[Alison]
<snip>

That 'various' hides a lot. At any rate, some of what has been said has
indeed struck me as simplistic and reductive. However, a criticism of points
poorly thought out and/or poorly expressed isn't an attack on 'feminist
perspectives'; it's a localised critique. Could withholding it be anything
other than patronising? Isn't 'feminist' here self-conferred, a seal of
approval; no more than that?

A couple of posts back, I suggested that _some_ female perspectives were
being erased not by male contributors but by other points being made: you
yourself, for example, queried Muslim women's defence of the burqa. My own
impression, as I tried to hint, is that for many young Muslim women the veil
has been a radical statement. It was for my (female) dentist's 24 yr old
Bangladeshi assistant whose clinical hijab hid her face but didn't inhibit
her splendidly self confident and acerbic dealings with tiresome people such
as me. (With shrill mistiming, she and her doctor husband emigrated to NY
not long before the WTC attack.)

And for many Dalit women the veil has been a route out of another sort of
oppression, of course.

<snip>
Geraldine's pointing out that the wtc terrorists were, without exception,
male (if not necessarily young or impoverished, except maybe on the West
Bank) - and I haven't yet heard of any al Quaeda members who are women [...]
seems to be dismissed with scorn
<snip>

FWIW, the girlfriend of the so-called 20th man, 'Zacarias Moussaoui', the
trainee pilot who didn't want to know how to take off or to land, _is_ being
sought as an al Qa'ida terrorist who had played a 'pivotal' role.

Al Qa'ida may or may not have female participants. It's quite an important
point: _not_ so that men finally demonstrate that women are just as violent
after all but so that we can all learn something substantive about how
gender operates in this sort of subculture. Should Fouad the housewife be
found to be making the fatoush or boiling up the melokhia for Ahmed the
bomber, that may or may not suggest something about women behave and/or are
allowed to behave. But if she knew about the semtex and the alarm clock it
won't exonerate her.

Earlier I suggested a correlation between male participation and the nature
of Islamist terrorism & its roots in Muslim cultures. I don't see how that
was scornful. (Geraldine's recommended Lionel Tiger, now that I've read him,
incorporates many of the caveats I advised; he says something broadly
similar, BTW). Potentially, the trajectory from, say, Leila Khaled to
'Mohammed Atta' may be as interesting as the apparent class similarity
between Mr 'Atta' and various SDS/WU members a generation ago.

<snip>
Brecht's [...] admonition, which I have always liked, on the importance of
"crude thinking".
<snip>

I like it too. But I'd link Brecht's 'learn[ing] how to think crudely' with
Adorno's observation that 'the potential for freedom calls for criticising
what an inevitable formalisation has made of that potential'. 'Crude
thinking', in other words, isn't a license for either _sloppy_ thinking or
for unexamined platitudes; it's a call for thought that is robust enough to
generate epistemological breaks.

Although it's been suggested that a 'feminist perspective' is being
compulsorily hushed, some sort of gender discussion has occupied a lot of
bandwidth for some time. By contrast, Candice has made a number of excellent
points in quite another direction. Which _have_ been ignored more or less.

<snip>
And there are say the Tamil Tigers, many of whom are girls
<snip>

Why 'girls' rather than 'women'? Aren't you using a chauvinist tone of voice
to diminish their significance for a mode of interpretation with which you
disagree? You did something broadly similar when you presented a
mock-dismissal of your views on the burqa as 'Western imperialism'. The
various Tamil separatist groups, including the TTs and the Black Tigers, may
be comparable to the Christian and secular Muslim components of Palestinian
violence rather than to the Islamist groups currently being linked with al
Qa'ida and what I called the latest *terrorist function* over in
Pashtounistan.

<snip>
But there seems to be some confusion about whether we are talking about
verities of human nature or certain kinds of socialisations, which can lead
to certain kinds of behaviour and aggressions (including rape).
<snip>

I'd put it slightly differently: Richard Dillon's 'Radlib' gibes are much
more targeted than tends to be acknowledged hereabouts. The cultural
relativist consensus is, by and large, a (relatively) well-heeled,
well-educated, post-whatever Western phenomenon. Obviously the
WTC attack can't just be filed away as an example of another culture's funny
little ways, though that is exactly what we tend to do with Grozny, for the
most part. The Right (the three best known political Bs, for example) aren't
afraid to reincorporate cultural absolutism in either its strong or its weak
form into their agenda. The Left is AWOL at the moment.

A great deal of what has been said here about the genderedness of the
current terror seems to me (a) a trip down fairly well worn paths in which
the activities of al Qa'ida or whoever are simply reduced to a sort of
firework show along the way, and (b) a very conservative solution to the
dilemmas faced by the Left: it allows a subtext of absolutism whilst
continuing some sort of lipservice to the old values, the old cultural
relativism.

But I've delighted you long enough. I shall become a Trappist, if I can.

Christopher Walker