Chesler takes heat from feminist colleagues

Feminist Phyllis Chesler

Is It Racist to Condemn Fanaticism? - Phyllis Chesler

Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticize Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learned that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes - and that such "colourful tribal customs" are absolutely, not relatively, evil.

Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonized me as a racist "Islamophobe" for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid we will be overrun by Sharia [Islamic law]. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas...

Now is the time for Western intellectuals to stand with [moderate Islamic] dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals.

Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

The writer is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the City University of New York.

(Times-UK)