Woman as Reason

Malala and American Left
Terry Moon

Meredith Tax, a women's liberationist and political activist since the late 1960s, author of The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917, and now US Director of the Centre for Secular Space, a think tank formed to oppose fundamentalism and promote universality in human rights, has recently written an important and controversial blog post, "Code Pink, the Taliban and Malala Yousafzai" (http://www. opendemocracy.net/5050/meredith-tax/code-pink-tal-iban-and-malala-yousafzai).

In her post she takes up the delegation of Code Pink, a US peace group that purports to be feminist, to Pakistan, where they marched with former cricket champion turned politician Imran Khan to the borders of South Waziristan, a Taliban stronghold. There they protested US drone strikes that have killed hundreds of innocent civilians, including children, and apologized for the strikes. However, they had not a word to say about the many hundreds killed in Pakistan by the Taliban, or those killed in Mumbai, India, by Lashkar-e-Taiba, part of a coalition of terrorist groups supported by their host and guide, Imran Khan.

What Code Pink didn't see coming, as Meredith Tax reports, is that while they were in Pakistan, "in nearby Swat, another Pakistani child, 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai, was gunned down by the Pakistani Taliban because she was an advocate of education for girls."

Tax continues, "No turn of events could more forcefully illustrate the idiocy of the US peace movement's one-sided approach to solidarity."

The outcry against the shooting of Malala was so fierce and so passionate that, as Tax points out, "even Imran Khan had to condemn it, though it took him ten hours to do so and he didn't mention the Taliban." As for Code Pink: "Code Pink's Washington office also did a hasty press release Oct. 10 saying they prayed for Malala's recovery and offering $1,000 to her school, while making 'a connection between drone attacks and growing extremism in Pakistan'-as if there were no Taliban before there were drones."

Tax's post let the voices of women in the region speak eloquently for themselves. What they said, loud and clear, was that they opposed both US imperialism's drones and-as Afiya Zia, a feminist researcher and activist based in Karachi, Pakistan, said-we '"simultaneously oppose the masculinist misogyny and non-democratic rule and violence employed by local authoritarian forces including the army, tribal rulers, landed political rulers, the ulama/clergy or indeed, any patriarchal forces.'"

Scathingly, Tax conjectures that, "Perhaps the US antiwar movement is so small because of its failure to develop a politics that is critical of both US imperialism and fundamentalist movements like the Taliban."

There were plenty of angry responses to Tax's post, but what those who responded could not do-including those from Code Pink and the other so-called peace delegates-was to bring themselves to actually condemn the Taliban as they did the US. Oh, well, yes, now that Tax brings it up, and now that they did gun down a 14-year-old school girl who got all that press, they grudgingly condemn the Taliban too. Many used the argument that, since they were Americans, only the US deserved their condemnation. With that logic, Pakistanis could only condemn the Taliban and leave condemning the US to others.     [source : NEWS & Letters]

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 24, Dec 23-29, 2012

Your Comment if any