Just, wow

I think Barbara Ehrenreich is a terrific writer, plus really smart. And I like her politics. If you don't read her excellent blog regularly, consider adding it to your list. She doesn't post every day, but when she does, it's worth reading. This week she takes on David Horowitz' Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week. Which is just, well, crazy. Horowitz*, a one-time Marxist/Leftist and now an occasional analyst for Fox News, is perhaps best-known for his efforts to secure "academic freedom" for conservatives amid the overwhelming liberalism of college campuses; he is also the one who put together the website DiscoverTheNetworks.org, which seeks to document the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy controlling the world.

Anyway, Horowitz is particularly keen to target feminist academics with his Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week efforts, as Ehrenreich notes in her post:

"A major purpose of this week is to wake up academic women to the threat posed by militant jihadism. According to the Week’s website, feminists, and particularly the women’s studies professors among them, have developed a masochistic fondness for Islamic fundamentalis[m]. Hence, as anti-Islamo-Fascist speakers fan out to the nation’s campuses this week, students are urged to stage “sit-ins in Women’s Studies Departments and campus Women’s Centers to protest their silence about the oppression of women in Islam.”"

The official speakers for the week-long event include Ann Coulter, former Sen. Rick Santorum, Daphne Patai* and Christina Hoff Summers*. Which, as Ehrenreich puts it: "These are the people who are going to save us from purdah?"

The word "fascism" is flying around a lot these days, on the left and on the right, and it's been making me nervous. If you're interested in the subject, check out the blog Orcinus. David Niewert and Sara Robinson have been documenting the activities of right-wing extremists in the US (and elsewhere) for quite a while, with special attention to eliminationist activities and rhetoric. Niewert's series of posts "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism," is particularly interesting (scroll down on the left column for links to the blog posts; they're also available, for a small donation, collected in a .pdf file).



*Yeah, yeah, I linked to the wikipedia entries on these folks. I know that wikipedia is often inaccurate and biased and part of the vast left-wing conspiracy & all, but there are links on all of those posts to source material -- including the original writings of each -- which may or may not be of interest to you. You want more balanced views of these folks? Follow the links in the posts.