Scapegoating Campus Feminists
Are women’s studies departments really endangering America?
The women’s studies department at George Washington University certainly doesn’t come across as a threatening institution. Overshadowed even on its own block by the large, glassy Benjamin T. Rome Hall and the Smith Hall of Art, the small, white brick townhouse at the corner of 22nd and I streets NW doesn’t even contain the offices of most of the faculty listed on the department’s website.
And yet, two weeks ago, students associated with the conservative Young America’s Foundation protested outside the department as a light rain fell, arguing that the university’s women’s study program was hindering the United States’ attempts to fight Islamic extremism. The students were participating in “Islamo-fascism Awareness Week,” a national event launched by David Horowitz’s Terrorism Awareness Project (an offshoot of his Horowitz Freedom Center) "to confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat."
Sergio Gor, president of the YAF chapter at GWU, explained why the small group of protesters chose that particular corner to pass out pamphlets and collect signatures on their petition denouncing Islamofascism. "We’re here in front of the women’s studies department, which is filled with self-described feminists," he said, "and yet you don’t hear them condemning radical Islam. Why are they not speaking out louder for women’s rights?"
Horowitz told Inside Higher Ed that during Islamofascism Awareness Week students at individual schools would research whether their campus’ women’s studies department addressed the issue of women in Islam, and would protest those that do not. "Women’s studies, as everybody knows…are about unequal power, the oppression of women, so if they don’t have a course on oppression of women in Islam, they should," said Horowitz.
This makes GWU somewhat of an odd choice for this particular protest. Kelly Pemberton, an associate professor of religion and a member of the women’s studies department, teaches a course called "Women in Islam." So it’s not as though the subject goes unaddressed at GWU.
Click here to read the rest of this article at www.prospect.org.
Jesse Singal is an associate editor at Campus Progress.
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