ROY EDROSO

Cover Story

While some of us have our beefs with the War Against Terror, the liberation of Muslim women from the confines of veil and burka, sartorial strictures heretofore rigidly enforced by the Taliban, seems to have given everyone in the West a good feeling. Or, at least, nearly everyone.

News broadcasts, magazines, and editorial cartoons were ecstatic when Kabul fell and Muslim women began to peel off. "22-year-old Masuda...proudly exposed her face on a main street in Kabul on Saturday," MSNBC reported after that city's liberation. "She told how much she hated the all-enveloping burqa under which the ruling Taliban had required virtually all women to hide. 'It gave me headaches,' she said." Tahmeena Faryal of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) told the Washington Post in October, "If the Taliban weaken, the burka would definitely be thrown out in Afghanistan with anger." From the looks of things, Faryal was right.

Even the Bush administration has taken this imagery and run with it. In a November interview on Indonesian television, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz denounced "the spectacle of people saying the Muslim religion requires that women cover themselves with a burka" as a perversion of Islam.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead that he balks at the uncovered Muslim female head? Well, yes, at National Review Online.

NRO columnist Stanley Kurtz is upset that in the wake of the aforementioned liberation, "some Americans called for a government-imposed program of feminist reform." Kurtz does not oblige us with the names of these reformers. He mentions the author of The Vagina Monologues along the way, but establishes no causal relationship (she's just there for the gratuitous slur, I imagine). But never mind. "Instead of being damned as a senseless outrage," he writes, "veiling deserves a qualified defense." (The conflation of burkas with veils, by the way, is Kurtz's, not ours.)

Kurtz then favors us with a long explanation of the history and social meaning of the veil: "By veiling, women are shielded from the possibility of a dishonoring premarital affair." Readers will be inclined to foot-shuffling and nail-biting during this section, as it hardly addresses the obvious question: What relevance has any of this if women want to take off their burkas and veils?

Throughout the article, Kurtz ignores this question, and talks as if the West were the cultural aggressor and Afghan women the aggrieved party. (One assumes he feels perfectly okay about bombing Afghan women--this being a conservative publication, after all.) "The United States ought not to be in the business of browbeating Muslim women out of their veils," says Kurtz. Again, who's browbeating? Those gals in Time looked happy to uncover their faces. Elsewhere: "Conservatives are eager to spread Western values across the globe, and when it comes to democracy and the free market, they have a point. But the conservative 'realist' tradition in foreign policy warns against endangering ourselves through attempts to remake the world in our image." So we can remake their politics and their economy without peril, but if we give their women the facial all-clear, we're "endangering ourselves."

Near the end, we finally get a glimpse of what animates Kurtz's concern: He is, it turns out, a culture warrior in the Falwell mode, and he can't abide the introduction of degenerate Western ways into Afghanistan: "Muslim fundamentalists have turned on America as a convenient scapegoat for the agonies and contradictions of modernization in their own society," admits Kurtz. "Yet distorted and unjust though it is, their logic contains a kernel of truth. The Western movies, television shows, and other media that now reach the Middle East tell of a world in which premarital sex and love-marriages are the norm--a world in which the extended family counts for little, and the lineage for nothing. This is what most alarms Muslim traditionalists."

So that's what this was all about. Kurtz is speaking not for Arab women, but for the menfolk who are their natural protectors. The ladies may think they like their heads uncovered, but the native males know better. Mistah Kurtz, he knows, too.

Kurtz's article seems pretty wacky now, but wait a few months. As Afghanistan stabilizes, and the cables are laid and entertainment centers put in, expect one of the stations to carry a Muslim 700 Club, starring choleric clerics who will denounce the general wickedness of new Afghan culture--the boys with their hip-hop, the girls with their piercings! And expect Kurtz to make many special appearances as a friend from beyond the seas who tried to warn them.

Kurtz
Faryal
MSNBC article
Wolfowitz

Closet Scene

Speaking of lone voices, conservative LAGGAWU (Look, A Gay Guy Agrees With Us) Andrew Sullivan explains why he finds it "depressing that there might be such a thing" as the new Gay Channel proposed by MTV and Showtime. (The very idea!) Given "the mainstreaming of openly gay writers, thinkers, actors, sportsmen and women, teachers, priests, et al into the regular culture," he asks, "Isn't a retreat into a specially designated niche channel something of a step backward?"

One pictures Sullivan in a prayer shawl and pais, finger raised, declaiming Talmudically, "Yes, Will & Grace is funny--but is it good for the gays?"

We shouldn't make fun, perhaps. The notion of Gay TV hits Sullivan hard, so hard that he forsakes even his usual pretense at laissez-faire. "This is one instance," Sullivan adds, "when I worry that the free market might actually be a bad thing for gays." My, he is depressed! He sounds like your average righty, explaining why pornography doesn't deserve a place in the "free market."

One wonders why Sullivan limits himself to kvetching when many of his fellow conservatives would be ready, willing, and eager to help him take action. How about those lovable Freepers, of whom Sullivan has spoken warmly in the past? They love a good fight, especially when gay people are involved. Right now some Free Republic posters are hard at work trying to keep Virginia from toning down its anti-sodomy laws ("If someone gets AIDS by exercising their personal choice, don't expect me as a taxpayer to feel sorry for you," etc). As of now they're only bitching about the Gay Channel ("Does this mean that the alphabet networks will quit trying to shove the sodomites agenda at us!"), but with the proper leadership, they might get off the dime. How about it, Sullivan? Put up or shut up. Better yet, just shut up.

Sullivan on Gay Channel: http://www.andrewsullivan.com
Freep vs. gay rights bill: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/609370/posts
Freep on gay channel: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/608946/posts