Feminist rhetoric was co-opted to justify the war on terror
Evidence
The rights of women in particular have been frequently invoked to justify the war on terror. One of the most celebrated high-level interventions came when U.S. First Lady Laura Bush, deputizing for her husband in his weekly radio broadcast to the nation in November 2001, took oppression of women in Taliban-held Afghanistan as her topic. “Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror,” she opined, “not just because our hearts break for the women and children in Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us.” Here, smuggled in with sympathy for the powerless, we find the additional frisson provided by the final clause: the Taliban and their ilk have their own imperial designs on us, so acting to depose them satisfies both our human altruism and our long-term self-interest. Hyperbole masquerading as common sense is a hallmark of the discourse and brings forth rhetorical connections that would otherwise surely be debatable; Laura Bush ended her broadcast by observing that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” effectively challenging the more usual solidarities between feminism and antiwar struggles. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 210
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the earlier chapter on colonial feminism and connects to how Hamid and Naqvi’s fiction contests this instrumentalization of women’s rights. — connects to: NGOs function as imperial weapons in feminist guise in the Afghan war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 311; Bush used women’s rights and democracy to justify war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 455
- SEED: The phrase ‘hyperbole masquerading as common sense’ is a ready analytical handle for reading the rhetorical moves in both novels.
- SHARE: Laura Bush’s 2001 broadcast framing women’s rights as a terrorism-fight issue is a compact example to cite in the essay.