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One of the central aims of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which will feature events on more than 100 college campuses from October 22-26, is to highlight the brutal oppression of women by Islamic radicals and by the regimes they control such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.Despite their vigilance in behalf of women’s rights in America and other Western nations, Women’s Studies Departments across the nation have been strangely passive in the face of the barbaric treatment of women in Islamic regimes. Numerous hours are spent in the classroom, dissecting the reasons for the ‘wage gap’ in America, violence against women and the ‘privileges’ accorded Caucasian males. But courses on the plight of women in Islamic regimes are strangely absent. Where there are a few courses that touch on Islamic women in Women’s Studies programs, the focus is often cultural and literary, while the abuses go unmentioned.This failure to confront the abuse of women who live in Islamic countries stands in stark contrast to the mission statements of many Women’s Studies departments, which describe their focus as the inequality that women suffer in patriarchal societies. Thus the official mission statement of the Penn State Women’s Studies Department declares that “As a field of study, Women’s Studies analyzes the unequal distribution of power and resources by gender.” Why then does the Penn State department not offer a course analyzing the extreme inequalities that characterize the status of women in the Islamic world?Another mission statement from the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Rhode Island is even more explicit:The discipline of Women’s Studies has a vision of a world free from sexism. By necessity, freedom from sexism must include a commitment to freedom from nationalism; class, ethnic, racial, and heterosexual bias; economic exploitation; religious persecution; ageism; and ableism. Women’s Studies seeks to identify, understand, and challenge ideologies and institutions that knowingly or unknowingly oppress and exploit some for the advantage of others, or deny fundamental human rights. Thus, Women’s Studies envisions a world in which all persons can develop their fullest potential.Despite this vision, the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Rhode Island offers no course whose subject is women in Islam. Instead, it refers to students to a course in the history department on “Women in Muslim Societies,” which covers “gender relations in the modern Middle East through novels, poetry, and oral histories, as well as through historical and anthropological studies.” But even though this course has been listed since 2005, no such course exists because there are no professors available to teach it.To rectify this gap in knowledge and concern, students at several schools participating in Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week plan to hold sit-ins or silent protests at the offices of their university’s Women’s Studies Department or Women’s Center with the goal of encouraging them to provide course offerings on the abuse of women in Islam.In preparation for these demonstrations, the David Horowitz Freedom Center researched Women’s Studies course descriptions at eight of the schools where students plan to petition their Women’s Studies programs to correct this absence: Pennsylvania State University, Temple University, George Washington University, the University of Rhode Island, the University of Pittsburgh, Emory University, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania.To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah....
