She was so “Broadway,” so “Babz,” she knew everyone in town, she was the one we all went to when we needed to get an obituary into the New York Times, (she never failed), or when someone needed a trustworthy physician, politician, publisher, publicist –or the proverbial shoulder to cry on. Either “Babz” was related to them by blood, by marriage, or through her own work. Or she’d read their work, contacted them, and behold, she could find them for you.

Although I knew her for nearly forty years, I rarely called her “Babz.” Well, maybe I did once or twice, trying it on for size, but I backed down, retreated into something less familial, more respectful. I am writing this hasty elegy to honor Barbara as someone who was especially dear to me. It is a personal reflection and not a formal or historic obituary.

I did not tell her that I loved her. Friends do not always use such language. I should have told her so. Since we go back to 1970-1971, I should have known that something momentous was up. In the last seven months, I noticed that Barbara was not herself. Suddenly, she was very calm and more philosophical than usual. She had a thoughtful, almost stately reserve about her. I should have asked: “What’s going on? Why are you so…weird? ”

Most of all, I should have told her how much her support sustained and blessed me.

Barbara died at 4am today, surrounded by those who loved her. There will be many obituaries for her which will extoll her many books and crusades–she, who has been called “The Ralph Nader of the Birth Control Pill.” Were she here today, we would no doubt laugh, groan, and despair over the fact that what used to be seen as a high compliment might really not be one at all.

Barbara was the most generous feminist I have ever known. Despite countless personal tragedies, including an intermittent childhood “career” in foster care which she rarely mentioned but which appears in a number of biographical sketches which she herself vetted; two painful marriages and divorces (about which I know too much); and despite being censored and therefore economically “fined” due to her heroic and visionary exposure of the pharmaceutical industry, Barbara was unfailingly kind to everyone. She had the wisdom and the temperament to continually mentor younger feminists. More: She remained kind and even supportive to other feminists with whom she may have disagreed.

For this alone, she deserves a posthumous Nobel Prize!

Barbara shared whatever she had. She led other writers to reviewers and to literary agents. (This is quite rare). Barbara was never petty. She envied no one. She was never really angry at anyone. Actually, there are some important exceptions but I will save these stories for another time.

Often, people who know each other for a long time aren’t always sure of where they first met. I believe Barbara and I might have seen each other around town in the late sixties, but we really “met” in 1971 in Washington, D.C. when she waited to speak to me after my lecture about women and psychiatry. Whispering, she said: “Everything you’ve said about how women are used in state asylums as personal maids by the staff is true. I know. My husband is a psychiatrist.”

From that moment on, Barbara supported my work in the area of “women and madness,” which was also the title of my first book. Her personal, political, and informational support was absolutely invaluable. She stood by me when I was attacked for “exaggerating” or even “imagining” the phenomenon of therapist-patient sex and when I was accused of being a “man hater,” even “crazy,” for daring to suggest that bias against women and other biases characterized most psychotherapeutic, psychiatric, and psycho-analytic practice.

It was Barbara who asked me to join her in co-founding the National Women’s Health Network (1974-1975) and due to her beneficent influence, that organization is still up and running. Alas, with her death, only three of the five co-founders remain alive.

Over the years, Barbara and I discussed and sometimes worked on many issues together: rape, health care, battered women, racism, divorce and custody battles, the various meanings of censorship, women’s health, including our reproductive and psychological health–but we also went to the opera, to movies, and to dinner together. She invited me to her conferences and parties and she came to mine.

Three months ago, Barbara attended my beloved son Ariel’s wedding. She was unusually quiet but managed to convey to me her pleasure at this profoundly happy event. (Barbara also chose some of Ariel’s writing for one of her anthologies; you can only imagine how pleased I was by her choice of authors).

Five years ago, Barbara quietly, privately came to my side when I was purged from a feminist listserv group to which we both belonged (I write about this in my book, The Death of Feminism). She told me that she did not want me to feel “cut off, isolated,” that she did not “understand why they kept attacking me.” These attacks pained her. “You are saying the most important things about women under Islam and you are telling the truth about anti-Semitism and Israel.”

In retrospect, I believe that Barbara recognized the high cost of telling the truth (or of telling an unpopular and threatening truth) since she, too had been shut out of many women’s magazines due to the ads that drug companies take in such venues.

She stood alone too–but she also felt nurtured by the huge women’s health movement that she helped to create. She would say: “Phyllis, don’t you think that the feminist health movement is the healthiest wing of feminism?” I would often agree.

Barbara/Babz/Baby: I will miss you every single day. Ordinarily, we would have been on the phone, talking about who had taken ill, and who had just died. But now it’s you, dear one, and I can no longer talk to you in the same way.

Although you were a proud Jew and supported the Jewish state, I know that you were not particularly religious. Thus, please forgive me if I offend you but surely, you deserve to be in Paradise (Gan Eden), as much as you deserve to be re-united with all the women whom we have both loved and lost to death in our own lifetimes.

I don’t think that you’re already organizing a protest movement in Heaven, as was once said right after Bella Abzug died. I think you are already gently advising and supporting others in Heaven; yes, that’s just the sort of thing you’d be doing.

May you rest in peace, may your soul be bound up with The Divine, and may your family and all those who loved you be comforted.

PLEASE NOTE: Barbara Seaman’s Memorial Service will take place on Thursday March 6th, 2008 at the Riverside Memorial Chapel. 180 West 76th St NYC at 5:30pm.

Talk Radio (The Mancow show) called last night and asked me to join them this morning to comment on the Obama-Farrakhan matter. And so I made a dutiful list of “talking points” and tried to overcome my professorial politeness in order to get a few words in edgewise on a wonderfully high-energy program. The interview will be posted in a few hours at Mancow.com and here’s some of what I said.

I believe that Obama is our first Muslim Presidential contender.

No, I am not saying that he secretly is or ever was a Muslim. Obama is a Muslim in the same way that Bill Clinton was allegedly our first Black President. He is , stylistically, a United Nations-style postmodern multi-cultural relativist and that means Obama may refuse to call barbarism by its rightful name if that barbarism is practiced by Muslims .

Also, on at least one very public occasion, there is a photograph of Obama failing (or refusing) to pledge alliegance to the American flag. When challenged on this and other questions of patriotism, Obama explained that the true American patriot is one who criticizes his country’s faults, not one who merely salutes its flag.

Obama might be the first Muslim French intellectual Presidential contender, a more politically correct and darker-skinned John Kerry or Howard Dean, and the Dreamboat of Code Pink and of the many high-profile but predominantly left-feminists who have been signing “feminist” petitions for Obama. For Obama–but not for Hillary, who may be the last women in position to run for the American Presidency for the next fifty years. I admit it: I actually dressed up to vote for Hillary in the New York primary since this was the first time in nearly fifty years that I had such an opportunity.

No, I am not saying that I will automatically vote for Hillary over McCain nor am I saying that McCain is My Guy. That is the subject for future musings. And now back to Barack.

When I characterize Obama as our first Muslim Presidential contender, I am not talking about the photo of Obama wearing a turban or the headgear of a Somali Elder. I am talking about his ties to Trinity United Church of Christ Pastor Jeremiah Wright (Obama has been a member for twenty years), and Pastor Wright’s ties to Farrakhan–who just last night bent over backward in his praise of Obama as our new Savior. Farrakhan addressed only the “black, brown, red, and yellow” people of America and of the world , not the “white” people, and compared Obama to the founder of the Nation of Islam, Fard Mohammed, whose mother was white and whose father was black–just like Obama’s parents. Farrakhan claimed that both men were “Saviours” and that Obama might be the only man who can save America.

Will Obama try to minimize this? Will he disavow it? Or will he ignore these words of praise completely?

Let me remind us that Farrakhan is a black separatist and black nationalist Muslim and the man who referred to Judaism as a “gutter religion.” And Pastor Wright shares his vision of the importance of black nationalism (packaged as black liberation theology) and has publicly honored Farrakhan. When questioned about this, Obama said that families have disagreements. Yes, Michelle Obama once wrote a thesis at Princeton which allegedly recognizes the importance of black separatism given white racist America. Do the Obamas also have family disagreements about this?

Look: Where does Obama stand on Islamic gender and religious apartheid? Is he aware that it has been penetrating the West, including America, the country he wishes to govern? Does he have a plan as to how he will deal with it? Does he stand with the Islamists or with their victims, beginning with Muslim women and Muslim intellectuals? Where does he stand on the proliferation of Muslim arranged marriages. polygamy, face-veiling, wife- and daughter-beating, and honor murders in America? And on the Islamist use of American civil rights law to safeguard Islamic gender and religious apartheid and Islamic separatism in America?

Is Obama aware of the persecution of “infidels,” beginning with Christians, in Muslim lands? Does he have a foreign policy vision that would demand reciprocity for all religions in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iran before we allow American law to be used to construct mini-Saudi Arabias or Irans in America?

Why has no one been asking all the candidates, beginning with Our Savior Obama these questions?

Obama’s various alliances, silences, and minimizations are worrisome. In addition, Obama has chosen a foreign policy team that has been consistently pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel; many of Obama’s chosen advisors have engaged in boycotts and urged divestment in Israel as if Israel really were “apartheid” South Africa.

It is also true that recently, in Ohio, Obama did talk about the importance of Israel’s security and did recognize that she is surrounded by enormous hatred. Former American Ambasador to Israel, Dennis Ross, has said that he “saw no difference between Senator Clinto and Senator Obama on Israel policy.” However, as noted in an editorial today in the New York Sun, Obama also presumed to tell democratic Israel whom it ought to elect–and not elect, and what the parameters ought to be for a future Palestinian state. In case you are guessing, he called for “contiguous borders.”

Has he called for an end to the Kassam rockets that rain down on Israeli civilians in Sderot? And for an end to Saudi, Iranian, and Syrian support for Hamas and Hezbollah as they all seek to annihilate the only Jewish state?

Obama also wants to talk to Amadinejad who has referred to Israelis as “filthy bacteria,” has funded countless acts of murderous terrorism against Israel, and who has pledged to genocidally exterminate the Jewish state. “Talk” he said–and without pre-conditions. (Of course, Obama’s handlers are backpedaling on this one as fast as they can).

It is true: Obama is a thrilling orator. But he is vague and keeps repeating himself just as an actor might. Yes, it is thrilling that an African-American can and is finally running for the American Presidency but it is equally thrilling, or it should be, that a woman is finally a Presidential contender as well. And we, the people should not be voting for–or against– anyone because of their race or gender. Their agenda alone is what should matter.

The last time so many women cheered and swooned and orgasmically submitted themselves in large crowds to another thrilling orator took place in Germany and Austria in the 1930s and 1940s. (Lionel Chetwynd, in the current issue of The Weekly Standard, compares Obama to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada and analyzes how the wildly adored Trudeau’s practices led to the ongoing ruination of Canada).

No, I am not saying that Obama is Hitler. I am saying that people seem desperate and wish to avoid facing a grim reality and many hard choices; they would rather allow a Savior to distract them and to make promises that he either cannot keep, (no one can), or promises that, if realized, will lead to our inevitable doom.

My friend and colleague, the scholar Bat Ye’or told me that if Obama is elected, America will become dhimmified even faster than Europe.

Senator Obama: Make my day. Prove her wrong. Tell us where you stand on Islamic fundamentalism, Islamist jihad, and Islamic gender and religious apartheid

Yes, I watched the last hour of the debate in Texas last night. I noted that neither candidate addressed the key issues which face our nation and which will determine our destiny. How will our next President deal with the potential Islamification of America? What are his or her views about fundamentalist Islam, jihad, terrorism, Muslim (not Hispanic) immmigration as well as the way in which some Muslim-Americans are using American civil rights and liberties in order to safeguard Islamic gender and religious apartheid on American soil?

Will we keep funding the Saudi Wahabi war against America and the West? Will we continue to buy their oil and continue to allow their Princes to buy up American real estate, universities, and mass communication outlets? Will President Obama launch friendly United Nations-style “talking” sessions with Saudi Arabia and Iran that will outlast even this never-ending Presidential election? Will President Clinton focus on mandatory, universal health care coverage even as we are being bombed back into the seventh century?

Of course, both candidates “scored” debating points and the audience cheered as if the debate was merely an extention of American Idol–which I fear it is. This is not a football game and such applause should have no place in so serious a discussion. I am so Old School –actually, I’m not, this is precisely how our old Mother Country, Britain, conducts the public airing of issues.

Psychologically speaking: I also noted that in general, Barack either looked down, or away, or into the middle distance when Hillary spoke. Or, he glared at her. In turn, Hillary often “gazed” at Barack as he spoke in a “girlish” or political wifely fashion. And, several times, Barack came too close to Hillary’s personal space in a way that suggested that if he could, he might have meant to touch her arm. Such “touching” is a male-to-female statement of power over and containment of the woman. Endless research about body language over the last thirty five years has confirmed that this is true.

My conclusions? That Barack was raised as a man and Hillary was raised as a woman and that both will have to wrestle with certain features of their gender-conditioning if they are to deliver on their various promises to the nation.

Folks: I am very worried. Are people voting for Obama because they were hooked on the television series 24 in which America had a black President? Are “angry white men” voting against a woman, any woman–or merely against this woman? Are women incapable of voting for another woman–someone who is not themself? Do young people merely want someone young and new, like themselves, in the White House? Are all Americans , including African-Americans, thrilled to finally be able to vote for a black candidate? Is everyone voting narcissistically?

Will people vote for Senator McCain because he “looks” like the kind of authority figure we once revered–or because of his track and voting record and because of his position on Islam? Will the battle to come be that between a traditional and no longer young military hero and that of a new kind of candidate with Kennedy-style glamor? And by the way, I hope that the Kennedy annointing of Obama does not condemn him to their tragic history of assasinated sons.

I am worried on all counts.

I lived in Kabul nearly fifty years ago. It was enchanting and dangerous. I lived on a wide and gracious street lined with trees. We had electricity, phones, hot and cold running water, and marble bathrooms. There was a movie theatre and an American-style cafeteria restaurant. Bazaars flourished, mosques shimmered, a thousand (all male) tea-houses thrived. Barefoot boys scurried bearing tea for businessmen all day long.

It is gone, all gone–mainly due to the Arab jihadis, (bin Laden’s boys), the Soviets, and the native reactionary Islamists. They all bear enormous responsibility for this tragedy as do all the Arab and Muslim regimes who failed to stop bin Laden and who instead spent all their time and resources scapegoating Israel. America? First, we mainly neglected Afghanistan, then we funded what became the Taliban as part of our titanic struggle with Soviet Russia. Finally, after 9/11, we went in to rid the country of the Arab jihadis. That battle is still underway.

Here’s a verbal snapshot of Kabul today. It was written by an American businessman who wrote to a friend of mine who forwarded his words to me. He has a dry and ironic wit and a keen eye. His information is accurate and utterly heartbreaking.

“First of all, the roads aren’t paved.  Also, there are no street lights.  Not a lot of trees.  That’s because almost all of the trees in the country have been cut down for firewood.  They’re digging up the roots now. That’s in Kabul.

Second, there must be something strange about the gene pool there because there aren’t any women. I was there six days and there are 100 men in the streets for every woman.  And most of them are completely covered.  I didn’t see one Afghani couple on a date.  In fact, I didn’t see anybody on a date.  The restaurants have guards with Ak47’s and double sets of walls to avoid the car bombers.  In case you don’t speak Pushto or English, there are big signs with pictures of AK47s x’d out in red just so everybody understand the dress code if you want to eat.

Third, nobody can read. And there is not a lot of room for improvement there because I saw an awful lot of kids in the street begging or working.  It was reassuring that none of them were younger then 5. Well, I’m not sure, some of them might have been 4.”

Fourth, no one in the American Embassy is allowed to leave.  To eat,  to go shopping, even to fool around–assuming that there was anyone to fool around with or someplace to go.  They can go to a private house if there is enough security.

Fifth, the Army allows it’s personnel to leave to go out, but they have to be in an armored vehicle.  The part about that is that the tactics seem to be completely different from the Petreaus handbook which is a  work of genius.  Even the soldiers say they are going out of their minds.  Its really hard to stay fit and alert in a compound.

Sixth, there may be some infrastructure improvement or improvement in living conditions but even in Kabul, electricity is intermittent for most of the population and even running water is not completely available.  Absolutely no one thinks that there is a significant improvement in the standard of living and the rural areas are probably worse because of the war.

Seventh, everyone agrees that the situation is much worse then it was two years ago.

I did like a lot of the people I met, very polite.  I love the little ritual they have of going A Salam Alechem and put their hand over their heart. I bet you didn’t know that praying five times a day is a great way to keep limber. They have these small bananas which are excellent when they’re ripe.  There is a great history of rug weaving in the country–pretty much the exclusive work of women.  The new rugs are magnificent.  I bought so many rugs that I have probably supported almost as many women over there that I have over here.

The only two businesses in the country are war and drugs and if you are in one, you’re probably in both. 

People do hate the Taliban and our support is not  based on money.  People want money from us but they want their daughters to have lives.  The Taliban destroys things just because they’re beautiful. Buildings,  gardens, pictures.  Their strategy is very well thought out, their power base in Southern Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan is viable economically because of drugs and has great geography for their purposes.  Their leadership is resolute, innovative, and completely dedicated.”

I was told by someone who has now asked me to remove his comments that many Afghan officials are “Marxists” and “Maoists.” If so–even if this is true a little bit– why has the Western media not focused on this? Have they done so and did I miss it? Did you all know this? What can this mean? Perhaps there are radically different analyses out there; please share them with me.

We still have no word about the kidnapped American woman, Syd Mizell. The warlords continue to terrorize. The young Afghan blogger still sits in jail, condemned to death. Western support is viewed as only endangering him further.

Quo vadis?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is begging the EU to undertake the enormous expense of funding her security. This article, below, suggests that she has begged in vain. Taslima Nasrin has been under house arrest for her own protection in India and has now been advised that she must either accept this or leave the country. (Nasrin lived in hiding for years in Sweden but chose to leave her European haven). Geert Wilders has been (temporarily?) banished from Holland and his film put on hold. Kurt Westergaard , the heroic Danish cartoonist, has been in hiding and on the run for three months. (PJM’s own Flemming Rose has covered his plight and informed us of the principled decision of 17 Danish newspapers to reprint the original Mohammed cartoons).

Either the democratic West will have to fund each person, one by one. Or we will all–millions of us at a time–have to commit similar acts of resistance. If we fail to fund, and absent that, fail to resist, our civilization will suffer a fatal, self-inflicted blow.

Below, please read about Hirsi Ali’s current plight.

Source http://www.expatica.com/nl/life_in/feature/EU-politicians-make-empty-promises-to-Hirsi-Al.html

EU politicians make empty promises to Hirsi Ali 15/02/2008 00:00

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been in Brussels to plead for political backing for a controversial proposal to get the EU to pay for her protection. By Vanessa Mock

She was invited by French Socialist MEPs, who launched the initiative to set up a special fund for the former Dutch Parliamentarian who has received death threats because of her critical views of Islam.

“Today I find myself in the embarrassing position that I have to come to ask for help,” she told the European Parliament. “I need you to support this fund to protect people like me whose only crime is free speech.”

Ms Hirsi Ali has been living under police protection since the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, with whom she made a film about Islam’s treatment of women. A note targeting her by name was found on van Gogh’s body.

The Dutch government stopped paying her security bills last year when she left to work in the US. “I think it was the wrong decision. I am forced to do fundraising and will have to go into hiding when the money runs out,” she said simply.

Despite a high-publicity campaign in Brussels, the Somali-born Hirsi Ali is likely to come away empty-handed. The proposal has received the backing of just one in seven MEPs (85 out of 785) - and just two Dutch MEPs.

A tragedy for Ayaan

“This initiative is going nowhere,” says Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, a Dutch MEP and a former colleague. “It’s tragic for Ayaan because she needs security but the EU is not the place to provide it. She is being made to believe in something that does not exist.”

The EU fund is the brainchild of French Socialist MEP Benoit Hamon, who says the EU must urgently protect any citizens whose lives are at risk because they exercise the right to speak out. “Europe has to prove it’s serious about freedom of expression as a fundamental right, not just as an ideal on paper.”

Diplomats however say the idea is unworkable because it would need the political backing of all 27 member states, whereas providing security for individuals has until now remained in State hands.

Protection for Wilders?

Many EU politicians would also balk at the idea of footing the bill to protect controversial figures, such as the radical, right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders. “Where do you set the boundaries for who would be covered by this fund?” asks Ms Hennis-Plasschaert.

It is telling that even EU Commissioner Nellie Kroes, Ms Hirsi Ali’s political mentor during her early days in The Hague, has given a cautious response. “She is an extremely courageous woman and deserves support,” Mrs Kroes, one of the most powerful politicians in Brussels, told RNW. “But it is still early days, things are being discussed. We have to wait and see.”

Shame on the Dutch

Earlier this week, Ms Hirsi Ali was invited by French intellectuals and Socialists in France, who had called for her to be granted French citizenship so that Paris could pay for her security. They criticised The Hague for suspending her security costs, estimated at Euro 2 million a year.

“As a European, I feel ashamed,” said French writer, Bernard-Henri Levy. “Ayaan is a true European, she defends European values of freedom to judge and to express herself and dare to criticise.”

Ms Hirsi Ali stressed that her love for the Netherlands was undiminished but that she felt let down. “The government supported my decision to leave as life had become impossible in the Netherlands and they promised to continue paying for my safety.”

This week, the Justice Ministry reiterated that it would resume payment if she returned from the US but Ms Hirsi Ali says it would be impossible for her to lead a normal life there. She was forced to leave her previous Dutch apartment after her neighbours filed court proceedings against having such a high-profile resident.

The US has refused to cover the cost because it is against its policy to pay for the safety of individuals.

Who is Ayaan Hirsi Ali?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the daughter of a Somali scholar and revolutionary opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse.

Her screenplay Submission, and her autobiography Infidel, led to death threats from Muslim organisations.

She obtained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, where she was parliamentarian for the VVD Party from 2003-6.
A political crisis surrounding the potential stripping of her Dutch citizenship led her to resign and indirectly prompted the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet.

She is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

This Review appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
%%AMAZON=0393066630 MAD, BAD AND SAD%%
Women and the Mind-Doctors from 1800
By Lisa Appignanesi
McArthur & Company,
532 pages, $34.95

This book is beautifully written and carefully, even lovingly, researched. The author prides herself on the fact that she is primarily a writer and is neither a patient nor a mind-doctor.

Thus, Lisa Appignanesi, who is also a respected novelist, views the literary arts as almost interchangeable with, or superior to, the psychoanalytic arts. In her view, “sad, mad, bad” women may be best analyzed, not psychoanalytically, but in a literary way.

Literary analysts may have compelling, even brilliant intellectual and historical insights but they do not view themselves as obligated to comfort, help or save a particular sorely afflicted soul. Indeed, Appignanesi views herself as an “outsider” who has “faith” in the writer’s point of view.

The power struggle that may be at the heart of this book reveals itself in Appignanesi’s description of Virginia Woolf as adamant that “the turf of the inner life and the imagination rightly belongs to novelists and artists and needs protecting from the reductionist inanities of … psychological interlopers.”

Permit me a brief psychoanalytic interpretation. To compensate for Woolf’s view, which Appignanesi may share, the author tells us far too much about far too many mind-doctors, theories, asylums, cases, patients. Her textbook-like reach is sometimes overwhelming. Perhaps unconsciously guilty about her own bias, and in an effort to be “fair,” she feels honour-bound to present a very long, if nevertheless informative, account of the history of female patients and their mind-doctors.

Appignanesi does not take sides; she has the luxury of understanding each approach without having to “do” anything. Therefore, she does not choose one school of thought over another, she simply presents them all. I wanted her to make a judgment about what helps: psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, political liberation movements, trauma theory, divorce, bed rest, cold showers - but she does not do so. Literature - and the long view - are redemptive solutions for Appignanesi.

I would, however, recommend this book for every abnormal psychology class in the world, since Appignanesi has really mastered the territory. She provides a sophisticated and nuanced history of how madness has been viewed and treated. She delves not just into the atrocities of confinement and of so-called treatment, but also the respite, safety and “tenderness” some asylums, keepers and mind-doctors have provided.

Historically, in Appignanesi’s view, how we conceived of madness actually changed from male to female. She writes: “In 1815 the two writhing, brutish and chained male personifications of madness in front of Bedlam were replaced by figures of women - a youthful, beautiful, female insanity. Madness, at least in representation, it would seem, was becoming feminized and tamed, no longer wild, raving and dangerous, but pathetic.”

Appignanesi does not deny that madness exists, nor does she romanticize it. She understands that madness was more acceptable in European society before the condition became medicalized, that madness may not be permanent, and that “cures are rarely absolute or forever.”

She condemns asylum abuse, beginning with the practice of chaining, brutally force-feeding, blood-letting and straitjacketing those who are already in torment. Of the many examples of psychiatric abuse she offers, let me share one especially chilling account. The American psychiatric system tortured one poor woman for 54 years before she mercifully died. Martha Hurwitz lived in New Jersey in the 20th century. Superintendent Henry Cotton of the Trenton State Asylum “carried out an obscene campaign of surgery on the tonsils, stomach, colon, and uterus of (female psychiatric) patients alongside removal of teeth. In the process he maimed and killed thousands” - including Martha Hurwitz, whom he also diabolically, perhaps psychotically, overmedicated and in whom he induced more than 50 insulin comas.

Appignanesi is as much at home in European salon society as she is in Bedlam, Paris’s Salpêtrière or in Freud’s office. Reading this book was a way to learn new things about some old friends: Freud’s Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim), the orthodox Jewish woman who co-invented the “talking cure” and who became a major feminist leader; Jung’s Sabina Spielrein, a patient with whom he had a love affair during treatment - and who went on to become the first woman psychoanalyst; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the writer and feminist, for whom S. Mitchell Weir prescribed bed rest and a domestic routine; Zelda Fitzgerald, the talented writer envied by her writer-husband Scott; the great Virginia Woolf, whose husband Leonard adored and protected her; the sublime but haunted Sylvia Plath, whose husband, Ted Hughes, left her. I also met some people here for the first time.

Appignanesi is at her best when she slows down and spends time with a woman, a doctor, a “case.” Thus, her more extensive discussions of Mary Lamb, Théroigne de Méricourt, Celia Branden, Alice James, Virginia Woolf, Sabina Spielrein, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe are excellent.

Sad, Mad and Bad also provides us with literary gossip at a high level. In a sense, this book is a social history of madness among intellectuals, poets and revolutionaries. Thus, we learn about Mary Lamb, who, in a fit of madness, killed her mother and who was, thereafter, both periodically confined and at liberty. This is the same Mary Lamb who, together with her brother, Charles, wrote Tales From Shakespeare and was a social intimate of Coleridge and Wordsworth. According to Appignanesi, William Hazlitt described Mary Lamb as “the only truly sensible woman I’ve ever met.” Mary Lamb’s alcoholic brother depended upon her totally and they lived together as adults.

We learn about George Cheyne, who himself had a “breakdown,” but who went on to become a popular holistic healer whom Samuel Johnson praised.

Asylum reformer Phillipe Pinel (1745-1826), sometimes considered the father of psychiatry, was a member of a salon run by Madame Helvetius, who admired Stendhal; this was same Pinel who ran the asylum where the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned. Théroigne de Méricourt was rescued by none other than the revolutionary Marat; an all-female mob had stripped her naked and was publicly flogging her. William Makepeace Thackeray’s wife broke down after childbirth and tried to drown her newborn and kill herself. Jung’s former patient and lover, Sabina Spielrein, was Jean Piaget’s analyst.

Alice James, the sister of William and Henry, once checked into an asylum that “treated nervous people who are not insane.” James Joyce’s daughter Lucia saw one of Zelda Fitzgerald’s mind-doctors and consulted with Jung, who, as it happened, “hated Joyce’s Ulysses.”

There are many more such anecdotes and asides that will delight any student or teacher of literature.

Because Appignanesi is so comprehensive, I am surprised that she does not cite the excellent work of Dr. Paula Caplan about the psychiatric pathologizing of women - or that of author and therapist Kim Chernin, who has written a great deal about women’s eating disorders. (Appignanesi is exceptionally eloquent about anorexia and characterizes those who suffer from it as “hunger artists” and “suicide bombers inside the bourgeois family.”)

Early on, Appignanesi theorizes that her “interest in madness” is a “form of survival” since her family “fled the Holocaust.” I do not entirely understand what she is saying here, but to the extent to which madness or evil may be narcissistically appeased, Appignanesi has “survived” in very high style indeed.

This was originally published in City Journal.

Rosanne Klass’s reissued memoir describes Afghanistan in a more innocent time.
City Journal | 21 November 2007

%%AMAZON=9622177867 Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good,%% by Rosanne Klass (Odyssey, 358 pp., $19.95)

The history of Afghanistan, once known as the “crossroads of the world,” is riven with brutal invasions and world abandonment. Barbarism, slavery, ruthlessness, and disease existed side by side with the country’s enormous physical beauty and the elaborate, formalized hospitality of its people. Conquerors razed Afghanistan’s extraordinary ancient cities and exquisite court palaces—Herat, Ghazni, and Balkh. Genghis Khan, and later Tamerlane, slaughtered significant portions of the Afghan population and returned to the country to conduct raids on the survivors, leaving precious little in the way of art or architecture. Alexander the Great also conquered Afghanistan on his way to India, though his soldiers tended to leave behind descendants rather than smoldering ruins.

Most Afghan kings were brutal to their own people, who were, after all, a permanently armed male population, always ready to fight for village, tribe, or warlord against central governments, including those of native kings and would-be conquerors. Even the Victorian-era British learned that Afghanistan could not be tamed; so, too, did the Soviet Union. America’s intervention in Afghanistan, though based not on colonialism or aggression but rather on justified political goals, has failed in its own ways.

Yet despite the continued dangers of terrorism and political chaos, the land continues to attract Western traders, travelers, teachers, and do-gooders, with its real and imagined nobility, its charming hospitality, and its wondrous geographical beauty. It has also attracted its share of writers. Rudyard Kipling conveys the indigenous nature of Afghan barbarism (along with the indigenous foolishness of Westerners in search of gold and glory) in his story “The Man Who Would Be King.” In 2002, an intrepid Scotsman, Rory Stewart, published an account of his extraordinary walking trip through Afghanistan, “The Places in Between.” The next year saw the appearance of Norwegian author Asne Seierstad’s “The Bookseller of Kabul,” which describes her life with an Afghan family after the fall of the Taliban. And in 2007, Deborah Rodriguez published “Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil,” her memoir of teaching Afghan women the art of hairdressing.

Now comes a reissued edition of an extraordinary gem of a book: Rosanne Klass’s “Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good.” Klass first published the book in 1964, and she has added a new afterword. Hers is a world-class travel memoir that conjures all of the heart-stopping beauty that called out to me when I first traveled to Afghanistan in the early 1960s. Klass went there with her American husband in the 1950s to teach English in a school for men and boys from remote villages. It was the first school of its kind, and Klass was the first woman to teach male students in the country. As an “uncovered” woman—that is, one not wearing a burka—she handled the men’s inevitable fear and hostility with patience and grace. Ultimately, she befriended both her students and the recalcitrant mullahs who also taught at the school.

Klass returned to Afghanistan in the 1960s as a journalist. Later, after the Soviet invasion, she founded the Afghanistan Relief Committee, which provided medical and other humanitarian aid to victims inside the war-torn country. Her home in New York City became a first stop for her many Afghan friends and former students who were now ambassadors, cabinet ministers, or in exile. In the 1980s, Klass directed the Afghanistan Information Center at Freedom House, a major source of human-rights information for the American and international media.

The beauty of Klass’s writing recreates a shimmering and more hopeful time. Klass preserves for us in words, and with reverence, the Afghan people’s history and customs (the arts of long conversations and of reciting poetry by heart, for instance), as well as holidays, palaces, fortresses, precious artifacts, and the non-Muslim religious wonders—like the great Buddhas of Bamyan, destroyed by the Taliban—that have almost all disappeared from this seemingly cursed land. Such epic destruction has happened here before. Through Klass, I can once again see the kuchi nomads “impassively” passing through Kabul, with their long line of “shaggy Bactrian camels . . . the women walked proudly besides them—unveiled, vivid, dressed in black and scarlet, and decked with silver bangles. In the city, where purdah sent local women fluttering shyly from attention, the proud indifference of these handsome Kuchi women seemed imperious.”

Klass also renders the country’s geography: the towering mountains, the steep, winding roads, the torrential rivers, the Edenic valleys and forests—as well as the incredible flowers and brilliant gardens that were so much a part of the terrain, at least back then. She understands the hold that this landscape can exert upon a human being.

Klass’s descriptions also bring back to life the din and smells of the Kabul bazaars, fraught with clutter and exquisite finds. Through her, I can reenter the neighborhoods where I once lived or visited—Jaidi Maiwand, Shari-Nau, Carta Kia—and the nearby winter and summer villas and gardens in Jalalabad, Itstalif, and Paghman. She describes Da Afghanan, a lesser bazaar, as “an old Curiosity Shop of the world” in which ”these heaps of battered necessities were crowned with wild, gaudy jewels: a gilded French telephone or a sheaf of lacquered Uzbeck spoons; a volume of Sir Walter Scott, an exquisitely molded Greek coin turned up by some plow. . . . Once I found an old mortarboard cap from Oxford University and could only wonder what disillusion had banished it to lie amid a scattering of old crockery in a dark corner. It seemed as though, from the Universe of Objects, the crippled, the lame, the halt and the blind had all found their way here to await the day when someone might possibly look upon them again and find them good.”

“The Land of the High Flags” is many books: it is a thumbnail history of Afghanistan; a psychological and political analysis of its most powerful kings (Abdur Rahman, Habibullah, Amanullah); a list of its most important native literary sons; a travel guide to its cities, villages, and countryside, replete with personal and professional photos; an almost satirical analysis of the social pecking order; and the story of a country trying to enter the modern era while being brutally beaten down. Above all, it is a story about Klass’s relationship with individual Afghans and with the Afghan people as a whole. She renders a particularly touching portrait of Gul Baz Khan, her colonial-era “house-man”—something like a personal concierge or butler. Often inscrutable, comically manipulative, industrious, and proud, he ruled Klass’s heart and household with consummate deference and skill.

A few quibbles. Klass cannot tell us very much about Afghan women. Their absence haunts her pages, where they appear only briefly, just turning a corner, heard on the other side of a high wall, shrouded in burkas or chadaris. The portrait she paints of her male Afghan students, therefore, is also incomplete. She portrays them as bashful, innocent, noble, and good-hearted, people who, even when treated sadistically by tyrannical teachers and laid low by poverty, illness, and early death, remain stoic and uncomplaining. Yet many of these seemingly charming, tender boys are likely cruel toward their wives—and they probably have more than one, as revealed in books like Edward Hunter’s “The Past Present,” and confirmed by my own acquaintance, in Kabul, with women living in purdah and in polygamous marriages. However open-minded the boys may be about foreign women, their views about their “own” women are more subject to tradition. Even nearly half a century later, in “The Bookseller of Kabul,” author Seierstad describes being befriended by and invited to live with a bookseller, a man with a Western intellectual background who nevertheless was a brutal tyrant to the women of his family. Seierstad’s depiction of his behavior has led to a lawsuit as well as a published rebuttal.

These gaps notwithstanding, the beauty of Klass’s book both uplifts and consoles. I will leave the last word to her, as she describes a long trip outside Kabul: “You must live in a dry land to know what a garden is. The very word paradise comes from the Persian word for ‘garden,’ and Eden must have been much like the valley of Panjsher: an island of sunlit greenness and coolness and flowing water; that is what Genesis says: that Eden had trees and a river. It is a definition. Those who described this must have known waterless plains . . . where there is no sustenance but what can be wrenched from the earth by endless labor and unrelenting struggle. They knew what . . . I could here begin to comprehend: the terror of Adam and Eve, driven from such a world as this green valley out onto the sun-blanched rocky earth which they had hardly glimpsed, and never heeded, beyond the leafy edges of their paradise; and forbidden to return.”

I write books, I read books, I review books. I am one of the People of the Book–and I happily live surrounded by bookshelves filled with thousands of treasured volumes. This means that I do not “read” books on a small screen or “listen” to books while I exercise or drive. I represent a dying breed.

I am now away on a very quiet, hopefully placid vacation. In my absence, I will be posting some book reviews that I have recently penned and published elsewhere. This review appeared in City Journal.

Brave Partisan
The many lives of Edith Kurzweil

Phyllis Chesler
City Journal | January 9, 2008

%%AMAZON=1412806623 Full Circle: A Memoir,%% by Edith Kurzweil (Transaction Publishers, 312 pp., $34.95)

Edith Kurzweil has lived many lives and prevailed against tremendous odds. As an Austrian Jew, she was not meant to live at all; as a first-generation immigrant in America, she wasn’t expected to succeed; as a woman, who was also a 1950s-style wife and mother, she was not supposed to become a scholar in her own right. But Kurzweil refused to identify herself as a victim, choosing instead to view adversity as a useful challenge. She earned a Ph.D. in sociology, became a professor, and published a number of thoughtful books including The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective, The Age of Structuralism, and Nazi Laws and Jewish Lives: Letters from Vienna. She also married three times, the final time to William Phillips, the founder of Partisan Review. Kurzweil served as executive editor of this highly influential magazine from the late 1970s until its demise in 2003.

Thus she knew and worked with many of the leading intellectuals of her time: Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Doris Lessing, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Norman Podhoretz, Cynthia Ozick, and many more. She was privy to the great disputes of the era, and her memoir Full Circle recounts them all, from battles about communism and fascism to splits over Zionism and the nature of American power—battles that, in different forms, continue to the present day.

Kurzweil’s life, like a play, has had many distinct acts. Act One: “Ditta” Weisz is born in Vienna to wealthy Jewish parents. For 13 years, she enjoys a charmed and sheltered existence, which world events then shatter. Solely responsible for her younger brother, Hansl, she flees Austria to join her parents, who are already settled in America, and travels through at least 11 cities and villages in Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, and Portugal.

Her flight is grueling and perilous: she dodges bombs, enemy soldiers, hostile civilians, and Catch-22-like diplomatic restrictions. Strangely, the idea of “being sold into slavery” (as opposed to being simply incinerated) terrifies her. At one point, Kurzweil rides in a boxcar together with other Jewish children. For eight days, they have little food, no light, no ventilation, no bathrooms—and no parents. She writes: “The younger children got sick first and some of them threw up; we had no toilet facilities and had to use the odd containers . . . since boxcars have no windows . . . the putrid smell of excrement mingled with that of perspiration and vomit. . . . By the fifth day our limbs were black and blue from the bumps we got when the train was careening.”

These painful memories occupy only three paragraphs in the hellish travelogue. Still to come is a long period of hiding in the French countryside and long lines to navigate at the Spanish, Portuguese, and French consulates as Kurzweil desperately tries to get a visa. Aided by a kind stranger, she makes it to the S.S. Excalibur just as it pulls up anchor in Lisbon. Seeing two children approaching, the ship’s crew halts and lets them aboard.

Act Two: Kurzweil’s new life as a teenage immigrant in New York City begins. Her sadistic father and self-involved mother control and exploit her. Kurzweil the memoirist does not complain; she merely shows us how things were. Her writing is fresh, leavened with the endearing Americanisms that she acquired. She “moseys” along, wants the “low-down,” relates best to people “on the ball.” For those, like me, who remember the Manhattan of this era, her descriptions bring back a lost world: here is the dear departed automat, the Cafe de la Paix, the Éclair, and the Konditorei. Kurzweil dubs these last two “Vienna on the Hudson.”

She encounters routine sexual harassment on the streets and on the job, of a type that these days we would regard as extreme. She describes the “leering once-overs” of foremen, the “foul language” of “sweaty men,” and the harshness of the “demanding foreladies.” Kurzweil works as a hat maker, jewelry painter, stock clerk, salesgirl, bookkeeper, and far underpaid diamond cutter. She works during all of her marriages, even while raising the children she had with two of her husbands.

Act Three: she prospers as a wife and young mother in a New York City suburb during the very decade in which Betty Friedan decided that isolated, educated housewives suffered from a “problem that had no name.” “I don’t recall my suburb as a Mecca of enlightenment nor as the nadir of Hell,” Kurzweil writes. She eventually returns to Europe and lives there happily for some time—though she shares a sobering anecdote about visiting her childhood home in Vienna. The concierge of the building, guilt-ridden about the past, is afraid that she has come back to reclaim her apartment.

Act Four: Kurzweil documents an important period of intellectual history. She confirms that intellectuals can be as ruthless as corporate titans, capturing the raw ambition, ceaseless backbiting, intimate betrayals, and anti-Americanism that have characterized so many New York and Parisian thinkers. Kurzweil describes how the New Yorkers devoted themselves to “honing their mercurial minds at each other’s expense.” She relates priceless anecdotes and both first- and second-hand thumbnail sketches of a battalion of intellectual leading lights, including Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Diana Trilling, Czeslaw Milosz, Robert J. Lifton, and Noam Chomsky, among others. She is frank about the male domination, philandering, and polygamy prevalent in intellectual circles, and about the way in which otherwise capable female job applicants were mainly viewed in terms of their “sexual potential.”

Full Circle has far too many rich anecdotes to recount, but one involving Chomsky is typical and illustrative. Kurzweil describes an enormous party that is “more like a political rally,” at which Chomsky states that students should be encouraged to protest, “even to the point of laying down on a railway track while awaiting an oncoming train.” When Kurzweil protests that a young Italian demonstrator has lost his life that way, Chomsky replies that the loss was acceptable—“if it had furthered the cause.”

Kurzweil also reveals the rather shocking attempt to destroy Partisan Review by certain “solicitous friends” who envied its success and wished to “own” its gold-standard brand name, even though they disagreed with many of its principled stands. She describes how William Phillips found himself locked out of his own office at Rutgers University, his Partisan Review papers impounded. Boston University chancellor John Silber gave the magazine a safe harbor, but after Phillips died, Silber, in Cynthia Ozick’s words, “executed” and “terminated” the magazine that Kurzweil had essentially run on her own during the years of Phillips’s declining health.

Full Circle is an ode of sorts to Phillips and to the committed intellectual life that he led, and an acknowledgment of what one must juggle, sacrifice, brave, and endure to live the life of the mind. The intellectually dazzling Phillips lost many of his closest friends when he refused to glamorize tyrannies or wholeheartedly embrace the cultural uprisings of the 1960s, which included hatred of America and Israel.

Kurzweil shared his political bravery. Immediately after September 11, in the pages of Partisan Review, she wrote: “To others, like myself, who lived through some of the real horrors of World War II, the United States was perceived as a safe haven . . . the United States is not truly prepared to fight its enemies. Once again, we are divided around domestic priorities and must fight enemies both outside and within our borders. . . . We have tried to attain our ends while holding on to our liberal values. . . . We will have to decide at what point the rights of the individual must be subordinated to the public good, to the ‘rights’ of the country. When do we go after the Osama bin Ladens? And how do we conduct fair trials without being so overly ‘fair’ as to encourage or condone more such activities?” Kurzweil’s perspective was prescient; her views today remain vigorous and vital.

Full circle: Vienna, 1940. As the train leaves, the 13-year-old Ditta is afraid to keep her maternal grandmother’s gold chain: “We were forbidden to take any valuables . . . in the end, I panicked . . . as the train began to move I reached out of the window to return the coveted jewel.” The real jewel is this book, and the memories and insights it contains.

The eminent scholar, Bat Ye’or, is tiny in height only; she is a towering intellect and a fierce judge of both human character and history. Her work predicted and documented the Islamification of Europe. We both agree that the battle for America has only begun–although I believe that it is well underway.

Here we are, two friends, ladies of a certain age, sitting in the most pleasant of surroundings , (a private club, tres ancien regime), and conversing most seriously, not about children and grandchildren, not about the ballet or the opera, (under other circumstances, a conversation we might certainly like to have), but given our times, and our views, a luxury we cannot afford. Thus, we talk about War and Peace and the Clash of Civilizations. What could be more enjoyable and yet more pathetic? Yes, pathetic. We two should be having this conversation in a government office and our views should be leading to co-ordinated government actions. More’s the pity that this is not the case.

But please: Come and join us.

Phyllis: What do you see is happening at this moment?

Bat Ye’or: The West is engaged in a very careful exercise of self-censorship. We are trying not to offend Muslim sensibilities. Western governments want to impose respect for Muslim sensibilities in the hope that this will avoid jihad. They are ready to suppress the truth.

Phyllis: What do you think of an Obama Presidency?

Bat Ye’or: Obama and his supporters do not seem to understand that Europe has failed. Today, European dissidents, including Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents are forming movements against the European Union whose policies have led to the Islamification of Europe. Europe is suffering from a huge Muslim immigration problem. The Muslim immigrants (with the exception of the above mentioned dissidents) do not want to integrate into a modern, tolerant state and they want to impose Sha’ria law on us all.

Phyllis: What does this remind you of?

Bat Ye’or: All these Western gestures of appeasement reminds me of the dhimmi regulations. These are a whole set of regulations whose purpose is to respect Muslim sensibilities. Therefore, Christians must conduct “quiet” services and dhimmis (infidels) must wear special clothing so as not to shock or offend Muslims with their too-fashionable or too-expensive clothing. Long ago, infidels had to dismount from their donkeys when a Muslim approached and a dhimmi could only pass a Muslim on the left (or impure) side, not on the right side.

I am not in favor of inciting anyone but really, where will this all end? And why this super-sensitivity only to Muslims? There is only one answer. Our intellectuals and politicians want to have a good relationship with the Muslim world. They think they will always have the freedoms that they currently enjoy. They do not understand that those freedoms are at risk.

Phyllis: Where does Israel fit into this picture?

Bat Ye’or: Europeans have imagined that the problem is only Israel. They were committed to allowing the Arabs to destroy Israel if that kept them, the Europeans, safe. But these Europeans do not seem to remember that Islam persecuted and then destroyed Christianity in Muslim lands. We see a repetition of this in Europe today.

Phyllis: Such politicians and intellectuals are suicidal, don’t you think?

Bat Ye’or: Absolutely. But they want so much to be loved that they are reaching out to their enemy. This is the politics of self-destruction. They are making concessions about their basic security and freedom

Phyllis: Some people are already discouraged, almost in advance, about the battle for America. What do you think?

Bat Ye’or: This battle is not yet lost. The handful of us who are working to alert others to the dangers specific to the 21st century are doing heroic work against all odds. We–you–have not failed. I believe that we are planting seeds. When America battled communism it had whole organizations committed to doing so. We–you–have nothing like that today in the war against Islamic terror.

Phyllis: I know that your work was initially attacked or “disappeared.” How much has this changed?

Bat Ye’or: My work has been well received in Italy by the most prominent Italian intellectuals. I am, however, conspicuously avoided in the UK by the media and in universities–although I did speak before Parliament two years ago. In France, everyone’s speech is less free than elsewhere. It is the most intellectually repressive society.

After I returned home, I read that French intellectuals, headed by Bernard Henri-Levy are organizing to support Aayan Hirsi Ali’s request for French citizenship. Have the French finally begun to wake up? Or does this say something about Sarkozy’s future politics and his potential interest in a high-profile symbol?

TO BE CONTINUED.

On Friday, February 8th, I wrote about Professor Noah Feldman’s op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he viewed a long-standing Turkish ban on the wearing of headscarves in universities as a ban against religious “freedom.” On Saturday, February 9th, I noted here that on the very next day, February 9th, the New York Times (page A4) featured an interview with a Turkish woman lawyer, Fatma Benli, titled: “Under a Scarf, a Turkish Lawyer Fighting to Wear It.”

Why is the New York Times so invested in securing an Islamic religious right in Turkey?

Here’s an idea: In a gesture towards even-handedness, perhaps The Paper of Record might consider agitating for the right of European Jews to wear headcoverings (kipot or yarmulkes) without risking being cursed, beaten, or knifed to death? Better yet: How about some even-handed agitation for the religious rights, not only of Muslims in Turkey, but of Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Ba’hai, to practice their religions openly in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia—without being arrested and stoned to death?

Today, yet again, the New York Times, (page A3) featured another article about the Islamic headscarf in Turkey. Granted, this time they quoted some Turks who oppose lifting the ban. These secularists point out that “a woman’s right to resist being forced to wear head scarves by an increasingly conservative society–was under threat.” (I made this point in my blog here on this subject and would welcome Noah Feldman’s response to this point).

Further, today’ s piece, written by Sabrina Tavernise, quotes a member of the TUrkish Parliament. “This decision will bring further pressure on women…it will ultimately bring us Hezbollah terror, Al Qaeda terror and fundamentalism.” Finally, a former Turkish Justice Minister, Hikmet Sami Turk, says: “(Lifting the headscarf ban has) been presented as a liberty to cover the head, but in practice, it is going to evolve into a ban on uncovered hair.”

Noah Feldman, our Paper of Record: I implore you to listen to such voices. They know something about the Islamic headscarf, namely, that it is an augur of coercion, punishment, and the further subordination of women. Taking a “neutral” position, quoting both sides of the issue, is ultimately tantamount to siding with coercion.

The Islamic headscarf is the not the same as the Jewish kippah or wig or headcovering although I agree that there are troubling signs among a handful of religious Jews in Jerusalem in which the women are being coerced into wearing burqas! and in which long, wide, heavy, dark, and completely unattractive clothing is being forced upon Jewish women in certain ultra-religious sects, both in America and Israel. I view this as an Islamification of Judaism and I fear it both among Jews and among our Muslim cousins.

Speaking of cousins: When Muslim girls refuse to marry their first cousins they are usually honor-murdered. Ditto, when they refuse to wear the veil. The information coming out of the UK about this sets the number of honor murders yearly at 17,000 world-wide. (5,000 was the long-time number suggested by the United Nations).

As I’ve written before: I believe that mosque and state, church and state, synagogue and state should be separate and that religious women should be allowed to practice modesty and to wear the sign and symbol of their religion at home, and at worship. On the job, in the streets, and in the classrooms are more problematic–not because there is anything intrinsically wrong with wearing a headscarf or a religious headcovering but because of the unique and specific nature of Islam. (Christians do not kill their own who convert to another religion. Jews do not kill their own who break certain commandments). Muslims do.

Islam is a political ideology, not a religion, and should be treated as such–at least until such time that the moderates, reformers, and peace-loving Muslims have silenced the aggressive terrorists and haters of freedom who now speak for them.