Daphne Patai, a professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts, was interviewed by FrontPage Magazine on the subject of radical Islam and its oppression of women:
The contradictions are mind-boggling. It was disgusting to read that Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University evoked protest only when he stated there were no homosexuals in Iran. Can it really be that this issue alone somehow caught the audience’s attention? I fear our students are living in a dream world, so mired in the security of having their views predominate on college campuses, so smug in their passion to criticize only the U.S. (and Israel), that they can’t even spot a threat when it’s openly declared and, indeed, acted on.
Do these students not understand that radical Muslims are serious? Have they failed to notice that these Islamists act on their beliefs and kill those who do not agree with them? And that their targets include political dissenters, Jews, Christians, other Muslims, homosexuals, writers, filmmakers, women who are thought to have transgressed, apostates, critics, infidels of all kinds – the list goes on and on. But it is especially shocking to observe the reticence of feminists to make criticisms of radical Islam. So, for example Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other Muslim and former Muslim critics of Islam find little or no support among feminists in the academy. You can be as brave and outspoken as these women are, your life can be threatened by religious zealots, and yet feminists in the West will be hesitant to defend you, because you’re criticizing a group they’ve decided is off limits! This is disgraceful and ought to be a wake-up call about the decline in a serious feminist commitment to universal human rights and its replacement by identity politics.
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