Islam and feminism.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: COMMENT - Letter to the editor

It's safe to say that the first two things Americans think of when they think of Muslims are violent terrorist attacks and the oppression of women.

In the minds of many--ranging from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to Bill Maher--Islam is uniquely violent and sexist.

Images of women shrouded from head to foot, and stories of women arrested for driving cars, beaten for showing their hair or wearing nail polish, and prevented from going to school or aspiring to be anything other than chattel are the backdrop to intensifying rhetoric about a "culture war" between the West and Islam.

Oppressive fundamentalist regimes, from the Taliban to the Islamic State, do, in fact, target women.

Resistance to these regimes by brave Muslim women, like Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, inspire people in the United States.

But it is a peculiarity of U.S. foreign policy that our country drums up support for wars and bombing raids that kill mass numbers of civilians by denouncing the oppression of the same people we are bombing. Enormous damage has been done to civilian populations around the globe in recent decades in the name of democracy and freedom.

The image of the oppressed Muslim woman is part of this destructive propaganda campaign.

After September n, 2001, the U.S. public supported the war in Afghanistan, primarily in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center. But the real heartstrings appeal was the oppression of women there. Contributions flowed to school-building and development projects that aimed to free Afghan women from opression.

But the U.S. military has not succeeded in liberating women in Afghanistan. Instead it has inflicted massive suffering and death--and the situation of women, though better than during the Taliban era, remains dire.

"There are slight improvements in women's lives in urban areas, but if we look at statistics, Afghanistan remains the most dangerous place for women," Reena of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan told Democracy Now! on the tenth anniversary of the invasion. "Self-immolation [and] suicide rates are extremely high. It has never been this high before. Domestic violence is widespread. Women are poor. They don't have health care. It has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world."

In Iraq, the United States has arguably helped set back women's rights by centuries, deposing a brutal secular dictator, and destroying a civil society and a large middle class where women were well...