BLAMING THE VICTIM: Cathy Young points out that it’s widespread, even among people who usually claim to know better. Excerpt:

You’d think that feminists, at least, would not hesitate to see a battle against a radical fundamentalist movement driven in part by hatred of women’s liberation as a battle against evil. Yet one of the most obscene recent examples of moral equivalency comes from Jill Nelson, an outspoken feminist commentator for MSNBC.com.

Nelson writes about the tragic events in Nigeria, where anger over the country’s scheduled hosting of the Miss World contest on Dec. 7, and over a newspaper columnist’s remark that Muhammad would have probably chosen a wife among the contestants, led to deadly riots by Islamic radicals. Her verdict? ”It’s impossible to see a side in any of this where the rights of women are truly of any concern.” Western men, she asserts, are using women’s rights to cloak the real issues of power and control over global resources – ”and who asked for these defenders anyway?” (The Afghan women who are finally allowed to work and go to school might have a different view.)

Then comes the clincher: ”As far as I’m concerned it’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burkas in order to survive.”

The theory that people like Nelson are really moles in the pay of Karl Rove, the CIA, or somebody out to discredit opposition to the war just gets more and more plausible. . . .