In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Phyllis Chesler accuses women’s studies of being soft on Islamism. “Islamic terrorists have declared jihad against the “infidel West” and against all of us who yearn for freedom. Women in the Islamic world are treated as subhumans. Although some feminists have sounded the alarm about this, a much larger number have remained silent. Why is it that many have misguidedly romanticized terrorists as freedom fighters and condemned both America and Israel as the real terrorists or as the root cause of terrorism? In the name of multicultural correctness (all cultures are equal, formerly colonized cultures are more equal), the feminist academy and media appear to have all but abandoned vulnerable people–Muslims, as well as Christians, Jews, and Hindus–to the forces of reactionary Islamism.” It is a crude attack, and, more than that, it is inaccurate. Chesler says she is a feminist. She seeks support for her own position not only through the disclosure that she was confined to purdah for several months in Afghanistan, but because “most academics and activists do not actually do anything; they read, they write, they deliver papers.” This is a familiar move, one that I’be been guilty of making myself, but it is an unsatisfactory move. In nothing that Chesler writes is there any engagement with the questions that feminism as a field of academic and political inquiry has generated in the past. These questions would provide caution in Chesler’s assumption of the role of a savior. Perhaps more important, they would force her to think of women under Taliban not in isolation from other histories, including the role of the Reagan-era conservatives in the rise of fundamentalism in Afghanistan, compelling a reassessment of where exactly blame should be put for the violence that has destroyed the societies that Chesler, with such unexamined piety, wants to defend.