Eleanor Smeal and Sima Samar are the winners of this week's Roy Wilkins Award. The two may feel that's praise and something to aspire to because Roy's known for many things.
But for us, Roy will forever be the piece of trash who cooperated with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to smear Paul Robeson. Never forget it's the ones closest who can do the most damage and, Friday, Ellie Smeal and Sima Samar were eager to do damage.
They were whoring themselves out in the cause of war. It wasn't the first time so they're not just whores, they're tired whores. Both women worked extensively with Bully Boy Bush on the Afghanistan War in the first part of this decade. In fact, the 2002 State of the Union Address found Bush signaling Samar out for praise as he did his other invited guests.
Instead of rushing to prop up the current administration, as they did the previous one, the two might consider how to best advocate for Afghan women but that wouldn't provide them with the easy access or easy money, now would it?
So like Roy Wilkins before them (Wilkins was the president of the NAACP at the time he worked to destroy Paul Robeson), they whore it for the government.
For Sima, it was important to attack women working for Afghanistan women, hence her attacks on RAWA. In 2002, RAWA posed a question still worth asking, "Can we ask this from Madam Masooda Sultan, Sima Wali, Sima Samar, Shorish and others that why you along with your financial backup and truly very much 'people loving faces' and 'pro-Islamic' and 'anti-Maoist' and 'anti-radical' and with compromising slogans could not and can not organize a small demo of hundred people?" It really is all about "the financial backup" for Sima.
The same RAWA letter addressed Ellie, including this section:
Ms. Smeal is again mistaken by considering the "Northern Alliance" better than the Taliban. In our opinion only paying attention to the crimes of the "Northern Alliance" against the women and raping of pregnant women and making them give birth to their babies in front of the fundamentalists and the presence of mass-graves, is enough to realize the deepness of their cowardness more than the Taliban. Maybe we will have to prove many facts but the stain of blood on the faces of the "Northern Alliance" is a reality that needs not to be explained much. In the best conditions, comparing the "Northern Alliance" with the Taliban is like wild wolves and dogs. If Ms. Smeal has borrowed this realization from Afghans, she should know that a great number -- not all -- of men and women living in the US consider the "Northern Alliance" "better" in order to speak in favor of the policies of the US - that is the defender of the "Northern Alliance"-- without caring about the future of freedom and democracy in their devastated country.
Ellie steamrolled her way onto Ms. magazine and women foolishly let her do that. She now owns and helps destroy Ms. Ellie was pimping more war and destruction and neither she nor Samar could be bothered with mentioning the Taliban in their speeches. It took reporters questioning them for the women to finally (and briefly) address the issue.
"Reconciliation" is a word that has abruptly come into vogue -- with Karzai and with some U.S. officials and experts. But it is absurd to think that an Afghanistan partly or wholly given over to some imagined "moderate" Taliban would not in short order turn back into a sanctuary for international terrorism. Promises that the Taliban might make in the process of gaining a deal would not be worth the paper they were written on.
Sadly, those words didn't come from Ellie or Samar. That's Sarah Chayes, writing in a Los Angeles Times column last week (here for PDF format version, here for HTML).
Instead of offering even a fraction of the strength Chayes regularly does, Ellie and Samar played it like good little Barack whores, desperate not to offend, eager to be the go-alongs. After all, it's the john's money, right? He gets to decide.
Well, girls, we'd suggest that in the future, you get the money upfront before you screw over the feminist movement. Get it up front and count it. And grasp that every time you swing that ass for the government, you lower your own worth.
We'd explain that further but Smeal and Samar have a street lamp to rush under.