Here's a really good article on Darfur and the way it has been shrugged off as a Zionist-coopted movement. Although the issue of backlash is understandable, I'm always disappointed and outraged when the struggles of the marginalized within the marginalized are undermined to save face of the wider community. If that's a case of ethnic cleansing, we have gender cleansing in India and its US diaspora, and sexual orientation cleansing in Iran. Oh, and how can I forget the Brahmin Samaj of North America -- wtf?!

If people are so concerned that these issues are only brought up by racist people outside our cultures to justify war and imperialism, when will we address them as human rights issues on our own and show the world that our cultures and communities do stand up first and foremost for the rights of our marginalized? I certainly don't endorse misguided western intervention, but I am even more sick of our constant kowtowing to patriarchal brown elites. How many more non-straight-brown-men will we sacrifice while we wait for the backlash to pass? (Not that among women of color we have our shit together either; check out this interview re: the politics of respectability and the Duke rape case. Fucking shit.)

Related: Let's not forget the US mainstream liberal quest to ignore gender and sexual orientation and class AND race, and everybody who is left of Bush should just unite to get him out of office and quit it with the "balkanization." But as Ann Bartow brings up often, the language our liberal friends employ is very problematically gendered; whattup with the Heathers? (I had no idea that metaphor was used so much!)