Tuesday 11 December 2007

Refreshingly direct language from Pryamvada Gopal

I've criticised Cambridge academic and Guardian columnist Pryamvada Gopal on a number of occasions for her circumlocutory root-cause cultural-relativist outbursts. So it's good to see her using uncharacteristically direct language to excoriate those western leftists (such as Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali) who have defended the brutal policies of the regional communist government in West Bengal (see here and here for details). She also criticises the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its western supporters for failing to defend feminist and human rights activist Taslima Nasrin in her continuing battles with religious fundamentalists. Gopal's defence in this piece of the admirable principle 'Never solidarity before criticism' is curiously at odds with this Guardian article, in which she appeared to argue that western liberals had no right to criticise the oppression of women in Asia and the Middle East.

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