Tuesday, August 18, 2009

On Leftist Feminism in Lebanon

I posted this item yesterday, and today I received this letter (and I cite with permission): "Greetings from Union of Lebanese Democratic Youth (ULDY)
As followers of your blog, we read an inaccurate post that deals with one of our youth camps. We would like to point out 2 points that we object and consider to be nonobjective and even untrue in your post.
1. You say "The Lebanese Communist Party is organizing a youth camp in Lebanon", then you make reference to an article about one of our camps. We would like to raise your attention that ULDY is a separate autonomous entity, which is proud of its background in the LCP, but that is independent from LCP as both sides acknowledge. In fact, LCP has its own youth camps and we can give you references about them if you want. This youth camp was one of ULDY.
2. Based on a sentence that passes among the tens of sentences in the descriptive article in Assafir newpaper that says "the girls announced that Spaghetti is ready", you judge that our female comrades were in the kitchen preparing food for the camp. This is a very inadqeuate conclusion from that statement. If it happened that some of our girls announced the food at that time, it doesn't mean that THEY WERE ONLY GIRLS THERE, or THAT WAS THERE CHARGE AT THE CAMP.
As a matter of fact, the author also indiacted in the middle of his article that there was a big presence of female comrades in the camp that "give special sense to the camp". They were an essentail part of all camp activities and proceedings: political, organizational, logistic and food providing, the same way our male comrades were involved. So selectively picking a statement to falsely generalize a conclusion, and ignoring another statement that negates what you said is not objective at all.
We cordially ask you to take those two remarks into consideration, with the second being the one carrying more weight in our criticism, and wish you a better coverage of the events and statements of ULDY through closer inspection of its positions especially regarding Arab Feminism, the title of your post. We won't add much if we say that four out of eleven of the Executive Bureau of ULDY are female comrades with leading roles, in addition to having a good gender division in its middle ranks and bases, eventhough we always hope for more equality."
The writer later sent me this: "The fact that the girls were in the kitchen at one moment doesn't imply that this is their role in our organization, or that they were always in the kitchen in that camp. What we tired to emphasize is that you are generalizing an incident of no general indication and doesn't express the character of that camp, and evening generalizing to "Leftist Feminism". We mentioned before that in the same article there were other expressions by the author that reveal clearer image about the camp with its nice flavor due to the presence of a big number of girls. In all cases, there remains a responsibility on the author of the original article who reflected an untrue image of what was a good experience in leftist Arab youth interaction with all their differences from the traditional society including gender issues."

Of course, I was not there. And I only reacted to what I read in the article in As-Safir.