Were these the same people circulating a petition decrying the Taliban and their brutality against women? Of course, pre-9/11, it was politically correct.
Of course it was. Jay Leno's wife, Mavis, made it her pet cause:
Mavis Nicholson Leno is the Chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan, and has been the United States' most outspoken critic of the Taliban's horrific treatment of women. link
When Mr. M and I were in Munich in 1998, we saw a street protest about the treatment of women in Afghanistan. Why do I think that since 9/11, Mavis, et al., haven't bothered to thank the U.S. for liberating all those Afghan women? Oh, wait a minute, international and military affairs expert Mavis has weighed in on the issue (in Sept. 2003):
Longtime women's rights advocate Mavis Leno is concerned that reconstruction efforts in post-Taliban Afghanistan are stalling and women there will suffer. ...
She believes that unless reconstruction is fully funded, "we will render the deaths of those U.S. soldiers who died fighting there meaningless through neglect." .... Speaking during a recent telephone interview, Leno said that many of America's allies who supported the war in Afghanistan have been remiss in fulfilling their post-war financial obligations. "If we don't do it, we'll be back in Afghanistan in 10 or 15 years as the country sinks back into chaos," she said. Because the country's infrastructure was "almost totally destroyed," Leno said, "we need to give them breathing room." ....
Still, there is good news. First and foremost, Leno said, the Taliban have largely been driven from Afghanistan. In addition, the country's new government has put a number of women into official positions, guaranteeing that they will not be disenfranchised. Women are "pushing forward in areas like education for women, medical treatment for women and technical training for women," she said. The situation is far better than it was under the Taliban, "where women were stripped of everything that constitutes human life, except life itself." That was especially difficult because Afghanistan previously had been a liberal Muslim country with a constitution and equal rights for men and women.
"By the time the Taliban took over the country— which they did at the point of a gun and without popular support— women had been holding major positions in society and culture for a long time," Leno said. "Even women in rural areas were moving forward to a more liberal way of life."
Leno also shared her concerns about the post-war situation in Iraq in which guerrilla warfare is taking American lives on a near daily basis. "What puzzles me is we knew about this going in— that the country would quickly revert to war among factions," she said. "I don't entirely understand why a better game plan wasn't in place after getting rid of Saddam Hussein, which was a fait accompli, a foregone conclusion. Nobody thought it wouldn't happen. It was the easiest part."
In a worst-case scenario, the war that ousted Saddam Hussein could give rise to a fundamentalist Muslim government and society, in which women will be little better off than they were in Afghanistan under the Taliban. "Though not living in heaven under Saddam, women at least had opportunities," Leno said. "It was a secular country." link
Isn't that Hillary's line, that women were better off under Saddam?