In the political realm, as Hammer points out, neoconservative attacks on Islam generally include a gender-egalitarian and women’s rights perspective. This ostensible intervention on behalf of women oppressed by the sharia reinforces Islamophobia among Americans; it claims to be interested in saving Muslim women while simultaneously casting them as foreign and dangerous, in this way turning women’s bodies into the tools of political agendas of imperialism and minority discrimination. Nowhere is this more evident than in the condescending feminist concern about the oppression of Afghani women, which conveniently justified the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan, although such concerns did not arise in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan praised the Afghan mujahidin as freedom fighters.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 50