Professor Bennoune Publishes Op-ed on Tunisia in San Francisco Chronicle

Professor Karima Bennoune has published an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle on the situation in Tunisia, where the assassination of left-wing opposition leader Chokri Belaid has spawned protests and fears of further violence by armed fundamentalist groups.  Bennoune, who grew up in Algeria, writes that the killing was "eerily familiar" to incidents of fundamentalist violence in that country 20 years ago that ultimately claimed as many as 200,000 lives over 10 years.  Her essay calls for the U.S. government to withdraw its support for "so-called moderate Islamists like Ennahda," the ruling party in Tunisia, and speak out against fundamentalism.

"Liberal opinion in the United States should champion those who wage North Africa's struggle against fundamentalism, whether in Egypt or Tunisia. Their defense of secularism and equality should be our fight, too," writes Bennoune.

Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools.  She joined the King Hall faculty from Rutgers in 2012.  Her current projects include the book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism, forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Company in August.

"U.S. must support Tunisia's secularists": San Francisco Chronicle op-ed