"I am sure there are liberal American women in belly dancing who are critical of the War on Terror and racial profiling, but the liberalism of these performers, and also of the performance space, is precisely the issue: wearing henna or doing belly dancing generally allows American women to disavow anti-Arab racism while avoiding any reference to the violence inflicted on those actually from these communities. The fact that these performances are focused on the body make it a particularly potent, embodied form of imperial feminism/liberal Orientalism at a time when the actual bodies of Arab and Muslim women, here and in their home countries, are under attack by the United States."