Here we go again: White feminists claiming to care about Muslim and Iranian women's rights, so much so they'd bomb them into liberation.
This latest feminist awakening comes courtesy of Israel and America’s illegal airstrikes on Iran, hundreds of civilians dead, and the world on the brink. And as always, when the imperial war drums beat, white feminism dances along, helping sanitise murder, justify war crimes, and whitewash massacre as liberation.
True to form, the moment Israel attacked Iran, Western feminists dusted off their dormant concern for Iranian women, last seen when they cut locks of hair in 2022, and suddenly rediscovered outrage at the regime’s treatment of women.
Talk shows and political debates have been flooded with misinformation about women's rights in Iran, with sweeping and malicious claims of oppression and domestic entrapment.
Some of it even blurred brown countries together, like The View's Sara Haines, who apologised for confusing Iran's theocracy with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, after falsely claiming Iranian women can't leave the house, get an education, or own property, despite women making up 60% of Iran's university students.
Predictably, prominent white figures chimed in, too. J.K. Rowling called Iran a “gay-hating, woman-hating regime”, despite her silence on women’s oppression elsewhere in the region, including the genocide of mostly Palestinian women and children.
Julie Bindel, another white feminist darling who once dubbed the hijab the “tyranny of the veil,” penned a Sun rant titled "Leftists Who Support Iran When It Stones Women for Being Raped Are Mad".
So it seems true feminism, in the Western psyche, means saving brown women from stones, but not the Western bombs flattening their homes.
Social media is awash with images of burka-clad, faceless women contrasted against pre-revolution Iranians in miniskirts and bouffant, a visual prompt to imagine Western-backed "enlightenment" as the solution.
It cements a binary: black veil equals backwards, miniskirt equals free. And by extension, anything that restores the latter, even invasion and war crimes, becomes justifiable.
Even the left, proclaiming to be ‘Team Iran’ on social media, falls into this trap. Leaked footage of women secretly removing hijabs, smoking, and mingling with men goes viral, accompanied by claims that Tehran is secretly more liberal than Europe.
The unspoken assumption? If it weren’t, maybe Iran would deserve to be bombed.
To top it off, in a move both dystopian and absurd, Benjamin Netanyahu positioned himself as a defender of women’s rights, citing Mahsa Amini’s death, and promised Israel’s bombardment would make Iran “great again.” Muslim women’s bodies suddenly matter, it seems, only when they aren’t Palestinian.
White feminism serves a clear, insidious purpose: the propaganda arm of Western imperialism. It props up, distracts from, and legitimises empire.
What bleeding-heart liberal isn’t moved by the image of women trapped behind cloth prisons, forced from workplaces into domestic servitude by “backwards Muslim chauvinists”?
No one is denying that Iran, like many countries, has serious issues with women's rights. Two truths can be true at once. A nation doesn't need to be hailed as a haven for women's rights to argue against invasion, destruction, and murder, in violation of international law.
Moreover, the irony is impossible to ignore: both Israel and the USA, actively engaged in genocides where 70% of victims are women and children, claim to be civilising forces and champions of gender equality.
How can we watch Palestinian mothers gather the bloodied remains of their children, women giving birth amid rubble after Gaza’s medical system is obliterated, and Israeli soldiers looting women’s underwear and posing with their lingerie, and believe this is a state bombing another nation to liberate its women?
This hypocrisy echoes the War on Terror, where Muslim women were pawns in Western political games. George Bush proclaimed, “Respect for women can triumph in the Middle East and beyond!” to sanitise his invasion as a feminist mission. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney wore a burka in Congress to sway lawmakers toward war crimes, and Cherie Blair met Iraqi women to highlight Saddam Hussein’s abuses.
Now we’re back, caught between so-called feminists dreaming of miniskirts in Tehran and politicians promising to bomb Iranian women into freedom, while Muslim women’s bodies remain mere political battlegrounds.
Nadeine Asbali is a freelance writer and secondary school teacher based in London. She is the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain
Follow her on X: @nadeinewrites
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