The Insanity of Western Women Defending Oppression
"But I was to learn that choosing to wear the hijab is much easier than choosing to take it off. And that lesson was an important reminder of how truly 'free' choice is.” ~ Mona Eltahawy
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You can listen to me read this essay here:
It’s easy for a western woman to put on a hijab. It’s very hard for a woman in an Islamic state to take one off.
This speaks to the heart of the problem in the West; the complete ignorance, the irrational way people so easily rush to protest in favor of whatever’s trendy without any understanding of what they are actually supporting.
It’s disturbing to watch Western women, especially the younger generation, protesting in support of oppressive Islamic regimes. I talked about these protests in The Age of Hypocrisy: Let's talk about 'stolen land'.
Without any real-life experience of living under Sharia Law, these women simply regurgitate propaganda. The more they do this, the more propaganda comes into their social media accounts, the more the cycle repeats, and the worse the madness grows. They become so indoctrinated, so invested in the lies that no amount of truth can get through to them.
This is called confirmation bias, the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.
Now, this happens to everyone, and we should all be aware of it. Seeing how easily young women are manipulated to support regimes that would imprison and kill them reminds all of us that we need to be aware of how the media constantly seeks to manipulate us.
The disconnect these young women have from reality is especially meaningful to me since I lived for three years in Luxor, Egypt and experienced Sharia Law and saw how women are abused because of it. Of course, abuse happens all over the world, not just in Islamic states. However, women have options to escape abuse in the West. When religion is actually the law of the land and part of that law includes oppression and abuse of women, abuse is taken to a whole new level.
Many will dispute what I say. They simply won’t want to believe it. But as a woman who stood up for other women in Luxor, Egypt against violent men—alone because everyone else was too afraid to do so—I can say unequivocally, the majority of men in Islamic countries believe they are justified to commit violence against women, indeed against all “infidels”, because this is what is preached by the Imams and supported by the law.
While living in Egypt, I started reading books by activists such as Mona Eltahawy.
During the Arab Spring she rushed to be part of the protests, as many women did. Women believed that this would be a turning point for them, that they would at last be given the freedoms they deserved. The opposite happened. The police broke both of Eltahawy’s arms and she was handed over to the interior ministry for over 12 hours, where she was rough handled and sexually assaulted.
"A feminist group told me at least 12 women were also sexually assaulted in an identical manner as I was. None of these women have wanted to speak either because their families silence them, or they were too ashamed to speak," Eltahawy told The New Arab.
Western women scream at protests, hoping for a few minutes of fame so they can claim they have been “assaulted”, while women like Eltahawy speak the truth defiantly knowing they will face actual violence:
“I detest the niqab and the burka for their erasure of women and for dangerously equating piety with that disappearance—the less of you I can see, the closer you must be to God.” ~ Mona Eltahawy
In America, where women are freer than anywhere else in the world, thanks to long years of fighting for that freedom, it’s shocking that women want to go backwards to support oppression.
At International Al-Quds Day rally in Dearborn, Michigan, held on April 5, 2024, Tarek Bazzi called for the crowd to “pour all of your chants and all of your shouts upon the head of America”, as the crowd shouts “Death to America!”
“It’s not genocide Joe that has to go. It’s the entire system.”
Michigan Imam Usama Abdulghani told the crowd that the “people of conscience” recognize that Israel is ISIS, Nazis, and fascists. Not Hamas, mind you!
Bazzi said, “When these fools ask us if Israel has the right to exist, the chant ‘Death to Israel’ has become the most logical chant shouted across the world today.’” This was accompanied by shouts from the crowd of, “Death to Israel!”
At the end of the rally, Tarek Bazzi encouraged a young child to lead the chant: “Free Palestine! From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free!”
So, this rhetoric, this propaganda, this conditioning is now being shouted in the United States. The fact that such people can even preach in public in the United States is a testimony to our freedom. The same could not be said in ANY ISLAMIC STATE. If I said gays have rights, or I hate the government in Egypt, in Palestine, I will be imprisoned. This is the obvious truth.
Watch the video below to see the hatred for yourself—yet in America, they are still free to spew that hatred.
Tarek Bazzi glorified “Imam Khomeini” the one who brought back strict Islamic morality laws and made it compulsory for women to wear the hijab. For women in Iran, the hijab is a symbol of oppression, despite claims of the imams that it gives them “freedom”.
In 2018, Ayatollah Khamenei decreed that the hijab gives women freedom:
Hijab gives women freedom and identity. In spite of the senseless and superficial propaganda campaigns launched by materialistic people, hijab does not shackle women. By ignoring hijab and failing to cover what Allah the Exalted has asked them to cover, women undermine their own dignity and value. Hijab brings about dignity. It makes women more valuable. It increases women's dignity and respect. Therefore, it is necessary to appreciate hijab and to be thankful to Islam for emphasizing hijab. Hijab is among the blessings of God.
During the protests in Iran in 2022 where women burned their hijabs, it was trendy in the West to support these women. Now, it’s trendy to support the regimes that persecuted and killed them. What would the young women of Iran say to the young women at Harvard, for example, protesting for the very thing Iranian women protest against?
What would Mahsa Amini say? Do these young women even know who she is?
Mahsa Amini was a young Kurdish woman arrested by the Morality Police on Sept. 13, 2022, in Tehran for "inappropriate attire", meaning refusing to wear a hijab. She was tortured and died in custody three days later.
Inspired by brave Iranian women taking off their hijabs, it became trendy for celebrities such as French actor Juliette Binoche to snip off a hunk of her hair on social media in “solidarity” while saying “for freedom”.
Soon everyone was doing it. What did it cost them? Nothing, except maybe a few minutes of internet fame when their video might go “viral”.
Now, it is trendy to support the exact opposite. Women in the West now put on a hijab and protest in favor of the regimes that tortured and killed women for taking them off. Western women are clueless as to the mockery they are making of the women who suffered fighting for freedoms that they take for granted.
Seeing women with keffiyehs casually draped around their shoulders or over their hair is an insult to women who have fought for freedom down through history. The Kafiyah is a symbol of terrorism, first worn by preeminent terrorist, Yassar Arafat. And if you deny the truth of this, then you are as ignorant as the women are who wear the keffiyeh. You simply do not understand history or refuse to see it. You may think, oh, the meaning has changed. No, it hasn’t.
All it costs for a westerner to cover her hair with a Kafiyah is $12.99 on Amazon. It cost Amini her life when she uncovered her hair.
Nothing shows the utter arrogance and ignorance of these supposedly educated young people than what happened in Berkely a few days ago.
A group of female Berkeley law students accepted an invitation to dine at the private home of dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife, a law professor, then disrupted the event and refused to leave. The dean and professor who are Jewish, and anyone who defended them, were immediately termed "white supremacists" and "Zionists."
Malak Afaneh later claimed she was sexually assaulted by Chemerinsky’s wife, who “groped her breast”. She said she feared for her life. She insisted that she was within her the rights in demanding everyone listen to her anti-American, pro-Palestinian speech at a private party at someone’s home.
Plop Malak Afaneh in the middle of Tehran and what would she do? Crash a dean’s party? Stand up in the middle of the city and start preaching “freedom”? She would be arrested. But at least then she would get the satisfaction of actually suffering for her cause. Real conviction is not what these Western women have. They are following a trend. Yet the damage is far-reaching. They are standing up for their would-be abusers.
Westerners don’t seem to realize how many Iranians support Israel. Iran was invaded between 632 and 654 as part of the Muslim conquests, which had begun under Muhammad in 622. They were forced to convert to Islam. The persecution of Zoroastrians by the early Muslims during and after this conflict prompted many of them to flee eastward to India, another country that stands with Israel.
Most people do not realize any of this. If you want to know what young Iranian women think about Israel and this war, please listen to this.
Somali activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, embodies this fight for rationality over stupidity. Ali was raised as a Muslim to hate Jews and Christians. She is now a Christian. Here is Ali’s response to those who trod on their freedoms in the West:
“I lived in countries that had no democracy... so I don't find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.”
There are so many terrible injustices in the world. Why don’t Western women stand up for Kurdish women? Surely there are no more inspirational heroes than Kurdish women who fight—actually fight—alongside men for freedom. But then, perhaps that’s why their cause has been suppressed. It would highlight the hypocrisy of these western protestors who would not last two minutes in a real battle.
The Kurds are “one of the world’s largest peoples without a state, making up sizable minorities in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Their century-old fight for rights, autonomy, and even an independent Kurdistan has been marked by marginalization and persecution. The persecution of Kurds goes back to the Ottoman Empire”.
There are many examples of the atrocities committed against Kurds. Here are a few.
In 1962 Syria striped 120,000 Kurds of citizenship. These Kurds and their descendants are unable to vote, own property or businesses, or legally marry.
In the 1980s, the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein unleashed a campaign that killed at least 100,000 Kurds, mostly civilians, with some estimates suggesting 180,000 people died. Thousands went missing and hundreds of villages were destroyed.
As part of the offensive, “Iraqi warplanes and artillery pounded the Kurdish town of Halabja with mustard gas and the deadly nerve agent sarin on March 16, 1988. About 5,000 people – mainly women and children – were killed”.
A 2019 article, Women. Life. Freedom. Female fighters of Kurdistan, by Sarah Lazarus, photographs by Sonja Hamad tells the stories of some of these female fighters.
After the Syrian war began in 2011, Berlin-based photographer Sonja Hamad saw many images of Kurdish female fighters – but felt they did not do the women justice. “The images were very sensational,” she says. “The women were depicted in the same way as men – always holding weapons. The pictures didn’t say anything about the women as individuals.”
So, Hamad took photos and here are some of them:
Hearing little of the courageous women fighting for freedom and so much about the ignorant western women advocating against it, I felt it was time to lift the voices of those who are the real revolutionaries, those whose voices are now being suppressed in favor of this insanity.
“It is not an Iranian revolution, or even a Kurdish revolution,” said Rozhin, 25, from the Kurdish city of Kermanshah. “It is a women’s revolution.”
Yet, this revolution seems to be taking way more than two steps backward now.
I will always remember Farrokhroo Parsa, who I wrote about in The Reluctant Revolutionary.
Parsa was an Iranian physician, educator, and parliamentarian. She served as minister of education and was the first female cabinet minister. Parsa was an outspoken supporter of women's rights in Iran.
Because of her brave stance, she was one of the first to be executed by firing squad in 1980 at the outset of the Islamic Cultural Revolution. My friend, Alec, who I wrote about in The Reluctant Revolutionary told me it was common knowledge, although never reported in the press, that she was dragged through the streets in a sack to humiliate her before her execution.
In her last letter from prison, Farrokhroo Parsa wrote this to her children:
"I am a doctor, so I have no fear of death. Death is only a moment and no more. I am prepared to receive death with open arms rather than live in shame by being forced to be veiled. I am not going to bow to those who expect me to express regret for fifty years of my efforts for equality between men and women. I am not prepared to wear the chador and step back in history."[3]
Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi, who suffered female genital mutilation as a child, as 90% of Egyptian girls still do, said this:
“Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can’t have anything without women.”
She wrote how in the west, “plastic surgery is a postmodern veil". Women are being conditioned in so many ways to give up their rights, to disappear.
If more and more Western women start supporting their oppressors like Islamic extremist Tarek Bazzi, what hope is there for any of us? Perhaps with writing this now, a few young women will learn about the brave Kurdish fighters, the revolutionary women of Iran and Egypt and other Islamic states. Perhaps more will find the courage to speak out against the latest trends. Stand up before it’s too late.
Oh my, Karen; this breaks my heart. I’m 72 now and, after a lifetime of supporting women’s rights, I begin to despair. I can’t understand how young women can so take their freedoms for granted that they can support Islamism. We have historically had to fight so hard to achieve our freedoms; hoe can they throw it away?
"He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy." ~Winston Smith (George Orwell - 1984)