Pro-Palestinian protestors are spitting in the faces of Iranian women

It was 1972; a hot and humid summer in Karachi. The adults were asleep but we children could never nap this time of day. My younger cousin Ayesha and I played as quietly as six year olds could, the diaphanous red veil magical and mysterious to our childish hands. I placed the veil on her head and announced “now you have become a  bride!” She smiled at me through the red gossamer scarf, at once transformed. I looked at her with my child’s imagination.

We could not have imagined that afternoon in Pakistan the veiling of Muslim girls and women would come to become an exploited, polarising force of subjugation. Later in Spring of 1975 I was in Iran and Afghanistan travelling with my parents, unknowingly taking a final glimpse before both civilisations would be condemned for almost half a century to an Islamism which would submerge women and girls under suffocating misogyny. Living in Riyadh in the 1990s, when it was a “land of invisible women” governed then under the yoke of reactionary Wahabi clerics of the 1990s, I was forced to veil in public and wore an abaya for the first time in my life as a Muslim woman.

And I was in Saudi Arabia - now liberated from Islamist fundamentalism - when I watched the September 2022 anti-veil protests ignite in Iran. Women’s bodies have been co-opted by the state, which has targeted them with deliberate injuries to the breasts and genitalia. The doctors who treat these poor women do so in fear for their own safety.

The death of Mahsa Jina Amini - the Kurdish Iranian woman arrested for allegedly inadequate veiling and fatally beaten while in the custody of the Iranian authorities - also triggered protests across the West. But, less than two years later, the world has moved on. The plight of these women, locus of so much of suffering in the country, has been eclipsed by pro-Palestinian protests in which some marchers overtly support Hamas, a terrorist organisation propped up by the Iranian regime. What ran through the minds of marchers this weekend, just one day after International Women’s Day? Did they consider the plight of women in these oppressive regimes?

The Israel-Hamas war has unmasked the extraordinary radicalisation of some armchair commentators in the West. Modern day progressives almost seem to celebrate terrorist groups, lionise Palestinian Islamists and neglect those Iranians who challenge extremism, whether in Tehran or Gaza.

Professor Gabriel Brahm of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute in Tel Aviv has launched a long-term investigation into “critical theory” and how it has contributed to the near-adulation of Hamas. Intersectionality now means that woke Westerners will always view Jews as first-world colonial “oppressors”, and stand with their opponents, and overlook the many instances where Jewish people have been atrociously persecuted. Even Iran’s Islamists are accorded near-victim status, portrayed as subject to the  whims of Western hegemony. To do so disregards the Islamist theocracy’s repression of women and homosexuals, because “race” must always trump all else.

Where is the woke West when Iranian women need its support? Why is it so reticent to condemn the treatment of women in Islamist nations?

Here is a reminder for those who appear determined to forget. Hamas infringes on the freedoms of women and girls in ways which echo Islamism’s brutal footprint in other nations. In the Palestinian territories, many women are deprived of the opportunity to work, particularly in Gaza. Even in the West Bank just 18 per cent of adult women work outside of the home. Early marriage is prevalent and data from UN Women shows that 15 per cent of Palestinian married women in Gaza are sexually abused by their husbands.  

Women can be beaten arbitrarily: when prominent Gazan journalist Rewaa Mershid was seen without a headscarf by the Hamas border patrol in May 2021, they reported her to the female Gaza police unit, who tore down a branch from a nearby lemon tree and thrashed her publicly with it. In 2021, a Hamas-run Islamic court ruled that women require the permission of a male guardian to travel.

This is the true nature of Hamas, and its Islamist ideology denuded of leftist branding. These are the “liberators” who are launching a “resistance” to “empower” the Palestinian people. It is shameful that overprivileged, ill-educated Western liberals who claim to be “feminists” believe them. The truest form of pro-Palestinian protest is the universal condemnation of Hamas and Islamism.