The collective, hypocritical West does not hesitate to find justifications for its colonial policies against the global south, using spurious arguments ostensibly related to human rights, while their essence is far from the rights touted by their governments and followers. The Ukraine war demonstrated that the red lines regarding human rights apply only to Western whites, before the events of the past year in Gaza and Lebanon proved that these lines completely disappear when the West, along with its followers like the Zionist entity and some right-wing regimes around the world, are the ones crossing them. Thus, there is no difference between a fascist regime or another secular or Islamic or communist one. If this regime is obedient to the United States, then there is a blackout on its human rights violations. And if it challenges the U.S., then it faces its soft and hard wars.
Based on the above, women’s rights were the pretext on which the West hung its hostility towards post-Islamic Revolution Iran. Of course, the West does not care about women or their rights, it is the one that places women in the highest positions of the patriarchal capitalist system to bomb other women overseas and choke them with siege, sanctions, and destabilization of their countries, regardless of whether a country’s regime is Islamic or not. It is the one that turns a blind eye to transgressions against women in Muslim countries allied with it. Iran’s opposition comes from its stance against empire and imperialism and the arrogance of the unipolar world that ruled after the collapse of the Soviet Union, while today there is a new pole in the making. This translates to its refusal to relinquish its resources and its opposition to American interventions in West Asia, including supporting resistance movements against the occupying Zionist entity.
Of course, the West’s hypocrisy and strategies would not succeed without a “fall guy,” the Islamic regime that follows religious law in civil affairs, plus the presence of Iranian opposition not independent but supported by the West, the United States, and even the Zionist entity at times. Despite shortcomings in civil affairs, which often appear as rejection of what is called “Islamic dress” for women, and which led to the 2022 protests following the death of the young woman Mahsa Amini (opening the door for Western interventions), there are also facts that are ignored and show that the condition of women is good in other aspects. A report by Human Rights Watch published during the protests titled “Unveiling Resistance: The Struggle for Women’s Rights in Iran,” discusses breaches in civil rights and the role of the “morality police,” but on the other hand indicates that “70 percent of Iranian women do not comply with the government’s interpretation of hijab regulations under Islamic law.” According to Article 20 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, “all humans, regardless of their gender, are equal in human, political, economic, social, and cultural rights,” while Article 21 emphasizes the necessity for everyone to respect women’s rights, stating that “protecting these rights is the responsibility of governments and state organizations in the country.” A Forbes magazine report mentions that “70 percent of students in science and engineering in Iran are women,” taking testimony from some women who work in the field and have started their own businesses. Iran and Saudi Arabia are considered global leaders in terms of the percentage of women in this field.
From here, what happened in Iran in recent days confirmed that Western liberals do not care about women’s rights, but commodify women’s bodies to serve their agenda, while supposedly commodification of women is precisely what the feminist movement, which they claim to support, fights against. Their goals only extend to bringing women to positions of power in a system they supposedly find distasteful, thereby killing two birds with one stone: on one hand, they hide the reality of the brutal imperialist capitalist system behind a female face, and on the other hand, they destroy any real feminist movement, and thus any hope for marginalized women in the West and the global south to attain their rights. The clearest example of the type of women they support are Kamala Harris, the American representative to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, whose hands are stained with the blood of Palestinians and Lebanese, and before them Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, and others who participated in oppressing their people and spilling the blood of other nations.
Returning to Iran, clips spread in recent days of an Iranian student who removed her clothes at “Azad Islamic University” northwest of Tehran, and walked among other students who seemed surprised but did not react strongly. While opponents and human rights organizations including Amnesty International considered the act “a protest against the mandatory Islamic dress in Iran,” the spokeswoman for the Iranian government, Fatemeh Mahjarani — ironically the first woman to hold this position in the history of the Islamic Republic — said that the young woman “was transferred to a treatment center” after she had been arrested by university security and taken to a police station. An official at the university and some local media said that the young woman suffers from a mental illness, while a purported clip of her ex-husband, hiding his face, crying and saying she suffers from psychological problems and is a mother of two, spread. Mahjarani told the reformist newspaper “Ham Mihan” that “no judicial file was opened for the student, as the government looks at the case from a social perspective, not a security one. We will try to solve this student’s problem as an individual facing a dilemma, and she can return to university in the future if it is determined that she is suffering from a psychological crisis.” She attributed the university’s hasty announcement of the student’s mental illness to “probably having a special file on her after a psychological assessment program at the university from a previous stage.”
Western media and activists quickly put all their concerns and global developments, especially the U.S. presidential elections, aside, and tried to exploit the subject politically. Drawings spread of the young woman in her underwear while the women around her wear Islamic dress, and some depicted those women as backward while the young woman was given European features. Liberals turned the young woman into an international hero and “brave,” while they themselves have been ignoring since last year and still do the heroics of women in Lebanon and Palestine who are subjected to physical and sexual assaults by the Zionist entity, saving the lives of children, women, and men under bombardment, moving children away from snipers, and being martyred while doing all that. They also ignore the situation of women in Sudan where recently hundreds of women committed suicide rather than be subjected to rape by the “Rapid Support” militias, and in the Congo, and many other marginalized countries. Moreover, some Western countries like France impose a ban on the hijab, which can necessarily be considered a restriction on women’s freedom and choices and limiting their “civilization” to their appearance, and liberals justify this by the need to “respect the country’s identity.”
All this does not matter, because the transgressions are committed by Western governments and those who collude with them. The only important thing is that there is an opportunity to commodify the body of a woman, and link her liberation to nudity, as if the women who were enslaved by the first settlers of the American continent were not stripped of their clothes, and the same goes for Palestinian women who are subjected to rape crimes by soldiers of the Zionist entity, which serves Western interests. What matters to Western liberals and their governments is violating all imaginable human rights, then waiting for the smallest opportunity to cast the accusation of human rights violations on the enemies and pretend innocence. As the great activist Malcolm X once said: “The political camps of whites in the United States are no longer divided between Democrats and Republicans. The whites who are struggling today for control of the American political throne are divided into two camps: liberal and conservative. White liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together to achieve the one goal, and white conservatives from both parties do the same… The white liberal differs from the white conservative in only one thing: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative.”
