When Will the West Stop Exploiting Women’s Rights for Imperial Aims?
Nothing about the Israel-US war on Iran was about ‘liberating women.'
Parnia Abbasi was asleep in her bed when the Israeli missile struck her apartment in Tehran, killing her alongside her family. The 23-year-old poet and English teacher’s final poem was eerily prescient:
In a thousand places,
I come to an end.
I burn
I become a fading star
that in your sky
turns to smoke.
It was difficult to retrieve her body because of the severity of the building collapse. Will an international movement of so-called feminists rally for Parnia, the latest in what Iranian academic and politician Zahra Rahnavard called the “civilian victims of…Israel’s woman-killing, child-killing regime”?
Will celebrities who fancy themselves human rights activists coin a slogan in her honor and wear it on a t-shirt, as Meghan Markle did for the ubiquitous ‘Woman. Life. Freedom.’ movement? Will Juliette Binoche and other French luminaries trim a few strands of their hair for Parnia? No. They can only be counted on to shill for women’s rights when it’s not the Western world threatening them. I haven’t heard a peep from Gloria Steinem about women in Gaza or Iranian victims of Israeli aggression.
The joint Israeli–US imperial, regime change obsessed war machine doesn’t operate in a silo. It is not kinetic power alone, rather it fires on multiple fronts: it is hard power joined by media that disseminates its fabulous lies (Iraq has WMDs, Iran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon, etc), manufacturing consent for its invasions, culture, and entertainment (those filmmakers and Hollywood stars who, whether they know it or not, are what Mao tse Tung called the ‘useful idiots’ of empire), and it’s feminism that manipulates a genuine desire to support women into justifying illegal wars. Iran is not the first country to be a victim of imperial feminism, and it certainly won’t be the last.