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.
The West’s Creepy Obsession
The West has long nursed a lurid, creepy obsession with women’s rights in countries they are about to bomb. You know a country is in trouble when black and white photos start surfacing online of its women in miniskirts that they are no longer allowed to wear. When George W. Bush decided to invade Afghanistan in 2001, the State Department found itself concerned with the fate of its women, seemingly overnight. Five years after the Taliban takeover, they released a paper called “The Taliban’s War on Women.” The first lady, Laura Bush, suddenly became an expert on Afghan women and went on the radio to plead for them. Won’t anyone invade Afghanistan to save those poor women! No apparent effort was made by the Bush White House to mention the fact that it was their CIA-backed Mujahideen who degraded women’s rights in Afghanistan in the first place.
Before the ironically named Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched (if you want a laugh, the invasion of Afghanistan was named Operation Enduring Freedom), women in Iraq had six months paid maternity leave, 87% literacy, and had their right to vote, run for office, access education, own property enshrined in Iraq’s 1970 constitution. In 1982, UNESCO even awarded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq an award for eradicating illiteracy. Here too, the United States sold its illegal and bloody invasion on a bundle of lies about weapons Iraq didn’t have and promises of liberating women. Liberating them from what? What did anyone in the US know about Iraqi women?
In 2004, President Bush delivered a Women’s Day speech gloating that women in the two countries he had invaded were “learning the blessings of freedom” even though Human Rights Watch reported that life in Iraq was “actually getting worse for women” due to the consequences of US sanctions as well as the civic breakdown and violence in the aftermath of the invasion. The situation, the NGO reported, for Afghan women was “dismal in every area”.
Imperialism and Feminism: Connecting the Dots
It has never been easier than it is today to connect the dots between imperialism and feminism. When the ‘Woman. Life. Freedom.’ movement was born in the aftermath of Mahsa Amini’s death for not properly wearing her hijab, it was supported by the official Israeli X account, even genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu has chanted the catchy slogan – on the day he started bombing Iran, nonetheless. That tells you everything you need to know – the regime whose soldiers snipe pregnant women, ban baby formula from entering Gaza, and bomb neonatal and maternity wards of hospitals is not going to advance the cause of women anywhere and certainly not by bombarding and murdering them.
Iran happens to be one of the only countries in the Middle East or West Asia that has no US army bases. There are an estimated 50,000 American troops in bases from Jordan to Saudi Arabia to Egypt. Among its fellow oil-rich nations, Iran and Yemen alone are not subcontractors for empire or Zionism. That is why the West is concerned about women’s rights in those countries and not in, say, Saudi Arabia, where women were forbidden to drive cars until 2018, or Kuwait, where women were not allowed to vote or run for office until 2006.
Once you have connected the dots, it is impossible to unsee the crude and criminal exploitation of women’s rights for imperial aims.
Iran also has the world’s second-largest gas reserves. US sanctions, however, mean that they cannot access global markets for that gas. That’s why CNN speculated about what an Iranian nuclear strike would look like – even though Iran has no nuclear weapons and Israel has 90 such warheads. That’s why The Guardian asks how the collapse of the Iranian government – always using the pejorative ‘regime’ – could unfold. That is why a bunch of patently ignorant women hosts of ‘The View’ talk show can gabber about the state of women in Iran, a country they clearly know less than nothing about. “They’re not educated,” co-host Sara Haines said, “they can’t own property,” and “they can’t go out of their houses.”
No one is arguing that Iran or Iraq are beacons of women’s liberty, but for all their problems, Iran has 85% female literacy; 70% of its STEM graduates are women. It’s the US where 54% of adults are literate up to a sixth-grade reading level. One in five adults in the US reads at a third-grade standard. Haines later went online to note that she confused Iran and Afghanistan. Whoops! Wrong invasions, wrong brown people I hate/want to liberate! It would be so much simpler and more honest to just say: We want your oil. We would like you to be indebted to our institutions. Give us your minerals and resources at below-market rates. But they don’t say that. They say they want to free oppressed women. Once you have connected the dots, it is impossible to unsee the crude and criminal exploitation of women’s rights for imperial aims.
Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. Her upcoming books include the memoir, The Hour of the Wolf, and a collection of essays she co-edited titled Gaza: The Story of a Genocide.
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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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In my opinion, we are being incredibly hypocritical if we say we are so concerned about women in other countries being oppressed when women in our own country are having our rights taken away daily. If the things happening here were happening in another country, we would send our military to fight for the peoples' freedom.
This is rich when they are going to fight for Iranian women right to wear mini skirt while the women in Gaza have no right to life or a woman in Mississippi does not have a right to family planning.