Over the last 12 months I have become an avid listener of the Yasmine Mohammed Podcast. Brought up in Canada in a strict Muslim household, Yasmine’s mother was Egyptian and her father Palestinian. Abandoned by her father, her mother remarried (as a second wife) and they lived in the basement of her step-fathers home. She was subjected to mental and physical abuse, and was coerced into a marriage at 19 to an Al-Qaeda operative. Yasmine’s story is one of escape an survival, and she now advocates for the rights of women living within Muslim majority countries, as well as those who struggle under religious fundamentalism through her organisation ‘Free hearts. Free minds’. Every week she interviews a survivor of religious extremism, from a variety of countries such as Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, the USA, UK, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen and more. These brave women’s stories are captivating and inspiring, but they are only a tiny percentage of the millions of women, still suffering under the oppressive weight of gender apartheid and brutal patriarchal societies around the world.
Since the countries takeover by the Taliban in August 2021, women in Afghanistan have been facing a human rights crisis, deprived of the fundamental rights to non-discrimination, education, work, public participation and health. The Taliban has also imposed draconian restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association, assembly and movement for women and girls. Just this week the Taliban have enacted a new law that prohibit women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes.
Let me say that again. Women in Afghanistan are not allowed to speak or show their faces in public.
In Iran, under the authoritarian regime of the Islamic Republic, Iranian women have not only been forced to cover themselves (as per strict Islamic law), but have been forbidden from dancing or singing solo in public, riding a bicycle, attending matches in sports arenas, becoming judges or president to name a few. They must sit at the back of the bus and can travel only with their husband's permission.
Iranian and Afghan women are trying to fight back against the Islamic regimes. Iranian women are taking of their head coverings on social media, and brave Afghan women have began peaceful protests against social and political justice and to demand their legal, social, and political rights. But in countries where women have no rights, the retaliation is swift. In September 2022, police killed a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman named Mahsa Jhina Amini, who was beaten to death by Police officers while she was in custody for allegedly violating the mandatory hijab laws. And in Afghanistan the Taliban brought dozens of military forces onto the streets and used violence, tear gas, fired shots in the air, electric shocks, and ultimately detention for the protestors who dared to stand up for their rights.
So while the white Western feminists keep their eyes firmly on Rafah – the result of a war instigated during a ceasefire by Palestinians – they ignore the estimated half a billion women suffering under horrific archaic patriarchal cultures and laws. While Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia are making improvements for women’s rights, like allowing a women to drive, the reality can not be said for the culture in the home. Cultural and family pressure remains oppressive on women and girls. Despite child marriage being outlawed in certain Middle Eastern countries, the continuation of the practice is still widespread. Worldwide, more than 650 million women alive today were married as children1.
Under Sharia law, men can take multiple wives, where as women are married off as children and have to be virgins. Men can divorce a women by text message, yet a woman has to have money for lawyers, and has to lobby for family support to even have a chance at achieving a divorce, and often suffers isolation and ostracised from the family and the community as a result. Men can travel and walk freely through the community, where as women have to stay in the home, only allowed to leave if chaperoned by a husband or male relative.
When I watch the ‘progressives’ protesting for Gaza week in and week out, I can’t help but wonder why the laser focus on 40,000 (unconfirmed) Palestinian casualties of war, when their are millions of women and children suffering extreme human rights violations around the world? Where are the feminists speaking out for the women of Iran who desperately need our support, and are risking their lives to fight for a better one. Where are the feminists protesting in the streets for the women and girls of Afghanistan for the rights to access education, to refuse marriage and to choose how to dress? How is it that the so called ‘feminists,’ ‘progressives’ and gay and trans rights campaigners dressed up in keffiyehs have made it their solo mission to support the most ‘violent, misogynistic, intolerant forces on earth’?2
The feminist outrage is selective not universal, which proves it’s not real outrage, but instead a tool to accomplish something else. If I say I’m against the abuse of women, but have nothing to say against the most misogynistic culture with the largest amount of severe abuse against women, then obviously there is another agenda at work here. That agenda is deconstructing the West, particularly America and America’s allies.
This agenda and its allegiances with islamofascism is identical to that of the Soviet Union and the CCP. Many of the useful idiots screaming about Israel have no idea that they are really advancing global Communism, but that’s what this is about. In addition it’s just hatred of Jews, semantically concealed as “anti-Zionism” for the West by the Commies and Islamists to make it more socially palatable.
Feminism in this context is a means to an end which has nothing to do with protecting and empowering women.
The feminist outrage is selective not universal, which proves it’s not real outrage, but instead a tool to accomplish something else. If I say I’m against the abuse of women, but have nothing to say against the most misogynistic culture with the largest amount of severe abuse against women, then obviously there is another agenda at work here. That agenda is deconstructing the West, particularly America and America’s allies.
This agenda and its allegiances with islamofascism is identical to that of the Soviet Union and the CCP. Many of the useful idiots screaming about Israel have no idea that they are really advancing global Communism, but that’s what this is about. In addition it’s just hatred of Jews, semantically concealed as “anti-Zionism” for the West by the Commies and Islamists to make it more socially palatable.
Feminism in this context is a means to an end which has nothing to do with protecting and empowering women.
Feminists want to destroy the West.
Muslims want to destroy the West.
That's why feminists ignore all their horrors.
They ignored the rise in sexual assaults against women in Sweden.
They ignored the 1,000 women beaten, robbed many were gang raped on the streets of German cities in one night.
They ignored the 1,400 schoolgirls systematically gang raped for decades on North England.