The Insanity of Western Women Defending Their Oppressors
In the West, where women are freer than anywhere else in the world, thanks to long years of fighting for that freedom, it is shocking that women want to go backwards to support anti-women oppression.
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This is a guest essay written by Karen Hunt of Break Free Media.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
It is easy for a Western woman to put on a hijab.
It is very hard for a woman in an Islamic state to take one off.
This speaks to the heart of the problem in the West; the complete ignorance, the irrational way people so easily rush to protest in favor of whatever’s trendy without any understanding of what they are actually supporting.
It is disturbing to watch Western women, especially the younger generation, protesting in support of oppressive Islamic regimes. Without any real-life experience of living under Sharia law, these women simply regurgitate propaganda. The more they do this, the more propaganda comes into their social media accounts, the more the cycle repeats, and the worse the madness grows. They become so indoctrinated, so invested in the lies, that no amount of truth can get through to them.
This is called confirmation bias — the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.
Now, this happens to everyone, and we should all be aware of it. Seeing how easily young women are manipulated to support regimes that would imprison and kill them reminds all of us that we need to be aware of how the media constantly seeks to manipulate us.
The disconnect these young women have from reality is especially meaningful to me, since I lived for three years in Luxor, Egypt and experienced Sharia law and saw how women are abused because of it.
Of course, abuse happens all over the world, not just in Islamic states. However, women have options to escape abuse in the West. When religion is actually the law of the land and part of that law includes oppression and abuse of women, abuse is taken to a whole new level.
Many will dispute what I say. They simply will not want to believe it. But as a woman who stood up for other women in Egypt against violent men — alone because everyone else was too afraid to do so — I can say, unequivocally, the majority of men in Islamic countries believe they are justified to commit violence against women (indeed against all “infidels”) because this is what is preached by the imams and supported by the law.
While living in Egypt, I started reading books by activists such as Mona Eltahawy. During the Arab Spring she rushed to be part of the protests, as many women did. Women believed that this would be a turning point for them, that they would at last be given the freedoms they deserved. The opposite happened. The police broke both of Eltahawy’s arms and she was handed over to the interior ministry for more than 12 hours, where she was rough handled and sexually assaulted.1
“A feminist group told me at least 12 women were also sexually assaulted in an identical manner as I was,” said Eltahawy. None of these women have wanted to speak either because their families silence them, or they were too ashamed to speak.”2
Western women scream at protests, hoping for a few minutes of fame so they can claim they have been “assaulted” — while women like Eltahawy speak the truth, defiantly knowing they will face actual violence:
“I detest the niqab and the burka for their erasure of women and for dangerously equating piety with that disappearance — the less of you I can see, the closer you must be to God.”
In the West, where women are freer than anywhere else in the world, thanks to long years of fighting for that freedom, it is shocking that women want to go backwards to support oppression.
At an International Al-Quds Day rally in Dearborn, Michigan, held on April 5th of this year, activist Tarek Bazzi called for the crowd to “pour all of your chants and all of your shouts upon the head of America” as the crowd shouted, “Death to America!”3
“It’s not ‘Genocide Joe’ that has to go,” he added. “It’s the entire system.”
Michigan Imam Usama Abdulghani told the crowd that the “people of conscience” recognize that Israel is ISIS, Nazis, and fascists. Not Hamas, mind you!
Bazzi said, “When these fools ask us if Israel has the right to exist, the chant ‘Death to Israel’ has become the most logical chant shouted across the world today.’” This was accompanied by shouts from the crowd of, “Death to Israel!”
At the end of the rally, Tarek Bazzi encouraged a young child to lead the chant: “Free Palestine! From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!”
This rhetoric, this propaganda, this conditioning are now being shouted in the United States. The fact that such people can even preach in public in the United States is a testimony to our freedom. The same could not be said in any Islamic state. If I said gays have rights, or I hate the government in Egypt, I would be imprisoned in “Palestine.” This is the obvious truth.
Tarek Bazzi glorified “Imam Khomeini” — the one who brought back strict Islamic morality laws and made it compulsory for women to wear the hijab in Iran. For women there, the hijab is a tool of oppression, despite claims by imams that it gives them “freedom.”
In 2018, Ayatollah Khamenei decreed this nonsense about the hijab:
“Hijab gives women freedom and identity. In spite of the senseless and superficial propaganda campaigns launched by materialistic people, hijab does not shackle women. By ignoring hijab and failing to cover what Allah the Exalted has asked them to cover, women undermine their own dignity and value. Hijab brings about dignity. It makes women more valuable. It increases women’s dignity and respect. Therefore, it is necessary to appreciate hijab and to be thankful to Islam for emphasizing hijab. Hijab is among the blessings of God.”4
During the 2022 protests in Iran, where women burned their hijabs, it was trendy in the West to support these women. Now, it is trendy to support the regimes that persecuted and killed them. What would the young women in Iran say to the young women at Harvard, for example, protesting for the very thing Iranian women protest against?
What about Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish-Iranian woman whose arrest in Tehran for opposing mandatory hijab and subsequent death in police custody sparked a wave of protests throughout Iran? Do these young women even know who she is?
Inspired by brave Iranian women taking off their hijabs, it became trendy for celebrities such as French actress Juliette Binoche to snip off a hunk of her hair on social media in “solidarity” with Amini. Soon everyone was doing it. What did it cost them? Nothing, except maybe a few minutes of internet fame when their video might go “viral.”
Now, it is trendy to support the exact opposite. Women in the West are putting on a hijab and protest in favor of the regimes that tortured and killed women for taking them off. Western women are clueless as to the mockery they are making of the women who suffered fighting for freedoms that they take for granted.
Seeing women with keffiyehs casually draped around their shoulders or over their hair is an insult to women who have fought for freedom down through history. The keffiyeh is a symbol of terrorism, first worn by longtime Palestinian leader and preeminent terrorist, Yasser Arafat. And if you deny the truth of this, then you are as ignorant as the women are who wear the keffiyeh. You simply do not understand history or refuse to see it. You may think, “Oh, the meaning has changed.” No, it has not.
All it costs for a Westerner to cover her hair with a keffiyeh is $12.99 on Amazon. It cost Amini her life when she uncovered her hair.
Nothing shows the utter arrogance and ignorance of these supposedly educated young people than what happened in Berkeley, California a few months ago.
A group of female Berkeley law students accepted an invitation to dine at the private home of Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife, a law professor — then disrupted the event and refused to leave. The dean and professor (who are Jewish) and anyone who defended them were immediately termed “White supremacists” and “Zionists” (as if the latter is a “bad” word).
Malak Afaneh later claimed she was sexually assaulted by Chemerinsky’s wife, who “groped her breast.” She said she feared for her life. She insisted that she was within her the rights to demand everyone listen to her anti-American, pro-Palestinian speech during a private party at someone’s home.
Transport Malak Afaneh to the middle of Tehran and what would she do? Crash a dean’s party? Stand up in the middle of the city and start preaching freedom?
She would be arrested. But at least then she would get the satisfaction of actually suffering for her cause. Real conviction is not what these Western women have. They are following a trend. Yet the damage is far-reaching. They are standing up for their would-be abusers.
Westerners do not seem to realize how many Iranians support Israel. Iran was invaded between 632 and 654 as part of the Muslim conquests, which had begun under Muhammad in 622. They were forced to convert to Islam. The persecution of Zoroastrians by the early Muslims during and after this conflict prompted many of them to flee eastward to India, another country that stands with Israel.
Most people do not realize any of this.
Somali activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali — author of the book “Infidel” — embodies this fight for rationality over stupidity. Ali was raised as a Muslim to hate Jews and Christians. She is now a Christian. Here is Ali’s response to those who trod on their freedoms in the West:
“I lived in countries that had no democracy ... so I don’t find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don't know what it is not to have freedom.”5
There are so many terrible injustices in the world. Why do Western women not stand up for Kurdish women? Surely there are no more inspirational heroes than Kurdish women who fight — actually fight — alongside men for freedom. But then, perhaps that is why their cause has been suppressed. It would highlight the hypocrisy of these Western protestors who would not last two minutes in a real battle.
The Kurds are one of the world’s largest peoples without a state, making up sizable minorities in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Their century-old fight for rights, autonomy, and even an independent Kurdistan has been marked by marginalization and persecution. The persecution of Kurds goes back to the Ottoman Empire.6
In the 1980s, the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein unleashed a campaign that killed at least 100,000 Kurds, mostly civilians, with some estimates suggesting 180,000 people died. Thousands went missing and hundreds of villages were destroyed. As part of the offensive, Iraqi warplanes and artillery pounded the Kurdish town of Halabja with mustard gas and the deadly nerve agent sarin on March 16th, 1988. About 5,000 people — mainly women and children — were killed.
After the Syrian war began in 2011, Berlin-based photographer Sonja Hamad saw many images of Kurdish female fighters — but felt they did not do the women justice. “The images were very sensational,” she said. “The women were depicted in the same way as men – always holding weapons. The pictures didn’t say anything about the women as individuals.”7
Hearing little of the courageous women fighting for freedom and so much about the ignorant Western women advocating against it, I felt it was time to lift the voices of those who are the real revolutionaries, those whose voices are now being suppressed in favor of this insanity.
“It is not an Iranian revolution, or even a Kurdish revolution,” said Rozhin, 25 years old from the Kurdish city of Kermanshah. “It is a women’s revolution.”
Yet, this revolution seems to be taking far more than two steps backward nowadays.
I will always remember Farrokhroo Parsa, an Iranian physician, educator, and parliamentarian. She served as minister of education and was the first female cabinet minister. Parsa was an outspoken supporter of women’s rights in Iran.
Because of her brave stance, she was one of the first to be executed by firing squad in 1980 at the outset of the Islamic Cultural Revolution. My friend, Alec, told me it was common knowledge, although never reported in the press, that she was dragged through the streets in a sack to humiliate her before her execution.
In her last letter from prison, Parsa wrote this to her children:
“I am a doctor, so I have no fear of death. Death is only a moment and no more. I am prepared to receive death with open arms rather than live in shame by being forced to be veiled. I am not going to bow to those who expect me to express regret for 50 years of my efforts for equality between men and women. I am not prepared to wear the chador (an outer garment or open cloak worn by many women in the Persian-influenced countries) and step back in history.”
Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi, who suffered female genital mutilation as a child (as 90 percent of Egyptian girls still do) said this: “Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can’t have anything without women.”
She wrote how in the West, “plastic surgery is a postmodern veil.” Women are being conditioned in so many ways to give up their rights, to disappear.
If more and more Western women start supporting their oppressors like Islamic extremist Tarek Bazzi, what hope is there for any of us?
Perhaps with writing this now, a few young women will learn about the brave Kurdish fighters, the revolutionary women of Iran and Egypt and other Islamic states. Perhaps more will find the courage to speak out against the latest trends.
Stand up before it is too late.
“‘Egypt needs a feminist revolution’: Mona Eltahawy ten years after the Arab Spring.” The New Arab.
“‘Egypt needs a feminist revolution’: Mona Eltahawy ten years after the Arab Spring.” The New Arab.
“At International Al-Quds Day Rally in Dearborn, Michigan Protesters Chant ‘Death to America!’” MEMRI TV Videos. YouTube.
“Hijab gives women freedom and identity: Ayatollah Khamenei.” Khamenei.ir.
“On the Map.” CBC.
“The Kurds’ Long Struggle With Statelessness.” Council on Foreign Relations.
“Women. Life. Freedom. Female fighters of Kurdistan.” CNN.
 | A guest post by
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Thank you for a flawlessly written essay. Many young women in the US have had very comfortable lives, never having to hide who they are. They are feckless creatures who, as you have so eloquently pointed out, never had to walk in fear because of the freedoms they enjoy. They are more preoccupied with gender identification and having their rights taken away. The most fear they have is that they won't be able to have an abortion. Anything else outside of their world, they are clueless and indifferent to because it's all about them. It's an extreme form of narcissism that permeates these young women's psyche. Until they rid themselves of the adolescent, "The world revolves around me" attitude, it will be difficult to change their thinking. Perhaps a few years of maturing and a couple of life's hard knocks might change them.
I think the only cure for this stupidity of some of our young woman who are pro-Hamas, is to send them to a Arab nation, for a minimum of six months at no cost to them but if they want to return sooner, they must pay all their own expenses. I think if they last six weeks, it would be a shock!