Women’s Rights: The Fig Leaf Used to Justify Colonial Wars

News:

On Tuesday 3rd March, Iran held a mass funeral ceremony for the 165 school girls and staff who were killed on the 28th February in the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab by US-Jewish entity forces. The gruesome attack drew outrage globally as images and reports of young girls strewn across classroom floors and parents clinging on to their remains spread across the world.

Despite this horrific event, and the fact that 200 women were killed in just the first week of this onslaught on Iran, according to some reports, Trump, Netanyahu and various other Western politicians and media commentators continue to package this war on Iran partly as a means to ‘liberate’ its’ women from ‘oppressive Islamic rule’.

Comment:

The fact that the ‘Epstein Class’ and political and media circles operating within secular liberal states in which violence against women is rife and which created an elite network involved in the rape, exploitation and trafficking of girls and women, would have the audacity to even dare to speak about women’s rights is unbelievable. Furthermore, the hypocrisy is breathtaking considering that tens of thousands of women and girls were slaughtered in the Jewish entity’s genocide in Gaza without a whimper of disapproval from these same politicians, commentators and feminists.

Indeed, more women and children were killed in the 1st year of the Gaza genocide than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades. In addition, the mass starvation of women and girls in the Strip, the bombing of maternity hospitals, the deprivation of medicines resulting in women having caesarians with no anaesthesia as well as the systematic torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian women in the occupation’s prisons did not elicit any tangible response from these same politicians, commentators and feminists.

Let’s be clear, the Iranian regime is an oppressive entity that has its hands soaked in the blood of thousands of innocents in the Syria genocide and other lands. Furthermore, anyone who studies the Islamic texts with any sincerity would realize that its model of governance and selective and distorted implementation of Islamic laws does not represent genuine Islam rule – which can only exist under the system of the Khilafah state based upon the method of the Prophethood. However, the use of ‘women’s rights’ by the American regime and various other western secular governments, political parties, politicians and media outlets to try to justify the bombing of Iran in part on ‘saving’ its women while simultaneously dropping bombs on their head is sickening. Spanish politician Manuela Bergerot, in response to some politicians defending the bombing of Iran using feminist rhetoric, stated in the Spanish parliament: “This is how the right defends the rights of Iranian women: by celebrating the murder of 160 girls.”

The framing of colonial wars in the Muslim world under the pretext of liberating or ‘saving’ its women from Islamic rule, and the weaponizing of women’s bodies and rights and exploitation of feminist narratives for imperial aims to occupy and colonize lands is nothing new. For over a century, there has been an indisputable marriage between feminism and colonialism in the Muslim world that clearly continues into modern times. Leila Ahmed, Egyptian American writer on Feminism in the Muslim world, wrote in her book, ‘Women and Gender in Islam’: “Anthropology, it has often been said, served as a handmaid to colonialism. Perhaps it must also be said that feminism, or the ideas of feminism, served as its other handmaid.”

Back in the 1900’s, Lord Cromer, British Consul-General who ruled over Egypt from 1883 to 1907, attacked the Islamic social laws, including ‘veiling and segregation of the sexes’, describing them as having a destructive effect on ‘Eastern’ societies’, and that the means to elevate women and the country was to free them of these Islamic beliefs and to persuade or force the new generation of Egyptians “into imbibing the true spirit of western civilization”. However, while calling for the ‘liberation of women’ in Egypt, back in England, Cromer was a founding member and one time president of the Men’s League that opposed the suffragette movement and their fight for equal legal, political and economic rights.

This same feminist rhetoric of ‘saving Muslim women’ and liberating them from Islamic laws or rule was reproduced by the French government during their colonization of Algeria, and by the American and British governments in their colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – to try and give a desperate air of moral justification to their occupation of the countries. This legacy of invoking feminist narratives and peddling Islamophobic and gendered tropes to try justify military intervention is rekindled once again in this war on Iran. However, slaughtering women and girls, destroying their schools, hospitals and houses, and displacing them from their homes - all in the name of liberating them is a perverse and twisted logic, clear to anyone with a sane mind. An academic, Janine Rich, wrote in an article, ‘Saving Muslim Women: Feminism, U.S Policy and the War on Terror’: “the ideological rallying cry of “saving” the women of the Middle East has been a powerful tool in justifying U.S military intervention in the region. ......The complex discourses surrounding women in the Islamic world have a long and deeply political history, and this narrative has been renewed and re-utilized numerous times to garner widespread public support for Western military intervention in the Middle East. Yet when examined critically, it becomes apparent that U.S foreign policy and military intervention in the Middle East has both worsened the status of women’s rights in the region, and subsequently used the discourse of women’s rights as a justification for the “war on terror.””

Winston Churchill famously said: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” The truth is that the capitalist secular liberal system embraced by America and other western states is incapable of liberating anyone – women or men – rather it only generates mayhem within their own states and globally. And the truth is that no-one is safe in the current world order dominated by this system, and the regimes in the Muslim world who play along to its tune. The mass funeral of the Iranian schoolgirls slaughtered in this war happened on the 3rd March – the date that marks the anniversary of the destruction of the Khilafah (Caliphate). It is clear that in the absence of this state, there is no leadership today to stand in defense of the innocent and to serve as the moral beacon for the world. Consequently, the criminals, warmongers, and genocide enactors are given a free reign to execute their slaughter and destruction of humanity.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Asma Siddiq
Member of the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir