Can You Call Yourself a Feminist If You Support the Bombing of Iran?
How Western Feminism Contributes to the Oppression of the East, Including the Current Situation in Iran.
Anonymous: Qajar Woman Holding a Diadem (mid 19th century)
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“They’ve impoverished you, they’ve given you misery, they’ve given you death, they’ve given you terror, they shoot down your women, leaving this brave, unbelievable woman, Mahsa Amini, to bleed on the sidewalk for not covering her hair,” Benjamin Netanyahu told Iran International.
“The Islamic regime, which has oppressed you for almost 50 years, threatens to destroy our country,” he added in another statement. He invoked the Persian — not the original Kurdish — mantra of the women-led rebellion of 2022. He justified the bombing of yet another country by saying that his bombs and our American bombs would free its women.
Nothing new. For hundreds of years, the Western powers used feminism as a subterfuge for imperialism and colonialism. Especially toward the Middle East and South Asia.
Zan, zendagi, azadi. That is Persian for woman, life, freedom. I don’t need to translate the Persian — it is close enough to the language of my ancestors — aurat, zendagi, azadi — that I know its meaning instinctively. Our language and cultures are close. The excuses used to justify colonizing our ancestral homes, and now, to invade or bomb those home are close, too.
There is a reason that support for Israel and support for Gaza and the Palestinians are so often drawn upon lines of color: the rest of us, of the global south/global majority1 deeply understand that we are never quite safe from the possibility of the Western powers deciding unilaterally on our takeover, colonization, or destruction. Those of us with ancestry in the East and the global majority outnumber those with ancestry in the West, but we still haven’t fully recovered from centuries of colonialism and imperialism. We’re still vulnerable. And the leadership of our countries are still cautious toward the West, caution that’s especially noticeable as they gain power (eg., China and India).
Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
That’s from George Orwell’s 1984. One of us is always the enemy. For the West, there is a historical ideological battlement, which always places in the East in the opposing position.
We know that the motivations are often for greater power and money, but other reasons are given. Before, it was also Christianity. Now, it’s also democracy. In the centuries of discord and division, one justification has remained strong throughout: “feminism”. The colonialists and imperialists sought to “free” the women of India, the Middle East, China, etc. Today, the West promises to free the women of Middle East.
You’ve perhaps heard of the white savior complex? This is the feminist savior complex. It has a two fold effect: both garnering the support of liberal women to the cause, and also suppressing their own home-country feminist activism. After all, if women of the West are better off than those horribly oppressed women of the East…
And so, British women became the handmaidens of colonialism as they used feminism to justify their countries greedy, deadly conquest of India. In Can the Subaltern Speak?, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak described how Indian woman’s agency was taken and her voice was silenced by both the native patriarchy and the colonizers. In Orientalism, Edward Said wrote of how the women of the Middle East were unable to speak on their own behalf, instead described by Westerners. He wrote:
There has been so massively and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim for their backwardness, lack of democracy, and abrogation of women’s rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and democracy are by no means simple and agreed upon concepts that one either does or does not find…2
American feminists will weep for the oppression of Afghani women, and before they cheered on the drones that slaughtered the Afghan people. They’ll host conferences and panels on the Taliban forbidding the education of women and girls while forgetting that it was the U.S. that abruptly withdrew from the nation before fulfilling the promises made to the Afghan people. They’ll weep for the women of Iraq, while ignoring that it was invading American soldiers that gang-raped and killed 14-year-old Abeer Qasim. They’ll weep while ignoring that it was America that systematically destroyed Iraqi civil society through its invasion.
Today, that breed of American feminist is cheering on the bombing of Iran, conveniently forgetting — if they ever knew it — America’s seventy-plus year history in dismantling Middle Eastern democracy, in embargos and trade restrictions, and in systemically destroying Iranian society and its institutions. American feminists will conveniently forget their country’s role in the four and a half decade long religious oppression of Iranian women.
And because memories are short, it should come as no surprise that the West today is again using “feminism” to excuse its bombing of Iran. Why not? It’s worked so well before.
A Brief History of Western Inference in Iran & Parallels to Today
Why did you Americans do that terrible thing? We always loved America. To us, America was the great country, the perfect country, the country that helped us while other countries were exploiting us. But after that moment, no one in Iran ever trusted the United States again…3
What you think this Iranian speaker, a woman, is referring to? The current bombing of Iran by Israel and the U.S.? If you know your history, maybe you think it’s the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Neither is correct.
…I can tell you if you’d not done that thing, you would never had that problem of hostages being taken in your embassy in Tehran. All your troubles started in 1953. Why, why did you do it?
Back in 1901, the British worked with the Iranians and discovered an oil field. This led to the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company…which became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company…which became British Petroleum. Which you might know as BP.
That, coupled with a few other things, such as an attempt to put British middle men into the process of harvesting and then selling back tobacco, led to growing discontent in Iran toward the British.
In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected (through parliamentary elections) the 30th Prime Minister of Iran. He ran on a platform that went against the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s British interests and other foreign interference. After his election, cancelling its oil concession, which would have otherwise expired in 1993, and expropriating its assets.
Naturally, this scared the British. The U.S. president at the time, Harry S. Truman, insisted that the U.S. not interfere in Iran. However, the next president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, felt differently.
Supporting Eisenhower was the CIA., spurred by British. Specifically, the Brits sent messages to the Dulles brothers — John Foster Dulles, incoming secretary of the state, and Allen Dulles, incoming CIA director — about the “Communist threat to Iran”. That threat was invasion by the Soviet Union…which seems unlikely. The planned coup was called Operation Ajax, or TPAJAX, and it was headed by thirty-seven year old Kermit Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was described as the quintessential “quiet American”:
a courteous, soft-spoken Easterner with impeccable social connections, well-educated rather than intellectual, pleasant and unassuming as host and guest. An especially nice wife. In fact, the last person you would expect to be up to the neck in dirty tricks.4
In fictional form, Graham Green described this type of American CIA agent in a book literally titled The Quiet American. The topic is Vietnam, the American agent Thomas Pyle represents America, the British narrator represents Britain, and their shared love interest, Phuong, represents Vietnam. Phuong’s fate, of course, is up to the two men who want to keep her.
As with the real life “quiet Americans”, Thomas Pyle is a perfectly what Kim Phibly described in the quote above: an optimist who believes communism to be the “absolute evil”…and he believes that some sort of a “third force” government enforced by Americans is the answer to Vietnam’s troubles. As with the real life quiet Americans, he knew little about the country whose fate he felt he had the right to decide. He believed he knew what was better for the country than its own people.
In one telling scene in the book, Pyle gets something on the bottom of his shoes. He carefully, so his lover doesn’t see, moves to scrape his shoe clean. Telling that he didn’t want to quite get his shoes — or hands — to look dirty, even though he was heavily involved in secretive, manipulative dealings. Secrets and covert dealings, while appearing clean. Pyle sounds like a dead ringer for the real life Kermit Roosevelt, who, through his dying day, believed that the coup was the right thing to have done to Iran.
In All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, Stephen Kinzer described the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh and Operation Ajax in detail, going back through the history of Iran to contextualize it. The first attempt of to depose Mosadegh failed, but Kermit Roosevelt remained in Iran until he succeeded. Instead of an elected ruler, the Americans put Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the previous shah, back into the power. Interests in Iranian Oil Production were split between Iran and Western companies until 1979.
The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants there that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship. 5
What Kinzer is telling us through that quote is that the disposition of Mosadegh also impeded the U.S.’s stated goals of spreading democracy and reducing women’s oppression throughout the world.
An Iranian intellectual wrote in an American foreign-policy journal:
It is a reasonable argument that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup’s legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the U.S. Embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran, while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowered from a single week in Tehran…
The 1953 coup and its consequences [were] the starting point for the political alignments in today’s Middle East and inner Asia. With hindsight, can anyone say the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was inevitable? Or did it only become so once the aspirations of the Iranian people were temporarily expunged in 1953? 6
In 1979, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was deposed, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power and instituted a theocratic constitution. Iran's modernizing, capitalist economy was replaced by populist Islamic economic and cultural policies. Women, who once wore Western clothing — seemingly the West’s ultimate definition of freedom, to dress like us — were forced to cover themselves, including their hair. Women and men could no longer mix freely in public. In many ways, women were removed from the public sphere.
Women in a hair salon in pre-1979 Iran
The Internet is full of images like the one above, of both women in Iran and Afghanistan in the 1970s. Feminists shake their heads, so self-assured at their own freedoms, so sad at the difference in appearance between women who look like them and women who are veiled and covered. Maybe, like me, they’ve read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, about Marjane’s childhood confusion and anger at how her life changed after the Islamic Revolution. She described going from Western clothes to being forced into the veil for public appearances. For a certain type of ill-informed Western feminist, there is no greater oppression than the veil. It is the “absolute evil”, the most misogynistic thing imaginable.
This is described at length by decolonial feminists, such as Chandra Tapade Mohanty. In an earlier essay on decolonial feminism, I wrote:
Chandra Talpade Mohanty wrote that during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, some Iranian revolutionaries voluntarily veiled themselves at times to show of solidarity with their working-class sisters. The West here and historically demanded that Muslin women be unveiled because the veil is a sign of her oppression — never freely chosen. What they’re arguing in speaking over the Muslim women is that the veiled women cannot be trusted to speak for herself, nor make her own choices. A Western analogy might be women choosing to dedicate themselves to child birth and child rearing, more domestic labor, and wear traditional cottage core/prairie dresses. Neither are inherently wrong: my feminist argument would be that women are given the choice and not forced nor manipulated into either.
And there is the crux: that Western men (and now women) chose governments, believing themselves more capable of deciding on the behalf of the global south than the people of the global south are themselves. And Western feminists believe that they have the right to define oppression for women who realities they know nothing about.
For example, general belief among Americans seems to be that Iranian women do not have access to education. This is…not true. I’ve met and befriended Iranian-American women who graduated from Sharif University of Technology (one of the world’s best university for studying engineering/tech) and the University of Tehran. I know Iranian women who immigrated after graduating from these universities to pursue graduate school here in the U.S., or to take jobs at top tech companies. At the same time, one of my neighbors in college (I went to a University of California) was a visiting researcher here, and he wanted to stay in the U.S. because he thought his two daughters would be better off. His wife had a bachelor’s degree that earned in Iran. One of my friends who came here for grad school tells me that one of the reasons she immigrated is that because of the trade embargos on Iran, there’s less opportunity for innovation and economic growth — in other words, she immigrated because the West made material conditions worse in her home country.
In short, it’s a complex situation.
Americans try to simplify into “Iran = bad” doesn’t really cut it. America and Israel deciding “Iran = bad” and “we should bomb Iran and its people should support us because we’ll throw out the old regime” is an even more terrible take. As history tells us, Iranians have absolutely no reason to trust either country — and besides, bombing nuclear sites absolutely does not sound like the way of reducing oppression. It sounds risky — especially if there are nuclear leaks. It sounds like it has very little to do with the oppression of women, and a lot more to do with battles over which countries have nuclear capabilities, and how much of it they have.
Look: I’m not arguing that Iran’s women aren’t oppressed. I’m saying that we don’t understand the oppression. I’m saying Iranian girls and women should be the ones deciding how to overcome it. Most of all, I’m saying that the current situation has very little to do with that oppression, or reducing it.
In 2022, the women of Iran rose up in defiance of their oppression. Their movement — Jin, Jiyan, Azadî — rose from the minority Kurdish women’s movement. It followed the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, who had been abducted by Iran’s morality police because her hijab was too loose, not up to code. It started off as a Kurdish movement — the Kurdish people are an oppressed minority in Iran — but other Iranians quickly joined in.
“It’s now not about Kurdish movement, neither about Persians,” said Karim, 27, from the town of Bokan. “It’s about 85 million humans who are fighting back for their rights, socially, economically and in every aspect of life. One week ago a Kurdish girl was a stranger in the capital of Iran and now her face is known everywhere around the globe. This is not about national movement – this is beyond that; it’s about women, and it’s about our basic human rights.
“At this moment, every individual is thinking about fundamental aims and problems to be solved. But I do not guarantee that after one year the Kurds have another way of thinking about Persians.7
Here’s something to remember: the women of the East can ask for our help and we can give it, but they do not need us of the West to speak on their behalf, or to tell them what’s best for them. They do not need Western feminists coming in with their savior complexes. Most Westerners know nearly nothing about the Middle East, and even when they know some facts, they don’t have a deep understanding of the history, culture, and way of life.
What Americans and Westerners should remember is that we’ve caused a lot of harm to people of the global majority. Death, violence, empowering authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations. We’ve arguably set back their chance at democracy, and greater rights and better material conditions for women for decades. We did that, and as the past shows us, we’ve often bungled things up and made them worse. That should humble the West, it should make the West think and approach with more caution — but it hasn’t. The arrogance of the West, especially the country of my birth and citizenship continues, despite all the failures I’ve referenced here. Not only Iran, but Afghanistan and Vietnam, too.
I’d love to end this essay on a hopeful or uplifting note, as I usually do. The reality is…thinking about the history of Iran, Western involvement, the way Western feminists treat and view the East, the current situation in Iran…none of it leaves me feeling very hopeful for the present. I only hope that it will be better in a more distant future, and that what’s going on today doesn’t create decades of discord that previous interventions have.
feminism for all is a subscriber supported platform that advocates for women. If you can, please consider upgrading to keep this newsletter independent. Every paid subscriber allows me to continue to invest more time into feminist research and writing, and into survivor advocacy. Thank you so much for the time you’ve spent reading my essay(s). ♥️
I’m American…but my ancestry is from the global south/global majority. I go back and forth in this essay with identifying with being of the East (ancestry) and the West (born and raised).
Said, Edward. Orientalism. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). preface.
Kinzer, Stephen. All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2003). preface.
Ibid, p 4.
Ibid, p 204.
Ibid, p 204.
Chulov, Martin. How the death of a Kurdish woman galvanised women all over Iran. The Guardian. September 27, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/27/how-death-kurdish-woman-galvanised-women-iran-mahsa-amini