This August, as the British government pledged to begin treating hatred of women as a form of extremism, TalkTV broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer responded with yet another inflammatory statement: “If we’re going to tackle extreme misogyny, why don’t we ban the burqa?”
“I can’t think of anything more misogynistic and hateful of women than making them wear an item of clothing that means they have no face, no individual identity,” she said, dismissing British Muslim women’s assertions that they themselves choose to wear the burqa as evidence of “grooming.”
Such reductive portrayals of Muslim women — as passive victims who must be “saved” from their “oppressive” faith – have long plagued Western conceptions of Islam. Is there anything more absurd than claiming to liberate women by dismissing their voices and convictions?
But beyond the backward logic lies a deep-seated hypocrisy. At the same time that women in the West obsess over how to ban burqas, face veils, hijabs and even long skirts, they remain silent on the actual suffering of Muslim women and girls — including those facing a genocide funded and endorsed by Western governments.
Where is the feminist outrage for the thousands of Palestinian women killed, displaced and left to mourn their families? Why is there a deafening silence from the same voices when it comes to the Palestinian girls whose homes and schools have been bombed; for the pregnant Palestinian women who have lost their babies to starvation; for the Palestinian mothers whose children have been crushed beneath rubble or whose legs have been amputated?
Modern feminist movements champion gender equality and diversity, promoting the mantra of “women supporting women.” But “white feminism” and “liberal feminism” seem to value seeing a woman’s uncovered face and body more than they do preventing their tax dollars from destroying her homeland, her people, her life.
After the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, Western feminists rightly condemned the atrocities reported against Israeli women. But since then, at least 100,000 Palestinians have died, per a conservative estimate from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Of these, nearly 70% of the victims are women and children. One year ago, U.N. Women’s executive director Sima Sami Bahous reported that about two mothers were killed every hour and seven women every two hours in Gaza.
Yet these devastating figures don’t spark the same feminist outrage as, say, the debate over the Barbie movie receiving just one Oscar award. Western feminists champion women’s freedom to wear what they want, but fall silent when Palestinian women are stripped of their very right to live. The glaring hypocrisy couldn’t be more evident.
Co-opting feminism
The problem is not that Western feminists are blind to the suffering of women abroad. It is that they selectively prioritize causes that align with their political agendas. Again and again, the rhetoric of feminism and women’s rights has been co-opted to advance imperialist agendas and justify bloody interventions in the Middle East.
Shortly after 9/11, one U.S. Congresswoman wore a burqa on the House floor to demand America invade Afghanistan and protect Afghan women from Taliban rule. Over the next few years, former First Lady Laura Bush boasted again and again and again about how American bombs had secured the liberation of Afghan and Iraqi women. “As we do the hard work of confronting terror, 50 million more men, women and children live in freedom thanks to the United States of America and our allies,” she proclaimed at a “W Stands for Women” rally in 2004.
In 2022, the death of Mahsa Amini in Iranian police custody, after she allegedly violated the country’s repressive laws on women’s dress, rightly sparked global feminist support for Iranian women’s rights and freedom of choice. The widespread outrage over Amini’s death is proof that when the issue resonates with their personal values and political agendas, Western feminists are capable of taking action.
Similarly, Western media was eager to take up the cause of Malala Yusufzai. The story of a young girl bravely defying the Taliban to advocate for girls’ education happens to perfectly align with Western narratives about “rescuing” oppressed women from patriarchal, Islamic contexts. Western feminists have been less interested in critiquing the harms of America’s covert drone wars along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, though Amnesty International has documented several cases of Pakistani women and children being killed or severely injured by U.S. missiles.
Over the past year, we saw a similar story play out in America with Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. U.S. feminists threw their support behind Harris, celebrating her support for abortion rights and her potential to become the country’s first female president – yet they ignored her full-throated support for Israel’s assault on Palestinian women. Anti-war activists requested that a Palestinian American speak at the Democratic National Convention, but this request was denied. Instead of supporting their cause, Western feminists continued to back Harris rather than demand better of their candidate. When Harris won, they blamed anti-war voters rather than Harris’s missteps on the campaign trail.
To be clear, many feminists are working to dismantle these double standards and adopt a more nuanced framework for women’s rights advocacy around the world. But the silence of the most prominent feminist icons and women’s rights organizations speaks volumes. This silence is not neutrality – it is complicity. As Maryam Aldossari, a researcher on gender inequality in the Middle East, writes in Al Jazeera:
“Look at the images of mothers cradling the lifeless, bloodied bodies of their children. Look at the images of confused toddlers, often missing limbs and flesh, lying alone on hospital floors. Look at the images of young women, with dead eyes, trying to collect fragments from their lives and murdered families in the rubble of their destroyed homes. And after seeing those images, really seeing them, you still want to stay ‘neutral,’ stay silent, or talk about ‘Islamist oppression,’ don’t call yourself a feminist. Because you are not one.”
While a mother in Gaza digs through the rubble to retrieve her child’s lifeless body, a Western feminist focuses on growing out her armpit hair as a symbol of liberation. While a Palestinian woman feeds her children grass and prays for relief, another Western feminist tweets about the radical “girl power” of Beyonce and Taylor Swift. While Palestinian women beg for aid, suffocate beneath collapsed buildings, and bury multiple children in a single day, Julia Hartley-Brewer uses her platform to call for banning the burqa in the name of freeing Muslim women.
