Bitches Four

What’s happening in Iran is the biggest women’s rights protest ever in the Islamic world. Yet the response from some of the leading feminists in the United States, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, has been strikingly muted. Each one has made what can be characterized at best as a tepid, pro forma response, one that contrasts sharply with their statements and actions during the Trump administration. It looks as if each one of these women regards Donald Trump as a far greater threat to women than the Islamic Republic of Iran is.

AOC tweeted on September 23: “Solidarity with the courageous women and allies in Iran protesting for their freedom. Mahsa Amini was senselessly murdered by the same patriarchal and autocratic forces repressing women the world over. The right to choose belongs to us all, from hijabs to reproductive care.” She also retweeted a tweet from Yassmin Abdel-Magid, a hijab-wearing Muslim writer in Australia: “To be (hijabi) or not be (hijabi) is the business of no state or man. Solidarity with women resisting patriarchal control, the world over.” Tlaib, meanwhile, retweeted AOC’s statement, and Omar retweeted Abdel-Magid’s. That’s it in terms of the public reactions of this trio to the uprising for women’s rights in Iran.

Neither AOC nor Abdel-Magid was going to come close to saying something about Islamic law, although that’s exactly what the protests in Iran are all about: women there don’t want to live under Islamic law anymore. But both are far too committed to the fictional concept of “Islamophobia,” and so they both made it all about patriarchy. That’s a much safer target for them, as patriarchy exists all over, not just in Iran, and not just among Muslims. So the very publicly practicing Muslims Omar and Tlaib could retweet their statements without fearing that they would be accused of criticizing Islam.

AOC also went farther, equating the mullahs of Tehran with the pro-lifers in the United States. They’re “the same patriarchal and autocratic forces repressing women the world over,” daring to interfere with “the right to choose” in the fields of both “hijabs” and “reproductive care.” It’s a spectacular feat of illogic to equate a regime that is mowing down its own people in the streets with a Supreme Court decision that allows the individual states to determine whether to legalize or outlaw abortion, but that sort of incendiary rhetoric is how AOC keeps her rabid Left base ginned up with the requisite outrage that will drive these drug-addled slackers to the polls and to take other “social action.”

There is more.