This kind of thinking will be the death of the West.
“‘Damn dangerous’ – those who risk their lives fighting the mullahs and the Islamic headscarf support the rule of the white man. Says the Leibblatt of the German Greens,” translated from “«Verdammt gefährlich» – wer unter Lebensgefahr gegen die Mullahs und das islamische Kopftuch kämpfe, stütze die Herrschaft des weissen Mannes. Sagt das Leibblatt der deutschen Grünen,” by Lucien Scherrer, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 22, 2022 (thanks to Medforth):
The article in the German “Tageszeitung (TAZ)” appeared exactly one day before the knife attack on Salman Rushdie. It dealt with the issue of whether the Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad was legitimised to fight the Mullah regime in Tehran. Alinejad calls on Iranian women from her exile in New York to take off their headscarves – to protest against religious and patriarchal oppression in Iran.
The answer of the green-left leading media was: No, Alinejad does not have this right. It is true that thousands of women follow her calls and post pictures on social networks. But that, as “TAZ” author Julia Neumann, who specializes in “social justice,” teaches us, is not good – but “damn dangerous.” Neumann is not worried about the Iranian women who accept beatings and prison for their freedom. She is more concerned that Alinejad is using the colonial-era narrative of backward Islam to support Western ideologies.
It suggests “that white men can protect women of color from men of color” and “that women must be liberated from the headscarf and thus from Islam.” If you really want to help women in Iran and everywhere else in the world, Neumann concludes, you have to fight global patriarchy, this “construct of global politics, big business, political power and institutions.”
If the mullahs in Tehran had read the article, they might have cheered just as much as they did a day later. Masih Alinejad, like Salman Rushdie, is one of the regime’s mortal enemies. The anti-headscarf activist must fear attacks just as much as the writer. According to the FBI, Iranian agents planned a kidnapping in order to bring Alinejad to trial in her old homeland. Iranian newspapers have also published pictures of her with a rope around her neck.
But how does a newspaper supposedly committed to women’s emancipation like the “TAZ” come to denigrate an activist critical of the regime as a stooge of evil white men and to trivialise a regime that despises women? In the West, Julia Neumann suggests, women are just as oppressed as in Iran. Moreover, men there also have to comply with dress codes and cover their knees and shoulders. And would anyone in the West think of exempting nuns from the headscarf in order to help all women? Of course not.
One could dismiss the “TAZ” article as a slip, as an ideological aberration of a newspaper that has also equated policewomen with trash. But it is about a widespread phenomenon. As in postcolonial university seminars, it has become fashionable in the media to “deconstruct” critiques of Islamist states, symbols and ideologies – as white and racist narratives. These “narratives”, it is suggested to the audience, are based on prejudice and serve only to legitimise white male domination.
Criticism of the headscarf, which primary school girls (have to) wear today even in cities like Zurich and Berlin, is in this logic a racist attack on a collectively and globally oppressed minority. Some Western journalists, academics and politicians therefore defame all critics of Islam as lackeys of right-wing reactionaries, even if, like Masih Alinejad, they have experienced religiously motivated oppression first-hand.
Apologists for conservative to radical Islam, on the other hand, are courted and celebrated for their activism. For example, the Council of Europe, in cooperation with Islamist organisations like Femyso, launched a taxpayer-funded headscarf campaign under the slogan “Freedom is in Hijab.” The same message was also spread by the German broadcasters ARD and ZDF at the beginning of this year. The youth programme “Funk” presented the audience with young women who advertised their religious dress with slogans like “My headscarf, my choice.” The hijab, they said, stood for dignity, anti-racism, discipline and feminism, contrary to all racist prejudices.
There were no dissenting voices, although public broadcasters are obliged to be balanced. The contribution seems all the more strange because ARD and ZDF do report critically on dress codes in other programmes.
The (advertising) programme was produced by the group “Datteltäter.” The group aims to satirically combat prejudices against Muslims, but individual members have repeatedly attracted attention because of their completely lack of irony and proximity to the Islamist milieu. The former “Datteltäter” activist and one-time candidate for a WDR presenter’s job Naomi El-Hassan, for example, took part in the anti-Semitic Al-Kuds march and frequented a mosque in Hamburg which, according to the secret services, is subordinate to the Iranian regime. Another ” Datteltäter” and current “Süddeutsche” contributor, Nour Khelifi, was honoured with awards by the media scene. Among other things, this was because she had ridiculed Islamist influences in Austrian kindergartens that had been identified by a religious educator.
Commenting on the murder attack on Salman Rushdie, Khelifi said: “Salman Rushdie was stabbed to death on open stage & people on Twitter take this as a welcome chance to bring out their most disgusting anti-Muslim racism.” The tweet has since been deleted, but follows the same pattern as the “TAZ” post against Masih Alinejad: what is scandalous is not the Islamist violence. What is scandalous is the racist “narratives” in the West.
Masih Alinejad and Salman Rushdie have repeatedly warned against this supposedly anti-racist double standard. Yet it is increasingly prevalent. Julia Neumann’s reckoning with Masih Alinejad went down badly in the “TAZ” community. The editorial team felt compelled to publish a counter-article by the Iranian-born author and political scientist Gilda Sahebi. Neumann’s relativizations, her comparisons of nuns and her trivializations, Sahebi writes, are hard to take – and damned dangerous.
Infidel says
Maybe Frau Neumann could participate in a program where she and her ilk voluntarily do a citizen exchange w/ just as many Iranian women wanting to lose the chador. She could move to Teheran and don the chador she gets from her Iranian counterpart, while her Iranian counterpart could take the next flight to Berlin and not ever live under a chador again
gravenimage says
Germany: Leftist newspaper says that to support those fighting against forced hijab in Iran is racist and ‘dangerous’
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So concern over people outside the West is “racist”? Perverse, but you hear this more and more.
More:
This kind of thinking will be the death of the West.
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Yes, it will. Because these idiots are not suddenly going to fight Islam when it comes to protecting Germans, either. That would also be “racist”.
More:
It suggests “that white men can protect women of color from men of color” and “that women must be liberated from the headscarf and thus from Islam.” If you really want to help women in Iran and everywhere else in the world, Neumann concludes, you have to fight global patriarchy, this “construct of global politics, big business, political power and institutions.”
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This is the “white savior” meme that has popped up recently to make more white people feel guilty. According to this meme, being white and thinking you can help anyone is the epitome of racism. By these lights, white Abolitionists risking their lives to help black slaves escape slavery are as or more racist than slave masters and slave hunters. It also means that no white person would have been allowed to liberate the death camps. It also means that if you feel good about sending emergency aid to natural disaster victims in a non-white part of the world that you are should be made to feel terrible about it.
Sick stuff.
Infidel says
Actually, if the people putting out these ‘White savior’ memes are doing it to bust the ‘White Man’s burden’ legacy that’s been there since Rudyard Kipling, I don’t totally disagree w/ them. It’s not the job of the West to ‘save’ the rest of the world. As Mark Steyn once noted, the Statue of Liberty is supposed to be an inspiration to people elsewhere in the world to seek liberty for themselves there, not necessarily come here!
So it’s up to people in countries outside the free world to liberate themselves from various tyrannies, be it islam, communism or anything else and join the free world. But it’s not up to the West to help them do it. In fact, if they did it themselves, they’d value it all the more
gravenimage says
Infidel, I have issues with the idea of the “White Man’s burden”, as well–that’s what led us to foolishly spend twenty years in Afghanistan believing that we could bring freedom to Muslims who don’t want it.
But the “White Savior” thing is really just all about making White people feel unearned guilt.