Back in 2011, Maryam Namazie, then a participant on FtB, wrote a report about the difficulty of addressing institutional misogyny in Islam without being swept up in xenophobic, reactionary politics from the far-right. Whereas Namazie’s many criticisms advocate for the limitation of Islam in government as an institution, the far-right sails straight past this distinction to then scapegoat Arabs and Middle Easterners as a whole.

And I finally got a taste of it myself following a #MyStealthyFreedom forum.

This forum was a discrete way for Iranians to send out pictures of what it was like being subject to the Revolutionary Court. It released videos of arrests performed by the so-called “morality” police, and also published the aftermath of public whippings for violating various fatwas. The hashtag refers to an act of subtle rebellion in Iran, taking pictures without one’s legally mandated hijab in public.

The founder of the campaign, Masih Alinejad, is obviously then pissed off at the United States for closing its border to Iran. And what is remarkable is that the same American commentators who claimed to support the struggle of Iranian women trying to escape the oppressive thumb of the Iranian Islamic Republic flipped on a dime to justify their xenophobia.

“It’s to keep out terrorists.”

This, on a page, about supporting individual liberty.

I don’t understand the extent moral relativism would have to infect your brain for this to be a logically consistent position.

You support the individual liberty of Iranian women to unveil without penalty from their government…

…but they should stay where they are because terrorists??

The patriot’s capacity for cognitive dissonance will never cease to amaze me.

-Shiv

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