Participants gather before embarking on a Women’s March in Toronto on January 20, 2018. |
They came in the tens of thousands. Women across the United States and Canada marched to assert their rightful place in society, no longer on the periphery, but at the centre.
Excesses of language and silly pussy hats aside, this year’s march came in light of the #MeToo movement and the exposure of many prominent men accused of sexually assaulting women.
As a father of two daughters, from a society where women suffer immeasurably more than their sisters in the West, I know that every time women take a step forward, the ripple effect is felt around the world.
However, if the women’s movement itself becomes a pawn in the hands of ‘diversity-conscious’ liberal feminists, it leads to strengthening the very forces that are institutionally targeting women to keep them in their place as dictated by the guardian men of the family or the state (in most cases Islamic).
It seems Western feminists have decided to respect such misogynists simply because their overt anti-Americanism has become an intrinsic part of the ‘women’s rights’ movement.
During last year’s marches, the Women’s March celebrated the awful headgear that has been imposed by the state and the clergy in a number of Islamic states and that has seen girls murdered right here in Canada.
This year the hijab celebration was not that front and centre. Perhaps some sisters in the movement got the message that Linda Sarsour, the American-Palestinian Islamist who once tweeted about taking away Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s vagina, was not an appropriate figure to honour.
But if hypocrisy was evident last year, in the recent 2018 march, selfishness, arrogance and ignorance could be seen in abundance.
Women were at the forefront of protests against the Iranian regime in late December 2017. |
Long before the marches in DC, Toronto, Los Angeles and other cities, women in Iran had revolted in a courageous manner to stand up to the ayatollahs and many ripped off their oppressive hijabs to challenge the dictatorship of the Islamic Regime.
Further west, the amazing female soldiers of the Kurdish YPG were involved in resisting the invasion of Syria by the Islamofascist Turkish Armed Forces.
One would have hoped that the Women’s March would utter some words of solidarity with the brave women of Iran and the Kurds, but that was not to happen. Not one word was said. Had the organizers claimed that the march was about women in the West, they would have had an argument that could be debated.
This was not the case. At many rallies, international issues that matter to Islamists did come up in the speeches.
The Women’s March exhibited no words of solidarity with brave Iranian and Kurdish women. |
In LA, for example, Thandiwe Abdullah, daughter of Black Lives Matter organizer Melina Abdullah, gave a speech in support of women in Palestine and declared Israel as an ‘apartheid state.’
“Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanctions discrimination against the Palestinian state,” she said, arguing U.S. citizens are complicit in these actions.
In Canada, a Toronto Star column reported on how a speaker “brought people to tears with stories of atrocities against her fellow Rohingyas.”
The question that remained unanswered was this: If Rohingya and Palestinian women could find space in the march, why were Iranian and Kurdish women excluded? Who made that decision?
In the meantime, the Iranian woman who protested the country’s enforced hijab code by standing on a pillar-box in Tehran and taking off her hijab is missing and feared to have been arrested.
Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and columnist at the Toronto Sun, is a Robert J. and Abby B. Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
