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 specialises 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 colour from men of colour” 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 relativisations, her comparisons of nuns and her trivialisations, Sahebi writes, are hard to take – and damned dangerous.
https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/masih-alinejad-kaempft-gegen-das-mullah-regime-im-iran-ld.1698330