The Spectator

Western feminists should be standing up for Iran's women

The preoccupation with ‘Islamophobia’ has led many on the left to defend, or even lionise, the veiling of Muslim women.

The bravery on display is breathtaking. In a devil-may-care act of defiance, young ladies are putting their lives on the line by smoking in public, discarding their hijabs and openly insulting the Supreme Leader’s image – a grave crime that could lead to prison, torture and even death. It is a raised middle finger – sometimes quite literally – to a regime intent on eviscerating women’s rights, suppressing dissent and enforcing Islamic governance, including blasphemy laws, the criminalisation of apostasy and mandatory hijabs. One might expect choruses of violent assent from liberal women in the West, who make it their mission to dismantle the patriarchy one microaggression at a time. Western cities should be full of ardent feminists, cheering on the courage of their Iranian sisters in the face of vicious oppression. And yet their silence is conspicuous. While the women of Iran are taking back the streets, the women of Islington are tutting into their margaritas. https://archive.ph/HHZlu

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Tahmineh Dehbozorgi (@DeTahmineh) on X

The Iranian people are waging one of the most courageous anti-tyranny movements of our time against the Islamic Republic. The media’s silence is...

Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people,” Arabs, or “the Middle East,” as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine. This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs,” “all Arabs are Muslim,” and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers.” Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture—Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable—are erased. By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them—or ignores them entirely.

Wheely bin control measures, a spotter’s guide.

I will give you Friday and Saturday, Royal Mail (although Amazon managed it), but today you have absolutely no excuse. cf the bin men, who totally could have on Thursday or today.

The first edition of Connie Willis’s Blackout/All Clear got a deserved load of stick for historical inaccuracies (and even later editions are questionable) but I just spotted this in the precursor, Doomsday Book: He stepped into the road. The stallion turned his head toward him and began to whinny wildly." There, there, it's all right," he said, coming up carefully on its left side. He put his hand on its neck, and it stopped whinnying and began nosing at Dunworthy, looking for food. He looked for some grass sticking up through the snow to feed her, but the area around the thornbush was nearly bare of snow.