The courage of Iran’s women puts woke Westerners to shame

‘Ready to be next, but not the last.’ This is the message 17-year-old Sima, a young woman from Tehran, has been writing on her bedroom mirror in lipstick each evening over the past fortnight. She has been adding a victory sign, before then heading out to join protesters in towns and cities across Iran, determined to overthrow the nation’s autocratic, Islamist regime.

It is impossible to overstate the bravery of Iran’s protesters. Men and women, united in opposition to the dictatorship, have taken to the streets in defiance of the threat to their lives. More than 500 people are now estimated to have been butchered at the hands of the Ayatollah Khamenei’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Thousands more are thought to have been injured so far. Reports suggest hospitals are overwhelmed with victims of police shootings.

None of this has stopped women from joining demonstrations. ‘I am not afraid’, one female protester is filmed saying. ‘I’ve been dead for 47 years.’ Her arm is raised in defiance, as blood drips from her mouth and on to her chest. Akram Pirgazi, a mother of two, was the first woman to be killed by police in this current state clampdown.

The protests began just before Christmas. Yet for almost a fortnight, mainstream Western media largely ignored the Iranian women risking their lives daily, protesting on the streets of Iran. Only now, with bodies piling up, are headlines being made.

Robina Aminian, a 23-year-old woman from a Kurdish region in Iran, dreamt of studying fashion in Milan. Last week, she was shot at close range in the back of her head by Iranian security forces and then buried by the side of the road. She joined protests, reportedly full of optimism and joy, after her textiles classes at Shariaty College had finished. Today, her vibrant, smiling face shines from the front covers of British newspapers.

Not even this has been enough to nudge privileged Western activists to so much as summon up a hashtag in solidarity with Iran’s women. Instead, those quick to ‘blackout’ social media, take the knee or don a keffiyeh for the supposedly ‘right’ cause, have determinedly looked the other way.

The presence of women at the heart of Iran’s uprising is significant. By protesting against laws mandating strict dress codes and compulsory wearing of the hijab, women are not just defying Iran’s Islamist dictatorship, but also the sexist and oppressive practices associated with Islam more broadly. Anti-hijab protests expose the myth, endlessly repeated by the BBC and other liberal news outlets, that the latest round of protests in Iran took off simply because of rising inflation and the spiralling cost of living. Iran’s women are not taking to the streets meekly begging for food or asking for a little extra money. They are marching in defiance of a brutal regime that has terrorised all citizens. And they are burning hijabs, a hated symbol of women’s particular oppression.

For many Iranian women, these protests did not begin a fortnight ago. They ignited in September 2022 when Iran’s morality police attacked Mahsa Amini in the back of a police van for showing her hair in public. She fell into a coma and died in hospital three days later. The following year, in October 2023, teenager Armita Geravand was assaulted by morality police for not wearing a headscarf. After a month in a coma, Armita died. Their brutal treatment fuelled the Women, Life, Freedom movement and galvanised women protesting against compulsory dress codes in what were some of the longest-running anti-government protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Throughout this recent wave of protest, mass displays of solidarity from the West’s activist class have been notable only by their absence. Greta Thunberg, vocal in criticising Israel, seemingly has nothing to say about the killing of women in Iran. The same is true of Dawn French, Olivia Colman, Nicola Coughlan, Paloma Faith, Juliette Binoche… the list goes on and on. Celebrities queued up to sign petitions, pen open letters, make TikToks and join protests critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Students established protest camps on posh university lawns and hundreds of thousands of people marched through Britain’s city centres week after week, purportedly in solidarity with Palestinians. But when it comes to supporting Iranian women? Silence.

Actually, what’s happening in the West is more shameful than mere silence. At the very same time that women in Iran are defying the morality police, burning hijabs and demanding ‘freedom’, Europe’s cultural elite are busy promoting hijabi-chic in advertising campaigns and public-information posters. The garment rejected as oppressive in Iran is being normalised in Europe. Here, the hijab is promoted as striking a blow for ‘diversity’ and a challenge to ‘Islamophobia’.

The silence of the Western virtue-signallers reminds us that not all women are equal. Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 revealed that Jewish women do not count. Forget the #MeToo slogan, ‘Believe All Women’ – Jewish rape victims are to be forever doubted. Now we know that Iranian women do not count either. For Western activists, hatred for Israel and support for Islam are all-consuming.

Let’s leave the faux-feminists to their hypocrisy. Iranian women do not need Western saviours. To date, the iconic image to emerge from the Iranian protests is of a beautiful young woman, hair loose about her shoulders, lighting a cigarette from a burning image of the ayatollah. That is freedom. These women are braver and more principled than keffiyeh-clad Brits can ever imagine.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com.