The feminist call to war

Feminism used to be associated with pacifist anti-militarist movements, but times have changed and now there are feminists who call for war, whilst they still continue to blame all wars on men. It is an enormous contradiction. For the last two years Gaza has lived under a siege and a genocide, supported by some sectors of feminism and in the midst of the conflict with Iran, once again feminist voices come out with a clamour for war. The reason is their supposed rush to free the women of Iran.

Four female political prisoners in Evin prison in Tehran (before it was bombed by Israel), conscious of the cynicism of some feminist groups in the West issued a communiqué denouncing the war and those who support it. They stated that Israel wanted a submissive and weak Middle East and they opted to continue their own struggle against the government in Tehran without allying themselves with Yankee imperialism.

Our liberation...from the dictatorship ruling the country is possible through the struggle of the masses and by resorting to social forces - not by clinging to foreign powers or placing hopes in them.

The powers that have always brought destruction to the countries of the region through exploitation and colonisation, by inciting wars and killing in pursuit of greater benefits, will have no way out for us except for new destruction and exploitation.^[1]

The four women are pro-Kurdish and also women detained in the protests following the death of Masha Amini at the hands of the Morality Police in 2022. One of them fought against ISIS in Syria. They are not coffee house feminists. They branded as traitors those Iranian who have called for war, amongst them the son of the despotic Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah imposed by the USA in 1953 following the CIA coup. He ruled with an iron hand murdering and torturing the opposition, both the Left and Right, men and women. His son wants to go back to robbing the country’s coffers.

Traitors to Iran and traitors to the peoples of the Middle East and traitors to the people's years of freedom-seeking struggles against oppression will know that their betrayal and disdain will be recorded in the memory of the Iranian people and in history.

Future generations will remember with shame those who stand on the corpses of defenceless people and trample them.^[2]

Whilst these women who did actually rise up against the regime are opposed to the war, in the West there are those bourgeois feminists who in between their macchiatos ask for more attacks on Iran, in order to “free” the women. They only think of Iran when a US president or the Nazis in Tel Aviv want to attack the country. They believe that the sexual predator who acts as US president is going to fight for the women. Maybe the way he did in Syria by installing ISIS.

One of the first to invoke the repression of women was none other than Netanyahu,^[3] a man who has bombed maternity hospitals in Gaza killing women and children all around. The US said something similar about Afghanistan and various bourgeois feminists came out to justify the war, deliberately ignoring that without US support the Taliban would never have existed. It was Jimmy Carter and then Reagan who started to finance the troglodytes of the Mujahadeen and later the Taliban i.e. the bourgeois feminists too.

I should clarify that many of those feminists are not bourgeois in the sense of their social class, they have no capital, they are not rich, though there is no lack of those who are. They are bourgeois in an ideological sense, although they use terms such as liberal, radical, separatist etc., but what unites them is their defence of capitalism and the bourgeoise. You could say right wing feminists but many of them like to present themselves as progressive when they are bourgeois, or in the case of the less wealthy ones, acolytes of the bourgeoisie.

Hillary Clinton, a bourgeois feminist (both in the ideological sense and also in terms of her bank balance) has her hands stained with the blood of women in Libya and other parts is one of the spokeswomen for bourgeois feminism. Much though they may shout, down with patriarchy! Their favourite slogan is Long Live Capitalism and Imperialism! This includes feminist intellectuals like Julie Bindel. They kept silent about the genocide in Gaza and now believe that whoever criticises the war against Iran supports the regime. I suppose this includes the political prisoners who don’t sip macchiatos in their cells.

Bindel writing in The Sun said that those who criticise the war support Iran and the oppression of women. She repeated the usual lies about October 7^th, mixed with some truths about Iran with the aim of supporting the war.^[4] Bindel has kept silent about the massacres of women in Gaza. She doesn’t support the women of Iran, but rather the West. It is worth pointing out that the owner the paper, where she writes, has supported reactionary governments around the world, including in Great Britain where Bindel lives. It is a misogynist, homophobic paper that frequently runs campaigns against the poor and migrants. Bindel is not alone, Kelly Jay Keen shares videos of the son of the Shah, perhaps to indicate that she supports the monarchy.^[5]

The bourgeois feminists, like all of the bourgeoise in practice see other cultures as inferior ones. They use the same imperialist language to justify wars as did Rudyard Kipling, the author of the infamous poem The White Man’s Burden. They boast about the White Woman’s Burden. It should be remembered that Kipling wrote that poem to seek and to justify the US invasion of the Phillipines.

Take up the White Man's burden
The savage wars of peace
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Then they say that men are to blame for wars and not their dear capitalist system. Over and again the bourgeois feminists call for war. But if they want wars and invasions, well why not ask for the US to be invaded, where women are pursued fleeing from one state to another to obtain an abortion, or where access to sex education is restricted and deficient as is access to contraceptives,^[6] where women earn less than men and are underrepresented in a wide range of fields.

Afghanistan is a country where women are more repressed than in any other part of the world. Throughout the conflict the US financed the Mujahadeen and later the Taliban. They had the option of supporting organisations such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a women’s organisation that opposed the Islamists and also the Russians and later the US invasion.^[7] No, in-between one macchiato and another our dear bourgeois feminists let the men in the Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton governments support the Taliban troglodytes.

They said the same in Iraq. I am sure more than one reader is asking themselves what Iraq has to do with it all. It was a secular country, that promoted women’s education and participation. However, one of the reasons bandied about by Bush was that he was rescuing and defending women and he compared their situation to that of Afghanistan, despite Saddam promoting women’s education.^[8] In fact, under Saddam, 30% of faculty staff were women, trained in Europe and the USA with full funding from the government. It is no longer like that, in fact there is no intellectual world in Iraq, the bombs the bourgeois feminists asked for, put paid to that.^[9] In the US the bourgeois feminists paid to go to universities, but Iraq promoted women as a state policy, something the Yanks have never done. In Britain, just 31% of the lecturers were women. Iraq almost beat them, but in-between macchiatos the bourgeois feminists called for a war to improve the situation of women in Iraq and of course their investment portfolios.

Now the drums of war are beating again and the bourgeois feminists once more give themselves over to the war, despite believing that wars are a male product rather than a capitalist one. They are not going to analyse their own participation, whilst a refugee from one of their wars prepares another macchiato for them.

As the female political prisoners in Evin said, it will be the Iranian people and the Iranian women who will free Iran and the Iranian women and not the bourgeois with the macchiatos, wine and caviar. They are just as much the enemy of the women of Iran as the male bourgeois and are as deserving of our contempt.

There is no lack of Iranian voices asking for war and not just the son of the despot Pahlevi. Masih Alinejad is an exiled journalist. She took part in the movement against the obligatory use of head coverings in Iran and other things. So far so good, unlike others she has fought against the oppression of women in the country. But in exile, she turned out to be a Zionist and in the first Trump government met with the hawk Mike Pompeo and also worked at the official US propaganda radio station, Voice of America, transmitting programmes in Farsi. Now she criticises Netanyahu, but not for bombing Iran and killing civilians but because of his bad timing. She believes he should have waited for protests against the government and attacked at that time. Of course the bombs were not going to fall on her, safe in New York.

Those feminists who keep silent about the genocide in Gaza do not seek the liberation of women in Iran, but rather a geopolitical reorganisation of the region and the victory of Zionism. But that slogan doesn’t sound too good and you can easier convince the dozy in the world by talking about the rights of women in Iran. Meanwhile they have little to say about why their governments installed and recognised the Islamists from ISIS in Syria. It is an exercise in public relations rather than real concern for the future of women in Iran. At the end of the day bourgeois feminists defend the bourgeoisie more than they defend women.

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^[1] Middle East Eye (19/06/2025) Iran: Jailed women activists issue letter condemning Israeli attacks. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/jailed-female-activists-iran-issue-letter-condemning-israeli-attacks?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Social_Traffic&utm_content=ap_azddldmlcf&fbclid=IwY2xjawLBawFleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFjM1M2M2VMb29MMkczSzMzAR4IXQ3CoRkZSexgXTaJmjUxJVpE2l0Bkra-DD3xFmiLdTXZYnIXuNPadxV9-A_aem_Jdx7RUMTQlXX43C-H6KSiw

^[2] Ibíd.,

^[3] See

^[4] The Sun (23/06/2025) Stupid ignorant lefties who support Iran when it stones women for adultery are mad and immoral. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/35536772/support-iran-death-cult-opinion-julie-bindel/

^[5] See https://x.com/Mylovanov/status/1937201198370549828

^[6] The Guardian (23/01/2025) As Trump returns, state lawmakers pursue bills that would treat abortion as homicide. Carter Sherman. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/23/abortion-homicide-bills

^[7] See http://www.rawa.org/index.php

^[8] The New Arab (22/10/2021) Colonial feminism and the un-liberation of women in Iraq. Jyhene Kebsi. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/colonial-feminism-and-un-liberation-women-iraq

^[9] Al Jazeera (01/10/2013) The Destruction of Iraq’s Intellectuals. Matthew Schweitzer. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/10/1/the-destruction-of-iraqs-intellectuals