Dorsa Derakhshani, an eighteen year old Iranian chess grandmaster, refused to wear a hijab to a match in Gibraltar. She was booted from the team. Apparently, her family is a breath of fresh air in an oppressive regime: seems her little brother, Borna, 15, was subsequently kicked off the team for playing chess with an Israeli chess player.
Whatever you think of the hijab, certainly western feminists are concerned about a young woman's rights, aren't they? Well, not so much, according to a piece in today's Wall Street Journal:
It would be nice to report that Western feminists rallied to Ms. Derakhshani’s defense, but they didn’t. America’s liberal feminists have been busy planning a “Day Without a Woman” to protest President Trump’s alleged misogyny.
In Iran, the Interior Ministry investigates more than a million women every year for refusing to cover their heads. In 2014 several bareheaded young Iranian women posted a video of themselves dancing and singing to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” They were arrested for “hurting public chastity” and sentenced to a year in prison and 91 lashes. (The sentences were suspended contingent on three years of good behavior.)
Feminists and progressives have a habit of ignoring Islamism’s female victims, preferring to focus on phantom reports of Islamophobia in the West. Enormous attention has been paid to “burqa bans” in European countries. But how many readers have heard of Ms. Derakhshani?
Sweden claims it has a “feminist foreign policy,” yet during an official trip to Iran last month several female cabinet members covered their heads. How will Iranian women escape Islamism’s chokehold if European feminists submissively bow to men who refuse even to shake a woman’s hand?
Days before that state visit, an Islamic court in Iran’s Lorestan Province sentenced a man and woman to death by stoning for adultery. The Swedish feminists issued nary a peep in protest of this gross violation of human rights.
In the guise of cultural relativism, Western feminism appears to have evolved into a new kind of racism. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights seems not to apply to women in certain Islamic countries.
The Wall Street Journal piece claims that western feminists are more interested in "moral preening" than standing up for women who are in parts of the world where women really are oppressed. Sweden’s deputy prime minister, Isabella Lövin, for example, signed a decree in a staged parody, with seven women standing behind her desk, of American President Donald Trump's signings. The author raises the question of why Swedish feminists are more concerned about our "mouthy president" than about brutal Islamists.
The author of the piece, a Belgium-Iranian women's rights activist, recalls that one of the national co-chairs of the massive women's march the day after Donald Trump's inauguration was Linda Sarsour of Brooklyn, who has said, “I live my life under Sharia law everyday.” Sharia law, which deprives women of the most basic rights, is, to say the least, inconsistent with the law of the United States.
The final indictment:
Such women will never stand up for the basic rights of their counterparts in Muslim countries. Such women don’t deserve to call themselves feminists. That’s an honor that rightly belongs to the likes of Dorsa Derakhshani.