No friends of women

international | gender and sexuality | other press

Thursday June 26, 2008 18:41

by pat c

Yassamine Mather continues her discussion of political islam

In her latest article on political islam, Yassamine Mathers looks at how the womens movement has fared in Iran. She also addresses how imperialism offers no answers for women. Full text at link.

The women’s movement in Iran has become the subject of many claims and counter-claims over the last few years. Bush and the pro-war lobby tell us that Iranian women deserve a better regime and, of course, by that they mean the kind of ‘regime change’ we have seen in Iraq or Afghanistan...

It is ironic that political correctness has discouraged many western feminists from challenging ‘islamist feminism’. Iranian women, who are amongst the worst victims of fundamentalism, have no intention of following this trend and indeed over the last few years many of them have written extensively against the defenders of ‘islamist feminism’.

If women’s liberation means freedom from economic, social, political and cultural constraints, then the women’s movement in Iran cannot find any solution in islamic discourse - any more than they can find it in the kind of bourgeois secularism proposed by defenders of regime change.

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Campaign continues to build

Sun Jun 29, 2008 20:29

Chris Strafford reports on a successful HOPI public meeting in Manchester. Full text at link.

Hands Off the People of Iran held a successful meeting in Manchester on June 24, titled ‘Can imperialism liberate women?’ The meeting discussed how imperialism cynically claims to support the rights of women and others to legitimate its own actions, including its military adventures.

Ruth Bergan from the Greens reasserted her party’s support for Hopi and spoke about the growing military threat to Iran and its use by the theocracy to attack the social movements. The driving force was not concern for democratic rights, but the pursuit of the west’s economic and political interests, she said. She spoke about the need for change in Iran to come from the Iranian people without the interference of the western powers, and slammed Britain’s hypocrisy in regard to nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

Yassamine Mather discussed at length the effect of sanctions and the increasing inflation within Iran, particularly their effect on the working class. She explained the intricacies of and contradictions within the Iranian women’s movement and how these are being played out in the ‘one million signatures’ campaign. Comrade Mather gave an account of the new generation of women, who are far more radical, and how they have linked up with the students’ movement.

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No friends of women

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