Women’s Rights Are Not Universal Principles but Geopolitical Talking Points

The language of women’s rights cannot be used to justify war while ignoring the violence those same policies produce.

Illustration by Rama Duwaji

I wrote an International Women’s Day poem in 2024, and I’ve been posting it every year since. It’s always current, always fitting — nothing seems to change. The world has descended into a permanent state of imperial stupor, so it always applies. It goes like this:

An International Women's Day Poem

This year, I feel like expanding it, given the sheer Western arrogance of this moment — Women, Life, Freedom in action. “Help is on the way, Iran,” claim US and Israeli politicians, activists, influencers, and Iranian diaspora hasbarists; liberation underway, one bomb at a time, war openly marketed as feminism, and the liberation of the Iranian people.

Over the past two years, we watched Palestinian and Lebanese women face levels of violence, displacement, and trauma unimaginable to the rest of us. Entire families wiped out. Mothers and daughters buried under rubble. Hospitals and maternity destroyed.

Yet these women rarely appear in the speeches of the same politicians or social media posts of the people who suddenly invoke feminism when discussing Iran. Like we haven’t witnessed it, livestreamed, on our phones. Women’s rights are not universal principles. They are geopolitical talking points.

Liberating Iran.

This March, a week into the US and Israeli bombing of Iran, waking up every day to watch the Orientalist myth of “saving Muslim women from their oppressors” play out by dropping bombs on their schools and killing 168 of their children has been a hard pill to stomach.

I’m sick and tired of the language of women’s rights being repurposed every time the Western empire needs to justify wars and geopolitical violence against its adversaries around the world.

Bombs are humanitarian. Military strikes are feminist acts. And the Epstein class of pedophiles and sex traffickers controlling the US government now pose as guardians of oppressed women abroad to justify the imperial domination of the resource-rich Middle East.

We aren’t angry enough, people. They are taking us for fools.

Women, Life, Freedom.

Looks like they went down to the basement and dusted off the Women, Life, Freedom movement, right on schedule. Only when convenient. Only when it serves the Empire, and the Iranian diaspora Zionists.

Diaspora monarchists, Zionists, Washington neo-cons, Israel-first warmongers, and the Epstein class pedophiles grabbed the Women, Life, Freedom movement from the shelf, fronting as the champions of women’s rights, cheering the first two bombs dropped on an Iranian school, massacring 168 girls, and on a gymnasium, massacring 20 female teenage volleyball players.

There’s not a single mainstream media outlet that has published a story about a volleyball massacre. Drop Site News gave it some justice.

Saving Muslim women.

The Women, Life, Freedom movement emerged organically from the experiences of Iranian women confronting their own government and their own social constraints. It was a movement rooted in local agency. It has no business being hijacked by the pedophile class now feigning moral superiority.

Western governments have long justified intervention in the Middle East through a narrative that casts Muslim women as victims waiting to be rescued. The storyline is always the same: Muslim women are oppressed by their backwards culture, religion, and by men around them. Western powers must step in as liberators.

Liberators who preside over Western societies plagued by sexual violence, trafficking, exploitation, child abuse, and deep structural inequality. Liberated by the militaries that carry their own documented histories of abuse, including rape and sexual violence during occupations.

What did the US army do to women in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or to their female colleagues? What did the Israeli army do to women in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Israeli Detention Facilities?

The irony is obscene.

Marketing war as feminism.

Today, on International Women’s Day, the Israeli Defence Forces released a video of a female IDF soldier proclaiming, “As a woman, I’m not here to watch history from the side. I’m here to build it.”

A remarkable reach, and a signature of the most moral army in the world, which has vaporized close to 700,000 human beings in Gaza in the past two and a half years.

After everything we’ve seen come out of that society, what’s a little more purplewashing? Cloaking military action and the massacre of civilians in the language of gender equality, while concealing the suffering those actions produce.

The message is grotesque: our women participate in war equally, so our wars and our massacres are morally validated. Our female soldiers are commanders and pilots; we are a society with progressive values, unlike those backward barbarians we’re bombing into civilization.

The erasure of women’s agency.

The most damaging aspect of the saving Muslim women narrative is that it erases the agency of the very women it claims to defend. It portrays them as weak, oppressed, and in need of rescue, while simultaneously casting Arab men as inherently violent and oppressive.

Women are framed as helpless victims, we must bomb the country to save them; and men are dangerous enemies, we can kill them, they are terrorists. It is a brilliantly nefarious equation, long cultivated by the West and Israel to justify their imperial pursuits.

In reality, women across the Middle East have long histories of activism and political resistance. They have organised movements, led protests, fought authoritarianism, and challenged patriarchal structures within their own societies. Leila Khaled, anyone?

From Palestinian resistance movements to Iranian student activism, women in the region have repeatedly taken leading roles in struggles for justice. Western power structures have been able to sustain their lies about the Middle East for so long because of the Islamophobia deliberately planted in Western minds.

Yet Western narratives portray these women as passive victims waiting for outside salvation. If women are helpless, intervention becomes morally justified. If they are active political actors, the argument collapses.

Their struggle has never required scripts written in Washington or London to justify imperial supervision.

Accusation as strategy.

As I already mentioned, the idea of saving women relies on another stereotype about Middle Eastern men: that they are uniquely violent, backward, and oppressive. It serves several purposes at once. It justifies violence against those men, undermines their legitimate armed resistance to occupation by labeling it terrorism and extremism, and feeds the belief in Western moral superiority.

Western moral superiority, now plagued by the Epstein files. A ruling class entangled in pedophilia, sex trafficking, and exploitation wants to lecture the world about domestic violence, sexual assault, and gender inequality.

The myth that patriarchy belongs to other cultures is comforting to the West. It allows us to avoid confronting our own failures. Patriarchy is not a regional trait. It is a global system.

And the violence exported through imperial wars rarely stays contained abroad. It returns home through militarised policing, surveillance, and a political culture increasingly comfortable with dehumanisation.

The same societies that claim to protect women overseas shoot their own women in the face for protesting ICE violence, then lie about it to the public.

Whose Feminism?

International Women’s Day should be a moment to reflect on solidarity across borders. And solidarity requires honesty.

Unlike dishonest Iranian diaspora Zionists and monarchists who cheer the bombing of their own people “for freedom and democracy,” we need to stay on point: women around the world do not need bombs dropped in their name. They do not need their struggles instrumentalized for the geopolitical narratives of a biblically deranged Western ruling class.

If the language of women’s rights is to mean anything, it cannot be selectively deployed to justify war while ignoring violence produced by the very same policies.

Women around the world need the freedom to define their own struggles, their own movements, and their own futures. And that freedom begins with rejecting the idea that empire has anything to do with liberation. Empire does not liberate. It devastates.