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.
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:
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 p…
