Arash T. Riahi retweetledi
I rarely take part in public reproaches addressed to fellow activists. Silence can have many reasons, and we, activists, don’t owe anything to anyone. Really.
Still, some silences are not neutral. They are chosen. That’s where I speak.
While images of bodies in black bags circulate from Iran, while women are imprisoned, raped, executed for refusing obedience, many fellow feminists and much of younger activist generation remains conspicuously quiet. This is disturbing. And painful.
What makes it worse is not only the absence of solidarity, but its asymmetry: today, vocal support for Iranian women in the West comes disproportionately from the political right. And I hate it. This should trouble anyone who still believes feminism is about women, not about ideological comfort.
The Iranian uprising is a Woman, Life, Freedom revolution. It is explicitly feminist, explicitly anti-theocratic, and explicitly led by women risking everything. Yet when their voices disrupt dominant narratives, they are often met with avoidance, suspicion, or strategic amnesia.
We seem stuck in an ideological binary where lived reality is filtered not through listening, but through alignment. When real women speak in ways that do not fit the approved framework, they are quietly reassigned to “the wrong side”.
The tragedy is not theoretical.
This is how we abandon women.
This is how feminist language vacates the field and leaves space for authoritarianism and the far right to claim the voices we refused to hear.
Solidarity with free Iran ✌🏽
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