No, it is not Islamophobic to criticise the Islamic Republic

Spiked : Mehdi Hasan’s attack on the Iranian rebel Masih Alinejhad was a vile act of woke intolerance.

A couple of years ago, in my book, A Heretic’s Manifesto, I envisioned a situation where Iran’s female warriors against theocracy might one day come to the West only to find themselves branded ‘Islamophobic’. In my dystopic foretelling, these valiant hijab-burners would be accused by the pious pricks of the woke of such blasphemous sins as ‘hijabophobia’ – a real word, meaning ‘hostility to the hijab’. They might look to the West for refuge and wind up not being celebrated but being shouted down, charged with the thoughtcrime of Islamophobia.

Well, now it’s happened. Iranian icon Masih Alinejad has been damned as an Islamophobe. One of the theocratic regime’s most dreaded heretics, for her fearless defence of secular values and women’s rights, Alinejad has been living in exile in the United States since 2014. 

And last week she was marked with that shaming slur of ‘phobe’. Her crime? Daring to diss the hijab. Her accuser? None other than Mehdi Hasan – motormouth hack, darling of America’s coastal bourgeoisie, and someone who will never suffer the indignity of being told what to wear by preening, arrogant men who think they can talk to God.

I don’t think I have ever been as much ‘team’ someone as I was Team Masih in her digital clash with Hasan. It kicked off on Thursday when Alinejad had the temerity to criticise New York’s sainted faux-Marxian mayor, Zohran Mamdani. 

His office put out a tweet celebrating World Hijab Day. This garment is a ‘powerful symbol of devotion and celebration of Muslim heritage’, it gushed. It’s also a powerful symbol of sexist suppression under the boot of theocracy, as anyone who can be arsed to watch the news from Iran will know. Alinejad wasn’t happy. She let rip.

‘Really? Right now?’, she tweeted in reply to City Hall’s clueless hijab-cheering. You fawn over this hair-shaming cloak while women in ‘my wounded country’ are being jailed, shot and killed for refusing [it]’, she thundered. 

She then mused on Mamdani’s yellow-bellied silence on the massacres in Iran. ‘Not a single word of sympathy from you’, she wrote. ‘No expression of solidarity.’ She wondered – searingly – what kind of supposed progressive is less interested in ‘standing with women’ than ‘standing with our jailers’.

It was a blistering pushback. And she’s dead right: there is something seriously off about the fact that as women in Iran risk their lives by casting off the hijab, we in the West bow down to that regressive covering. There are even World Hijab Day events in British schools, where non-Muslim girls are encouraged to put one on to see what life is like for a Muslim. As one observer quipped, how about encouraging Muslim girls to take theirs off so that they might taste that hair-flowing freedom their non-Muslim peers enjoy?

Read it all here......