Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Fallujah Hospital during the 2004 assault.

Back in October 2004, as the US occupation forces geared up for the infamous assault on Fallujah, an obscure group named the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq issued a communique which made the following claim amongst others:

In the city of Falluja, at the Mujahideen congress held on October 20,2004, the Islamic criminal Abdulla al-Janabi and Falluja’s Shura Council gave a fatwa (religious decree) that Mujahideen fighters should rape girls at age 10 before they are raped by Americans!

The communique was immediately picked up and relayed through avenues where dogma always trumps accuracy. Jo Wilding, a feminist activist publicized it through Indymedia and her mailinglist, and so did the Alliance for Workers Liberty, a sectarian left Zionist groupuscule.

Needless to say, the claim was false, but it generated the intended response. It succeeded to a certain degree in breaking the momentum of the antiwar mobilization against the coming assault and in the longer run to reinforce the propaganda that Iraq is descending into barbarism because armed resistance to the occupation comes exclusively from “political islamists”. That of course leads one invariably to a single conclusion. The occupiers must not leave.

The communique, a transparent black propaganda coup, generated a strong response from Tahrir Swift of the Iraqi Democrats Against Occupation and was widely condemned at the World Tribunal on Iraq (Istanbul session) and by The BRussells Tribunal. Nevertheless, through its judicious use of key issues that always bring about a predictable response from a progressive western audience, such as “Women’s Rights”, OWFI has since become a fixture on the progressive circuit, making appearances on platforms everywhere from Amnesty International to Democracy Now!.

Colonial Feminism

Pandering to the racist prejudices of Western liberals through generalized, stereotypical characterizations of Islamic societies wins these native informers instant acceptance — there are many who pine for a civilizing role. By patronizing the representative lesser beings, they can assume their former colonial role without experiencing any of the guilt. Just like George Bush, they can project their own values onto the benighted Other, while at the same time issuing ritual denunciations of Imperialism. In fact, this cultural supremacism has always worked in dialectical unity with Imperialism; it is an enabler of Empire.

In The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, Kirsten Sellars shows in splendid detail that since WWII, “human rights” has served as a pretext for internvention wherever other ideological justifications have been exhausted or proven insufficient. The merit in this approach is that it neutralizes progressive opposition. It is well known, for instance, that Amnesty International enabled the 1991 Gulf War by producing a bogus report on Iraqi soldier’s stealing incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital after throwing the babies out of them. [1]

Women’s Rights has played a similar, though understudied, role in recent years. Shortly before the invasion of Afghanistan, liberals in California suddenly discovered that the women there were oppressed (Senator Barbara Boxer’s office was calling muslim organizations to borrow a Burqa for presentation at press conferences). Nevermind that millions — men and women alike — had been suffering for more than two decades, and the right to a life not threatened by guns, daisy cutters, cluster bombs and mines was perhaps higher on every Afghani’s agenda. But the Western feminist had a different idea of salvation: why starve with a Burqa on when you can do the same without one? You may as well get a belly-ring before you die.

Afghanistan was invaded. Women are still oppressed. Barbara Boxer has better things to do.

It is a sad indictment of deeply rooted Western racism that claims which would be considered incredible or ridiculously improbable receive an eager audience when they are uttered in the context of Muslims.

At times the overzealous feminist messianism has done more damage than good.

When Goats Wear Pants

So yesterday, Democracy Now! once again hosts Houzan Mahmoud, a representative of the Organization of Women’s Freedom In Iraq. That women are living under atrocious conditions in Iraq is beyond doubt; but so is everyone else. In the OWFI version of reality, however, it has all to do with Islam. And just to remind you how brave this woman is for pointing this out, we are told that a fatwa has been issued against her.[2] “I have received an email, and the email said that you’ll be killed by the middle of March”, she said. That sounds scary — and about as credible as:

In some places Islamists are even ordering farmers to put shorts on their female goats and sheep. And in certain street markets the display of tomatoes and cucumbers is banned due to their association with genital organs.

This excerpt from one of her articles in the Guardian[!] may be the product of a fertile, if sick imagination; what is baffling is that a respectable news source like Democracy Now! should interview this woman without doing a background check. (On an amusing note, Mark Thomas, someone I admire, but who is clearly not immune to hoaxes, also flexed his comedic muscle against Islamic fascism; however more than anything he wrote, it is the source of his knowledge that had me giggling: “I was contacted by Houzan Mahmoud [who] told me Marywan would answer any questions I might want to put to him, but as he spoke no English and I no Arabic, I should e-mail the questions to her and she would get the answers.” [I'd love to hear this one. I am convinced "Marywan" is an invention of the same fertile mind that came up with the pant-wearing goat]).

Had Democracy Now! bothered checking who the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq are, they would have discovered it is merely a is a front for the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq. While it is purportedly against the occupation of Iraq, its main target has always been the Iraqi resistance, which it always portrays as “Islamist” regardless of its composition. It works closely with the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, a sectarian Zionist-leftist group in Britain (AWL itself is a supporter of US-UK occupation).

Carsten Kofoed, spokesman of the Danish Committee for a Free Iraq wrote:

The FWCUI, the UUI and the OWFI are all being led by the Worker-communist Party of Iraq (WCPI), a party that was formed in 1993 in the US and Israeli controlled Iraqi Kurdistan by followers of “the great Marxist thinker”, as the WCPI calls its ideological icon, the now deceased Iranian Mansoor Hekmat, whose views on Zionist Israel are surprisingly positive and reconciling for a declared Marxist (7). In Iraq, in the midst of a brutal, imperialist occupation in which the occupiers, as always, have allied themselves with the most reactionary local forces, the WCPI is fiercely fighting not the occupation force, but Islam, which is the religion of more than 95 percent of the Iraqi population and has become a common identity of the popular resistance to the occupation. The enemy of the pro-Zionist WCPI and its front organisations is not the US-led occupation force, but the Iraqi resistance.

Democracy Now! would do well in the future to have Iraqis who actually identify with, and represent the true aspirations of the people, speak for them rather than those who conform to Western-liberal values. None of these phoney liberals and native informers can hold the candle to Haifa Zangana; she is honest, eloquent and effective, because she speaks from first hand experience of having suffered under Saddam’s torturers in the same Abu Ghrabi prison, yet had the moral rectitude to oppose the war — vocally! — on principle alone. Haifa gets the final word:

Western feminist groups and some Iraqi women activists fear that Islamic law, if enshrined as a main source of legislation, will be used to restrict their rights, particularly in relation to marriage, divorce and inheritance. The US claims to share this concern. Iraqi women generally do not…The silence of female National Assembly members and interim-government and US-financed women’s NGOs is deafening. In Iraq, “women’s rights” is an absurd discourse chewing on meaningless words. No wonder that the US-funded NGOs, which preach western-style women’s rights and democracy, are regarded as vehicles for foreign manipulation and are despised and boycotted, even when they recruit liberal or left personalities.

Iraqi women know that the enemy is not Islam. There is a strong antipathy to anyone trying to conscript women’s issues to the racist “war on terror” targeted against the Muslim world. Most Iraqi women do not regard traditional society, exemplified by the neighbourhood and extended family, however restrictive at times, as the enemy. In fact, it has in practice been the protector of women and children, of their physical safety and welfare, despite lowest-common-denominator demands on dress and personal conduct. The enemy is the collapse of the state and civil society. And the culprit is the foreign military invasion and occupation.

Notes

[1] Fore more on Amnesty International’s double standards, check out the following : Amnesty International: A False Beacon; Amnesty International: The Case of a Rape Foretold
[2] A “Death Threat” is a rite of passage for any native informer who wants to advance to the level of champion for liberal causes; it also guarantees media appearances. Before Mahmoud, it was Yanar Mohammed, another member of the organization, who claimed to have received such a threat. Whether real or imagined, it always boosts one’s “street cred”.