Fearing Islamism is no phobia
In April 1979, my professor, a bright, beautiful woman, came into the classroom with “exciting news!” It was official, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was in power, Iran was now an Islamist state. She was ecstatic. This feminist professor who was also African American, was buying and selling Islamism. My heart sank. The world was turning upside down.
I was the lone student who objected. I said Islamism would be a catastrophe for women, girls, and Jews. I tried to explain my fear as an Iraqi-Egyptian Jew who grew up stateless, and how Islamism forced 800,000 Jews out from our ancient communities all over the Middle East and North Africa.
It should matter, I said, that Jews and women and other minorities are seriously oppressed under Islamist laws. This regime was going to be a disaster for the Iranian people.
I dropped the class. I had to “challenge” the course by taking a two-hour multiple-choice test based on a set of tedious books and statistics instead of submitting a paper on ethnicity I would have loved to write.
At the time, my words were not welcome. The others in the class were silent – maybe they didn’t know enough to have an opinion. But still? We have had years of information of executions, torture in medieval prisons, and rape, yet this very particular silence continues in progressive and feminist communities.
The cluelessness of predecessors is replaced with an inverted morality that excuses terrorism, and accepts Islamism and this regime’s international export of terror, especially against Jews and Israel, by funding Hamas and Hezbollah as it terrifies and pauperizes its own country.
This regime has created horror at home and mayhem in the world. It has made no secret of its plans to go nuclear and destroy Israel, the “little Satan,” first, and then the USA, the “big Satan.” And our university students are silent?
These students were very loud in their support of Hamas killing Israelis and setting up “encampments” curiously ready within 24 hours or less after October 7, complete with sets of new matching tents and all the accoutrements for weeks-long protests, not against Hamas, but Israel.
Even for the math-impaired like myself, one can see it was quite the coordinated effort by Islamist professionals on the outside and horrifically sanctioned by too many professors on the inside. One professor was captured on video expressing his ecstasy over Hamas’s massacre and rapes of Israelis.
Clueless students indoctrinated to hate the West for decades now marched on cue. And they are silent on the same campuses today as Iran kills thousands of young people who just want to be free like them.
This new generation has been infused with almost 50 years of anti-West, anti-Israel, anti-women, anti-freedom ideology of the Soviet infused Islamism of our era.
Back in 1979, my classroom went silent when the professor reframed my experience as ignorance bordering on racism. Today, we have words like “Islamophobic” to silence. And, we are routinely cursed in “progressive” communities as “Zionists” as if that’s a bad thing. In Iran and other Islamist countries, if a woman wanting freedom is a bad thing, if 10-year-old girls are forced to cover up and marry old men, how can you expect Jews wanting freedom to be okay?
Those who have the courage to object to Islamism, who are pro-West and pro-Israel, including those of us who know from lived experience, are routinely gaslighted, cancelled, threatened, invalidated.
Let me be clear, I am not talking about Rumi’s Islam. I am not talking about Rumi’s beloved Shams, or the beautiful spiritual poetry of Hafiz. Their bodies would be hanging in Tehran today.
The mullahs who took over Iran are not lovers, not the “God intoxicated” mystics of Sufism. This is political Islam, radical Islam, and they are not shy about telling the world exactly what they are about.
It is not a phobia to fear Islamism. Phobias are imagined. Khomeini himself said, “There is no Islam that is not political.” Far too many have suffered terribly from this ideology.
The Woman Life Freedom Movement rose a few years ago after a young woman was murdered because her hijab was not fully covering her hair. Say her name, Mahsa Amini, 22, arrested, tortured and killed by the “morality police” in September 2022. Say their names, the list is long.
Islamism, this ideology, is about spreading radical Islam, a movement that is massacring its people with impunity, sensing that the world will do nothing. And the world continues to pretend with “Iran Deals” and “talks” as if this regime is normal. It isn’t and it has told us so in over a thousand ways.
It is not normal for feminists and progressives to support any of this by silence.
Young Iranians are being butchered on the streets in the thousands right now, writers, poets, dreamers, the Rumis, the Shams, the beautiful ones who want to feel the wind in their hair, their hearts and souls.
Realize the Death Cult for what it is – Iran has been pauperized by its radical Islamist mullahs who will continue to do it until they realize their goal. They will continue to torture women and lovers of freedom in medieval prisons, promote hangings on the streets, control Iranians with maimings, rapes, and deaths. Horrifically tragic deaths. It’s happening en masse right now.
Decades later, watching professors cheer Hamas on social media the day following October 7, the pattern is obvious.
I watched this sick ideology of Islamism take root here in the 1970s. I watched intelligent people, including fellow Jewish lesbian feminist colleagues, hang posters of Yasser Arafat on their walls, as if he were a “freedom fighter.” How? I asked.
They looked at me as if I was mentally challenged, “damaged by (my) personal history…”
Imagine that: to be informed by the collective trauma of Jews, my history as a stateless Jew stuck with no passport for years, a father whose business was severely hampered by not having a passport, a grandmother and mother who survived the Farhud in Baghdad, and being a Jew in Catholic missionary schools in postwar Japan.
I speak of all of it, and I will continue to, despite the gaslighting and insults that come my way. There is a feeling of satisfaction in telling the truth. In seeing the truth. In not imagining phobias. And validating others who understand the evil of Islamism/political Islam.
The Islamic regime is evil. Hamas is evil. And for progressives to side with entities like Hamas that oppresses and wants dead as many of its own for sympathy as a means to an end (of Israel and Jews) is insanity. Thinking this Islamist regime that pauperizes its own country and imprisons and massacres its own people is acceptable or anywhere near “normal” is insanity. No difference.
But somehow this particular mental illness has taken hold and spread as Islamism is being normalized. Too many young people are confused into cheering for the wrong team.
Right now, 47 years after Iran was taken over by Islamists, reports are coming in of thousands of Iranians, overwhelmingly young beautiful men, girls, boys, women, being shot to death by this insidious regime. The numbers are growing, it’s terrifying, heartbreaking. Soul numbing. And we wait.
Previous uprisings have failed, but this one has to succeed.
I wonder if that professor remains cheering for the Islamists. I wonder if feminist organizations around the world will begin speaking up again for women. They didn’t after October 7th. I know someday there will be remorse, a reckoning. I just want it to be now.
