A familiar breed of British pundit has resurfaced – loud, self-declared feminists whose outrage is as selective as it is performative, and whose moral compass somehow always aligns with western state power.
They remain silent as Gaza burns, but are quick to find their voice to cheer on Israel and its allies as they threaten to flatten Iran – civilian casualties be damned.
During Israel’s recent strikes on Iran, the radical feminist journalist and co‑founder of Justice for Women, Julie Bindel, branded leftist anti-war feminists “Team Iran” sympathisers. It was a disingenuous, grotesquely misleading and dangerously ideological accusation, but not a surprising one.
What we’re witnessing goes beyond reasoned critique – it is the cynical weaponisation of feminism to uphold state violence.
This is no isolated incident. It’s a pattern.
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In October 2023, Bindel shared a Telegraph column that championed Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza as “a stand for civilisation”, while spreading propaganda against Palestinians and vilifying those who defend their humanity.
When Palestinian women are pulled from rubble, starved in besieged hospitals, denied reproductive care or give birth next to the corpses of their children, Britain’s loudest feminists look away.
UN experts have documented acts of sexual violence against women and girls in Gaza – including rape, forced nudity and public humiliation.
No statements. No hashtags. No vigils.
The same figures who demand global outrage over gender-based violence have nothing to say when those crimes are committed with American firepower and British backing.
Smearing solidarity
While women in Gaza bleed in silence, these pundits reserve their fury for pro-Palestine protesters – smearing them as extremists, branding solidarity as terrorism, twisting every act of dissent into an endorsement of “jihad” and weaponising antisemitism to crush critique.
Such hypocrisy is as strategic as it is shameful.
Nothing unnerves Britain’s loudest self-styled ‘feminist’ commentators more than the Palestinian flag – seen not as a cry for justice but an affront to their moral high ground
Nothing seems to unnerve Britain’s loudest self-styled “feminist” commentators more than the Palestinian flag – a symbol they treat not as a cry for justice, but as an affront to their proclaimed moral high ground.
When groups like Palestine Action engage in peaceful civil disobedience – spraying red-paint slogans on Royal Air Force fences and even RAF planes to protest genocide – they are labelled “terrorists”.
Indeed, those who dare to expose and resist mass killing face criminalisation as part of a calculated assault on any challenge to the status quo.
This isn’t careless commentary – it is a deliberate ideological distortion disguised as feminist critique.
Moreover, it is a betrayal of feminism’s proud legacy of nonviolent resistance. From the Reclaim the Night marches that defied police curfews in the 1970s to Southall Black Sisters, who took to the streets to confront domestic violence, state racism and police inaction long before it was politically convenient, this unbroken tradition of protest against gendered state violence lies at the heart of the movement itself.
The same voices who once championed the right to free speech – to occupy, stencil and disrupt – now recoil at a banner that simply demands accountability for colonial violence.
Smokescreen for war
Apparently, the mere objection to the bombing of Iranian civilians is now considered “supporting the regime”.
It is a framing that is at once ahistorical and a staggering collapse of intellectual rigour. Even those who have previously criticised some of Iran’s policies are accused of siding with the Ayatollah simply for opposing western air strikes.
When it comes to Iran, these pundits become overnight experts – reciting floggings, hijabs and hangings with righteous certainty.
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But raise Israel’s war crimes – the bombed hospitals, the mass graves, the deliberate targeting of civilians – and their intellectual faculties, let alone moral clarity, suddenly short-circuit.
Iran is treated as uniquely monstrous – requiring exceptional condemnation and meriting exceptional violence from the so-called champions of human rights.
The doublethink is exhausting.
The same feminists who once championed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under the banner of “saving women” are now recycling that same logic to legitimise ongoing western aggression. Have we learned nothing from two decades of war, occupation and manufactured consent?
This isn’t solidarity – it’s a smokescreen for war dressed up in feminist language.
Equally, opposing Israel’s assault on civilians does not imply an endorsement of the Iranian regime. It is a feminist stance against yet another bloodbath disguised as liberation.
To dismiss such opposition as regime sympathy is a reductive insult to the Iranian feminists who have risked everything to confront injustice without calling for foreign bombs. As Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, one of the country’s most courageous feminist dissidents who was jailed for defying the state, has made clear, real change will come from within.
In Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, where western intervention was sold as salvation, its bombs left only mass graves, collapsed infrastructure and broken societies.
Selective sisterhood
Some pro-war commentators have falsely claimed that most Iranians support US or Israeli bombing of their country.
In reality, the small crowds seen celebrating air strikes outside Iran’s embassy were rallying behind exiled monarchist Reza Pahlavi – a man known for his open support of Israel, who in recent interviews dismissed the killing of his own people as “collateral damage”.
To frame this fringe display as representative of Iranian opposition is not nuance – it is propaganda dressed up as political principle.
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A hashtag like #TeamIran, barely used beyond one media personality’s feed, has been transformed into the centrepiece of a manufactured smear campaign against leftist solidarity. This astroturfed narrative, pushed by pundits and politicians alike, attempts to paint anti-war voices as “regime” loyalists – all to shut down dissent and shore up support for military escalation.
These dissenters are then ridiculed as “stupid”, “ignorant” or “beyond comprehension”. What truly defies comprehension, however, is how some of the UK’s loudest feminist voices have spent the past 20 months standing shoulder to shoulder with a military occupier, exposing their casual racism, far-right flirtations and a deep-seated contempt for Muslims cloaked in moral posturing.
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Their outrage flares only when it flatters imperial power – and disappears entirely when Israeli forces bomb hospitals, block aid convoys or leave women and children to burn while seeking refuge beneath crumbling roofs.
Where is their outrage at Israel’s catalogue of war crimes? Where is the feminist fury at apartheid policies, the suffocating siege of Gaza and the systematic erasure of Palestinian life?
Why has selective sisterhood become the norm – loud for some women, silent for others? Why do so many feminist organisations cower in fear, unwilling to speak unless it serves the powerful?
Feminism must mean more than slogans for empire.
It is meant to stand against all oppression, not just the kind convenient for white saviours and western allies. It’s time to honour that promise by reclaiming it from those who’ve turned “women’s rights” into a weapon of war and whitewashing.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
