Interview
What To Us Is International Women's Day?
This week, a special Project Censored episode: "What To Us Is International Women's Day?," a variation on the question asked by Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave is the 4th of July? March 8th is International Women's Day, and while many will and do celebrate this day in revolutionary ways, the truth is that IWD like so many other holidays is often used to serve the vehemently anti-feminist goals of the architects of our oppression. So-called white feminism perpetuates the evils of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism - but with a femme facade, pushing us to ask what to us is an international women's day which doesn't seek to dismantle the very systems that use, abuse & torment women across the US and the globe? Award-winning journalist Mnar Adley and organizer Afeni Evans will join Eleanor Goldfield for this special hour-long dive into the insidious machinations of white feminism, who gets violently othered and why, the internationalist demands of a revolutionary feminism, and what really to us, is - or could be - International Women's Day?
Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Mnar Adley
Eleanor Goldfield: Thanks everyone for joining us at the Project Censored Radio Show. I'm your co host this week, Eleanor Goldfield, along with Mickey Huff. We're very glad to welcome back to the program, Mnar Adley, who's an award winning journalist, also the editor and founder and director of Mint Press News.
Mnar, thanks so much for joining us.
Mnar Adley: Thank you for having me, Eleanor.
Eleanor Goldfield: Absolutely. So, I asked you on for a very specific reason today. March 8th is International Women's Day. And while many might and will celebrate it in a revolutionary fashion, it's really a kind of a co opted holiday in a lot of ways.
A day to uphold many of the ills that women suffer under, whether that be a patriarchal white supremacist capitalist system or imperialism, colonialism. And so I wanted to start asking you about something that has been termed white feminism, and as Koa Beck, the author of the book White Feminism, put it, "White feminism is an ideology. It's a type of feminism that takes up the politics of power without questioning them, by replicating patterns of white supremacy, capitalist greed, corporate ascension, and inhumane labor practices and exploitation, and deeming it empowering for women to practice these tenets as men always have."
So, with that, Mnar, as a Palestinian American and the first woman to wear hijab reporting the news in U.S. media, you're obviously no stranger to finding yourself on the quote unquote wrong side of what the U.S. deems acceptable feminism. Could you talk a little bit about your experiences with that?
Mnar Adley: Of course. Well, first I'd like to thank you, Eleanor, for having me on today. It's always an honor to be speaking with you, with my sister in the struggle. You've always been someone that I admire and look up to for strength and inspiration in our movement for Liberation, and I'm really glad you asked me this question because it's something that not only resonates deeply with me as a Palestinian American woman, but I'm seeing the effects of this to this day, since the post 9 11 era specifically.
And when I talk about liberation, I'm referring to breaking the chains of colonialism and the Western idea of who deserves liberation and who doesn't. And that includes how Western feminism defines liberation for women here versus women who are maybe of color and different religion broad. And I've been at the forefront of dissecting this narrative as someone who is a Palestinian American woman who visibly wears the hijab living in a post 9 11 America.
You know, I founded Mint Press. It's a leading independent journalism outlet in this country, in the United States that investigates the driving forces behind war policies because after 9 11, I saw how Western feminism was used as a colonial tool to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a means to liberate Muslim women.
And we're seeing the same thing happening today in Israel's occupation of Palestine and South Lebanon and in Syria. And so after 9 11 when Bush announced his global war on terror, where we saw the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, we were flooded with images of Muslim women in those countries who are being oppressed that needed saving.
I remember and I'm sure you remember, I think we're around the same age, but we were, like, bombarded on our TV screens and on the front pages of, like, the New York Times, the Washington Post, of Afghan women wearing burqas being abused and denied education by the Taliban. And, of course, without any sort of context that our government and military is who funded, armed and propped up the Taliban to put them in power.
And so those images of those Taliban women wearing the burqas, having their faces covered, became like the iconic images of what people in the West understood about Islam. So Islam has now been defined just by these simple images as being backwards. It's a religion led by angry brown men who are controlling and barbaric ruling over oppressed women.
These women could not think for themselves. They're forced to cover. They're being denied their basic human rights. But, you know, again, without the context that this ideology that the Taliban and others were following is called Wahhabism, which is directly funded by the West and is used to keep the war on terror fueled and people in those countries oppressed.
And so this Islamophobia campaign has had really horrific effects because it dehumanized billions of Muslims around the world to justify two illegal wars the U.S. launched that killed more than 2 million people, most of which were women and children. And despite the successes of this program to supposedly save Muslim women, it was Muslim women in the West who wore the hijab, who were being violently attacked and having their hijabs ripped off of their heads. And they were the victims of hate crimes. So this shows how this colonial tactic, which was sold to free Muslim woman was actually dehumanizing us to the point of not being worthy of life, whether it was abroad or here.
You know, that life, freedom and liberty, we were not worthy of those things if we just, if we decided to practice wearing the hijab. And so the effects of that did not go away. In fact, they are still evident in the way that Muslim women are perceived in the media. They view the hijab as a patriarchal mechanism of oppression. So it's on the West to save Muslim women and liberate us. And part of that liberation has meant to undress us too.
And it's like, you know, there's nothing wrong with a woman not wanting to wear hijab or wanting to wear the hijab, but these rules are being imposed on us by governments that have no moral superiority. These are the same governments that are using white phosphorus chemical weapons to drop bombs, to starve women, to kill women and children. And so they have no moral superiority to tell a woman how to liberate themselves.
And so we at Mint Press have spent the last decade trying to dissect this war narrative to look at different functions of different narratives and how they're being used as tools to oppress people and justify and dehumanize them broad.
And I believe this is one of the tools that is being used.
Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. That's very well put. And, you know, I think that one of the images that I saw back in the day that made this, that I think brought home to a lot of women who are not Muslim was a picture of a woman wearing hijab and then a picture of a overly sexualized like Victoria's Secret model or something.
And it's like, isn't it really the problem that women are told what to wear, not what they wear? And of course, then you have the Victoria's Secret ad aspect of sex sells and war pays. So the issue isn't that women wear a certain thing. It's that people are so concerned about what women wear and want to tell them what to wear, a bit like the obsession with trans folks or why do you care what's in people's pants? Like, just leave it alone. It's creepy.
But this is part of that system of control. And I wanted to kind of hone in on occupied Palestine with this here, because I think it's such a stark example of this, you know, which women matter. For instance, you had people like Beyonce that were stumping for Kamala Harris saying, I'm coming to you as a mother, which is absolutely grotesque and twisted when you consider the fact that the Biden/Harris policy was to murder mothers and their children in occupied Palestine in some of the most sadistic ways that we've ever seen in the history of humanity.
I mean, I can think of no other example, especially in modern times, that so starkly makes that distinction of what women matter and what women don't, according to U.S. Empire. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Mnar Adley: Of course. I mean, we can go back to 1948 or we can go back to October 7th when we were told that Hamas fighters committed mass rape without providing a shred of evidence.
A lot of the news organizations that talked about this mass rape that happened against Israeli woman have actually had to retract a lot of their reporting. And so we had the situation where we have the horrors of October 7th where we were being told that all of these Israeli women were being raped again by these barbaric Palestinian brown Muslim men, and they're using rape as a weapon of war, without providing that sort of evidence.
And then that was used to justify the United States arming Israel to the teeth, providing every single fighter jet and bomb to drop on civilian homes in Gaza, on schools, on shelters which targeted disproportionately women and children. I mean, we know that in Gaza, that, what is it over 60 percent or 70 percent of the population in Gaza is under the age of 18?
And so that means it's not even just women. Israel with the backing of the United States targeted children. I mean, I have a 15 year old son and I have a seven year old son, and I can't imagine the horrors that these children and teenagers have had to live through in Gaza. And it goes to show that the media played a very integral role in telling us who deserves life and who didn't.
Malcolm X famously told us that the Democrats specifically are far more dangerous than Republicans because they are the wolves in sheep's clothing. You know, we know what Trump's policies are because he already served four years as president and we know that he's racist. We know that he's misogynist. He's racist. We know that he doesn't like brown people. I mean, that's been quite evident in his immigration policies, but the Democrats, what's so interesting about them is that they're the wolves in sheep's clothing because they present themselves as these fighters for social justice and change, hope, liberation, women's rights, and for social change for women and all the things that, you know, women are fighting for, and we're being told to choose between Democrats and the Republicans as if there's much of a difference, it's like having to choose between which killing machine do we prefer Lockheed Martin? Or Raytheon?
And so when Joe Biden was president and Kamala Harris was the vice president, they insured and provided and approved and signed off of every single arms deal that the United States provided Israel with, so that Israel could drop the bombs on schools and hospitals, in residential homes in Gaza.
And of course, as I mentioned, the majority of those who were killed have been women and children. And yet we have Democratic figures like Kamala Harris who pretend to care about women's rights and to care about women and our right to abortion and our right to IVF clinics when she and Joe Biden approved all of the weapons going to Israel and every single bomb that Israel used to use in Gaza.
You know, destroyed all every single one of the I.V.F. clinics in Gaza. They destroyed every single woman's hospital in Gaza. They destroyed all of the woman's centers, mental health facilities inside Gaza. And it's so interesting because the Democratic Party, despite having this, you know, walking the talk of, you know, we support women's rights, they are so completely out of touch with their voter base.
We saw in the last election cycle that the majority of Democrats saw Israel's genocide in Gaza as the number one issue. And yet Kamala's campaign for president set her number one issue is supporting IVF and abortion, which sounds really good on paper.
But the picture that I just painted with Israel destroying every single IVF and abortion clinic in Gaza, which they do exist, were destroyed. 181 women were giving birth in Gaza per day without any painkillers. I mean, over 10 miles of aid trucks were being blocked from providing essentials in Gaza. I mean, this is more than just food, but sanitary and essential supplies like tampons, pads, formula for babies, for mothers who can't breastfeed, life saving medications.
I mean, as you can hear from my voice, we still have the trauma of what happened in Gaza. We have not forgotten, excuse me, because as a mother, we know how important these things are. I mean, can you imagine? Like having the menstrual pain that these women were dealing with because they were under such immense stress and lacking nutrition. They weren't eating enough calories. There was a famine happening inside of Gaza. I'm so sorry. I'm crying. You know, I read a lot about this and it really has affected me personally because this is not just because I'm Palestinian, because I'm a human being watching our sisters in need of this kind of support and they haven't, they don't have it.
And we have a Western media here in our neoliberal Western societies who pretend to care about women's rights. But this is the perfect example about how white feminism is just a colonial tactic to kill and dehumanize us women that are living under these bombs. Israel's genocide really lifted the veil as to the values Israel and the United States represent, which is a bloodlust for war and profits for weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, like General Dynamics and Raytheon.
They don't care about women. The propaganda balloons have been broken. People across all political fronts, genders, religions, you name it, they now see the truth, but most importantly, they see through the lies of both parties, especially the Democratic party. And so this last year really revived this kind of international solidarity that we haven't really seen since 2001.
And so it's been quite difficult to watch how the media has played an essential role, the same way it played a role in justifying the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and NATO invasions of Libya, the U.S. genocide, Saudi backed genocide in Yemen. I mean, all of these wars disproportionately target women and children.
Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for sharing that, Mnar. I know that it's like ripping open a wound every time somebody asks about that. And I wanted to, because you mentioned International Solidarity and, you know, it is called International Women's Day, and so I'm curious, what would that look like to you in terms of extracting it from the clutches of white imperialist feminism to actually talk about, okay, well, what would this look like if women and their allies across borders were to enact and engage with legitimate solidarity?
Mnar Adley: Well, I think in the last year I have seen solidarity across all political, religious, gender, I mean, every single front you could think of that might have divided us in the past. People have come together, even people who, you know, might've even voted for Trump and might be on the conservative side or, you know, whatever, they have all come out. Not all but we've seen like this mass movement to come out and say that we've we see the reality of the ground in Gaza. We know the people are suffering. We can't support Israel's war crimes.
And, you know, the solidarity has really, really been beautiful and I think we have to take it to the next level and look at history. What are the things that have worked in the past? And we have movements right now, like Palestine Action in the UK that are being led by a woman, actually, people who inspire me are like the co founder of Palestine Action, her name is Huda Ammori. And a lot of it is woman led and these women are organizing, and of course there's men involved in Palestine Action. But if you like it, look at the members of Palestine Action, they are majority woman.
And they are a grassroots organization that is getting the support of local cities and neighborhoods where Israeli weapons factories are being built in the U.K. And they are not just protesting against these weapons manufacturers, but they're organizing in a way where they're breaking the windows, breaking down the doors and bulldozing right into these companies and factories and getting them to shut down. They've been so successful. This is beyond protesting. This is like direct action.
And because they are getting the support of local communities, they're going door to door to get people to support these companies to shut down. That's why they've been successful. They've cost Israel's largest arms company, Elbit system billions of dollars worth of weapons contracts with the British government.
And so if we look at history, we have to go beyond just, you know, protesting on the streets. We have to do grassroots organizing and we have to be willing to talk to people that we don't normally agree with so that they can, so that we can have these heart to heart discussions, heartfelt understanding. Get people more on our side.
We can do that if we communicate through our humanity, through our hearts, and we can get a lot of people to see the truth and to care about these causes more effectively. The way the internet and the technocracy is created with these big tech platforms is to keep people isolated. You can block people, not engage with people on the other side, oh you're liberal, oh you're conservative, and there's just no sort of like healthy discussion anymore.
But if you get on the streets, you go door to door, you know, you visit the churches, you visit the mosques, the synagogues, get to people's level. You can have that kind of support. And I do see that happening more often now, and it's a really, really beautiful thing to see.
Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, as an organizer, it's very frustrating when I see pockets of people that have decided that, like, oh, we can only organize with people we really agree with. And I'm like, well, that's not organizing. That's a tea party. And that's great. And I'm glad for you. But in order to organize, you have to reach out and be a bridge for people and sit down with people who you disagree with on a lot of things. And yeah, I think that that is very important.
And before we wrap up here, I wanted to touch on another thing because there is this side of feminism, and not just white feminism, but I think feminism as it stands still today, even in some leftist spaces that dehumanizes men. And I think that this has been particularly stark again with the Palestinian issue.
I think Palestine is a lens through which we can see almost any issue, whether that be media or patriarchy, colonialism, et cetera, and how it's necessary for feminism to recognize how patriarchy destroys men, and how our job has to be as women to recognize that and to bring men in on that level and to basically stop dehumanizing them as patriarchy does, right?
It breaks men down and builds them back up in the image of the system, which is rageful. And so I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about how you feel that feminism, like a legitimate revolutionary feminism can do a better job of incorporating men, not just as a mother of two boys, but also as a Palestinian American woman who has seen how starkly the media has dehumanized Palestinian men to the point that they're almost never mentioned unless it's the terrorists, right?
Like we talk about the death toll being women and children, but there are also men. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that aspect of feminism, including men and boys.
Mnar Adley: You know, it's so interesting to see how the media has played such an integral role to kind of create this very, very narrow lens of what Muslim men are and have been in their role in the Middle East, which has been, you know, patriarchal, aggressive, domestic violence, angry aggressive, all of these things that are negative and toxic traits that are just, you know, they exist in every society. But that doesn't mean that the majority of men are like that.
I mean, look at what we saw in Gaza. Um, you know, it was the men wearing their flip flops, the fathers, you know, they were pulling the women and children and other little boys out of the rubble. The surgeons, the male surgeons that were, you know, crying on screen talking about the horrors of the things that they've seen children have to go through in the hospital rooms. The fathers that were carrying, picking up the pieces of their children, the body parts of their children, their wives, putting them in plastic bags.
These are the men of Palestine and Gaza. These are the men that have been carrying the weight of all of the trauma that everybody is going through. They're trying to make, you know, they're trying to help and save people while also trying to take care of their families for those that did survive, and still make them, you know, take a gentle approach to make their wives and children feel safe.
We also saw the videos of, you know, the father is cuddling with their children. I mean, these are the images of normal men. These are not like differentm, like this is how they're human beings. And so I personally think that we need to take a holistic approach to creating change, which I believe begins healing these generational trauma wounds that we have, because oppression harms the spirit and this doesn't just affect, you know, Palestinian and Muslim. And yes, we've taken the brunt of this kind of abuse by the media.
But if we look at a lot of the research in community health and psychology, that has affected like black Americans, Native Americans and Latino communities who have been victims of like mass incarceration, for example, or state sanctioned violence, and systematic discrimination in schools, workplaces, health care and housing. Due to these conditions, you know, racial and ethnic minorities in the US, just like Muslims and Palestinians suffer disproportionately from mental and physical illnesses, all linked to stress and trauma.
And so that really is where we have to begin and create a safe space for both men and women to come together, and I do see that. I think people are able to see past this narrow lens that the media has created in terms of the role of men in the movement, but I see men interlocking their hands with the women in the movement.
And that's such a beautiful, beautiful thing. And so we need to see more of that by creating that space for each other to feel safe so that we can heal these wounds. And I do believe like my role as a mother who has two boys is to heal that generational trauma. You know, I don't want my sons to be watching the news and media to have this subconscious programming about their own selves, that there's something wrong with them because they're Palestinian or that they are Muslim.
I want them to feel empowered. And I feel like that really starts with the parents, of course, like myself. I have privilege to live in this country, to have the ability to heal those wounds. Yes, I am traumatized by the things that I lived through under Israeli occupation and apartheid, and I'm deeply, deeply wounded by the images that I saw coming out of Gaza.
But I also have this privilege living in this country to be able to, you know, peel each layer of trauma and wounding that I have so that I can ensure that I don't pass on that trauma to my boys, and to ensure that I create a safe space at home for them so that they can always, because, you know, healing always, of course, starts with safety, and so creating that safe space for them.
And it all starts with healing my own self so that my boys can lead the next generation of men who are healed. They're still aware of the world's ills, but at least they have the correct tools and they feel empowered to deal with them.
Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. As the mother of a son, I absolutely agree with that a hundred percent.
And Mnar, thank you so much for taking the time and the energy, absolutely, to sit down with us and discuss this very important topic. And I wish everyone a very revolutionary and non white supremacist and imperialist International Women's Day.
Mnar Adley: Thank you.
Editor's Note |This article was originally published by Project Censored on March 8, 2024, under the title What To Us Is International Women's Day?. It is republished here with permission from the original source. You can read the original version here.
Eleanor Goldfield is a creative radical, journalist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on radical and censored issues via photo, video, and written journalism, as well as artistic mediums including music, poetry, and visual art. She is the host of the podcast, Act Out, co-host of the podcast Common Censored along with Lee Camp, and co-host of the podcast Silver Threads along with Carla Bergman. Her award-winning documentary film, "Hard Road Of Hope" is about West Virginia as both resource colony and radical inspiration. She also assists in frontline action organizing and training. See more of Elanor's work @ ArtKillingApathy.com | HardRoadofHope.com