The regime accusing Ahou Daryaei of being mentally ill—the woman in Iran who stripped off her clothes in defiance against the “morality police”—is a historical misogynistic practice familiar not just to the eastern, but also western world. Let’s not forget that institutionalizing women for “hysteria,” postpartum depression, and deviation from traditional femininity or expectations around women was common practice through the 1900’s. This included committing women who defied norms to the asylum and forcing them to undergo electroconvulsive therapy, ice baths, insulin shock therapy, and in extreme cases, lobotomies. When we say jihadists are backwards, this is exactly what we mean. As the rest of the world (not just the west, look at UAE for example) progresses and undergoes intermittent periods of enlightenment and slow or rapid cultural growth, jihadists are stuck in the primitive, backward, unevolved mindset of forcing women to comply with archaic ideals and suppressive practices, then labeling any deviation from this as clinical insanity. It says a lot about the global state of cognitive dissonance when people can acknowledge the intolerable nature of these mindsets and practices at home, but when they look to the Middle East, they not only approve of it, but actually repeat the regime’s propaganda in confusedly accepting that “this is just their culture” and that all things we consider wrong are inherently baked into—and somehow cleansed by—“culture,” playing perfectly into the jihadist’s aspirations to conceal their crimes under the cloak of cultural immunity. Jihadists rely on the west not understanding that jihadism is a form of colonialism/imperialism, and that the murder, sexual assault, violence, and oppression they use to enforce their tyranny most certainly is their culture, it’s just not our culture - the indigenous peoples subjected to it. But of course, understanding any of this would require dismantling the rotten mindset that “brown people” simply can do no wrong, unless and until it can somehow be blamed on white people - an inversion of the same navel gazing ideology of euro centrists who once haughtily believed the western world was the epicenter of all good, now haughtily believing the western world is the epicenter of all evil. I promise you, we discovered evil many moons ago. Whitewashing, downplaying, justifying, and excusing that evil by hyper-fixating on the west and failing to hold abusers accountable is how the “anti-west” “anti-oppression” crowd have become the biggest collaborators of Middle Eastern oppression.
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