Mick Hartley

Last weekend’s FiLiA meeting in Brighton had more to contend with than the useless politicians and the violent men outside. There were also, as Julie Burchill reports, the ‘Feminists for Islam’:

The first sign that something might have been amiss at FiLiA was a hijab’d woman selling similar head-coverings in the foyer. ‘What next, binders?’, Sonya Douglas asked on X. The number of keffiyehs and Palestinian flags on show could have persuaded a person that they had wandered into the Oxford Union debating chamber by mistake. Veteran feminist Bev Jackson posted that: ‘An organisation called Total Woman Victory had a stand at FiLiA disseminating a pamphlet with some of the most virulent anti-Jewish tropes I’ve ever seen.’

Jewish women have had to put up with enough monstrous bullying and belittling from the world generally over the past two years (BELIEVE ALL WOMEN – UNLESS THEY’RE JEWISH, as the saying has it). And now the poison of anti-Semitism seems to have trickled into the very heart of a conference where women of all races and belief systems should feel safe. But sadly, we’ve seen before that Islam and diversity, though often used in tandem by politicians and other clueless scolds, are often strangers to each other. Here at the FiLiA conference was evidence of a strange beast – here was Feminists for Islam.

It is a strange beast. Why would women support the most violently misogynistic force on the planet? Some of the reason, no doubt, is the same “be nice” mentality that sees so many women align with the trans crowd who generally view them with contempt.

Let’s make this clear. You cannot be both an Islamist and a feminist. It’s as illogical as saying you can be a woman and be a penis-haver. Yet it seems increasingly difficult for a group of otherwise enlightened women to grasp….

Women who voluntarily don the hijab are trampling on the broken bodies of all the brave women – the young women of Iran come most heartbreakingly to mind – who are raped, tortured and murdered for daring to take theirs off. Those who wave the Palestinian flag are doing the same to the Israeli women raped until their pelvises broke by the Islamofascists of ‘the resistance’.…

Of course, this syndrome extends far beyond feminism into the left’s attitude to Palestine as a whole. On X this week, Owen Jones finally went fully gaga, intoning over a Hovis-tune-inspired soundtrack that Palestine will ‘free us all’. What does that mean? No gay rights? No women’s rights? No rights for atheists? One state religion, and death for apostates? This use of language is truly Orwellian – and not in a good way.

Yes, I saw that. It was truly weird, with that deranged messianic look of his. I could only assume he meant “free us all” from Jews.