Mick Hartley

Masih Alinejad, in Tablet, with an open letter to NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani:

While mass killings are unfolding in Iran, you have chosen silence.

While women are being beaten, imprisoned, and killed for refusing compulsory hijab and the entire Islamic regime in Iran, you have offered no sympathy, no solidarity, not even a basic condemnation.

This silence matters….

In Iran, the Islamic Republic has carried out one of the largest massacres of civilians in its history. Protesters are shot in the streets. Detainees are raped and killed. Hospitals are raided.

That is why your celebration of World Hijab Day, lacking your sympathy for women being oppressed in Iran, is not a neutral cultural gesture. For millions of Iranian women, the hijab is not a choice. It is the uniform of their oppressors. Celebrating it while women are being slaughtered for rejecting it is, at best, deeply insensitive. At worst, it normalizes and sanitizes the violence of a terrorist regime.

Of course this silence isn’t confined to Mamdani: it’s right across the western media. The BBC regularly features the latest reports from Gaza as lead stories – today it’s Inside Gaza hospital struggling to provide care to newborn babies – but nothing when it comes to the tens of thousands being slaughtered in Iran. Nothing.