How the Trump Administration Is Exploiting Iran’s Burgeoning Feminist Movement
By Azadeh Moaveni
Last December, an image was posted on Instagram that showed a young woman named Vida Movahed standing on top of a sidewalk utility box on Revolution Street, a crowded thoroughfare in Tehran. Her dark hair was curled around her neck, and she was waving her white headscarf on a stick in front of her. She stood quietly, until she was arrested, an hour later, for not wearing her hijab. The next month, a thirty-two-year-old graduate student named Narges Hosseini assumed the same pose on another utility box on the same street. Hosseini later told reporters that she had been moved by Movahed’s action and wanted to keep the spirit of defiance alive. As her image spread across Instagram, some thirty women were arrested for taking part in similar protests, which resulted in three prison sentences. In the news and on social media, they became known as #TheGirlsofRevolutionStreet.
Millennials responded to the protests on social media and blogs by calling for full freedom of dress as a basic civil right. Young women began leaving flowers at the site of each protest; female parliamentarians demanded new policies promoting equal access to higher education and jobs, and targeting gender discrimination in public spaces. The authorities responded with violence, though not to the degree that people had feared. A woman who was demonstrating was pushed off her utility box by a policeman, and morality policewomen shoved and yelled at a group of girls with their hair uncovered in public. Videos of these confrontations appeared in Iranian media and the international press. Masih Alinejad, a prominent Iranian anti-mandatory-hijab activist based in New York, deemed the moment the start of a real feminist movement in Iran. But, for women’s activists inside the country, the protests were just the latest clash in a long struggle for equality, which started around the time of the Iranian Revolution, in 1979, when the Islamic Republic imposed dress codes requiring women to cover their bodies and hair.
The protests have served a different purpose in the United States. As headlines across the world have heralded #TheGirlsofRevolutionStreet as Iran’s #MeToo movement, the Trump Administration has deployed the cause as part of its campaign to isolate the Islamic Republic and promote regime change in Tehran. From the moment that the U.S. pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, has put Iranian women at the center of the Administration’s new strategy. In a major policy speech at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, Pompeo said that Iranian women’s protests were evidence of a growing divide between Iranians and their government. “The brutal men of the regime seem to be particularly terrified by Iranian women who are demanding their rights,” he said. “As human beings with inherent dignity and inalienable rights, the women of Iran deserve the same freedoms that the men of Iran possess.”
Pompeo has since become the most outspoken Secretary of State in U.S. history on the subject of Iranian women’s struggle for equality. On his Twitter account, Pompeo released an eerie graphic of a miniature Movahed, in front of a glowing Iranian flag, that noted the number of women jailed for protesting the hijab. Another tweet featured a line graph showing a surge in protests superimposed over the image of a woman with her fist in the air. “Hmm… Can this be explained?” he asked. The graph gave no source for the data, and the y-axis was unlabelled. When reporters pressed Heather Nauert, a State Department spokesperson, to share the origin of the information, she referred vaguely to “U.S. government sources.”
In June, the State Department’s Persian-language Twitter account began projecting a similar concern for Iranian women. Seizing on the fervor surrounding Iran’s participation in the World Cup, the account polled whether Iranian women should be allowed inside football stadiums. (For Iran’s match against Spain, the government allowed women into Tehran’s Azadi Stadium for the first time in nearly forty years, to watch a televised feed from Russia). One tweet compared “Iran 2018” with “America 1917,” suggesting a parallel between Iranian women and American suffragettes. On Monday, the State Department tweeted, “Really #what are you afraid of?,” joining in the online furor over the recent arrest of a young Iranian woman who posted videos of herself on Instagram dancing without a headscarf. The feed intersperses such tweets with grim statistics about Iran’s unemployment rate and crowing updates on European companies such as Total and Citroën pulling out of Iran in anticipation of American sanctions. Niki Akhavan, a professor at Catholic University and the author of “Electronic Iran: The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution,” told me that the Administration’s strategy felt like a return to Cold War-era information tactics. “A combination of what we used to call soft power or soft war encompasses what they’re up to,” she said. “They’re pairing their anti-Iran deal propaganda with human rights, and weaponizing women’s rights as rhetoric and strategy.”
Later this summer, U.S. sanctions against Iran will go back into effect. This will limit the ability of European countries to invest and do business in Iran, and, crucially, will limit Iran’s ability to sell oil abroad. These measures, Akhavan said, will directly erode the quality of life of ordinary Iranians while enriching reactionary elements of the system that have tended to profit from sanctions, both financially and politically. The State Department’s information campaign is one prominent way, she suggested, of getting out ahead of America’s role in making Iranians’ lives worse. “It’s an attempt to show solidarity with Iranian women, to place themselves on the side of the people, when all their activity is taking things in the opposite direction,” she said. At a State Department briefing last month, a journalist asked Nauert, the department’s spokesperson, what message Pompeo intended to convey with his tweets. Nauert said that Iranians were “tremendously concerned with their lack of economic progress” and that Pompeo was merely highlighting their frustration at the regime. She did not mention that Iran’s economic recovery was predicated on the nuclear deal that the Trump Administration had just overturned.
Pompeo’s advocacy for women reflects a cynical strategy. In addition to representing an Administration that has had multiple officials, including the President, accused of sexual assault, and two of its members resign over harassment or domestic-violence issues, Pompeo supports a number of policy changes that have rolled back protections for women. He is against the right to an abortion, even in cases of rape. As a member of the House of Representatives, he voted repeatedly for a global gag rule to prevent aid money from going to nonprofits that discuss abortions and co-sponsored “personhood” legislation aimed at banning most forms of abortion and even contraception. In the Middle East, he has embraced countries like Saudi Arabia, which upholds one of the harshest gender-discrimination regimes in the world, including a guardianship law that obliges women to be legal wards of men from birth until death. In April, Pompeo called the recent reforms by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, which leave the guardianship system in place, “inspiring,” and said that they would “empower women.”
Since the State Department took up the cause of Iranian women on Twitter, the majority of engagement and replies have come from men and anonymous accounts supporting regime change, often paired with the hashtag #iranregimechange. Women’s-rights circles in Tehran are concerned that these alignments will encourage hard-liners to crack down on organizers and protesters. “Activists inside were nervous this independent movement would become associated with outside opposition groups, and face pressure and arrests by the security sector as a result,” Sussan Tahmasebi, one of the pioneers of the Iranian women’s movement, said. Several others told me they worried that the tentative gains that women have made in recent months would be jeopardized by the Iranian government’s perception that the Trump Administration was exploiting natural tensions, specifically around gender. “Trying to appropriate Iranian women’s discontent to advance regime change is a surefire way to undermine their cause,” Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said. “The more the Trump Administration tries to deepen Iran’s domestic fault lines, the more likely it is that the political élite will close ranks and bring down the iron fist.”
As part of their support for regime change, officials in the Trump Administration have regularly met and promoted Iranian émigré opposition figures based in the United States who are either unknown or reviled inside Iran. These figures, some of them former dissidents who fled Iran in the early two-thousands, have appeared on Fox News alongside John Bolton, the national-security adviser, claiming that Iranians “love Trump,” whose travel ban formally denies Iranians from entering the United States. The Administration now cultivates an array of groups opposed to the Islamic Republic that often identify themselves with #TheGirlsofRevolutionStreet iconography — a graphic echoing Movahed’s protest, with her hijab dangling on a stick. External actors, which seek to put pressure on Iran, have become conflated with the progressive cause of Iranian women, who seek peaceful reform. The latter group seems likely to bear the consequences. “When you take a stand on the hijab in order to take a stand against the regime, it becomes about regime overthrow, Tahmasebi said. “It’s no longer solely about women’s issues.”
Originally published at www.newyorker.com on March 11, 2018.
