Selective Feminism: Activism or Propaganda

Feminism, at its philosophical core, is a universal commitment, a recognition that women, regardless of race, religion, nationality, or geography, deserve dignity, safety, and freedom from oppression. It is a movement that does not ask permission to care, does not pause at borders, and does not select its subjects based on geopolitical convenience. Or at least, it should not. Yet a troubling and increasingly visible pattern has emerged in certain activist circles, a brand of feminism that is loud where it is politically comfortable and conspicuously silent where it is not. This selective application of feminist principles does not represent genuine advocacy. It represents something far less noble, propaganda dressed in the language of liberation. Few cases illustrate this hypocrisy more vividly than the contrast between the fierce, sustained outcry against the enforcement of the hijab in countries like Iran, and the near-total silence from those same voices when it comes to the suffering of Palestinian women and children under Israeli military operations. Both involve the bodies, rights, and dignity of women. Both deserve attention. Yet one reliably fills protest squares and editorial pages in Western capitals, while the other is met with awkward deflection, institutional caution, or outright indifference.

When protests erupted in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, the response from feminist activists in the West was immediate and impassioned. Social media campaigns trended for weeks. Celebrities cut their hair in solidarity. Editorials multiplied. The moral case was straightforward and, importantly, cost-free to make in Western contexts, a young woman had died after being detained by the morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. The outrage was warranted. The enforcement of dress codes by state violence is a legitimate human rights concern, and no serious observer should minimize it. Here is the question though that must be asked, why does this particular injustice draw such consistent and energetic feminist activism, when equally horrifying and numerically far larger atrocities against women elsewhere go unaddressed by the same voices? The answer is uncomfortable. The enforcement of the hijab in Iran is politically useful to certain agendas. Condemning the Iranian government aligns with Western foreign policy interests. It costs an activist nothing socially; in fact, it earns social capital. It is feminism as fashion statement, feminism as political alignment, not feminism as principle. Now consider what has unfolded in Gaza. Independent journalists, United Nations agencies, and humanitarian organizations have documented the deaths of thousands of Palestinian women and children in Israeli military operations. Hospitals have been bombed. Families have been buried under rubble. Pregnant women have given birth in the ruins of collapsed buildings, with no medical support. Women have watched their children starve, watched their daughters bleed without medicine, watched their sons executed or disappeared. Where are the trending hashtags from the feminist organizations that loudly championed Iranian women? Where are the editorial boards that called out the morality police? Where is the coordinated celebrity activism? For the most part, silence, evasion, or at best, a carefully worded statement so hedged with qualifications that it says nothing at all. Some organizations have actively suppressed employee statements of solidarity with Palestinian women. Others have issued statements condemning all violence in the abstract, a rhetorical device that, by equating occupier and occupied, says everything about political calculation and nothing about feminist principle.

This silence is not incidental. It is structural. Many of the loudest feminist platforms in the West receive funding, institutional support, or political protection from actors who have a stake in maintaining uncritical support for Israel. Feminism, in these spaces, is permitted only insofar as it does not challenge certain geopolitical arrangements. When it threatens to become inconvenient, it is quietly shelved. What we are witnessing is not feminism. It is propaganda, specifically, propaganda that borrows the moral authority of feminism to serve political ends. Propaganda does not apply principles consistently; it applies them selectively, amplifying narratives that serve the propagandist’s goals and suppressing those that do not. Genuine feminism applied consistently would require activists to speak with equal urgency about an Iranian woman dying over a headscarf and a Palestinian mother dying under an airstrike. The fact that the former generates protests and the latter generates silence tells us everything about which cause is genuinely feminist and which is geopolitically motivated performance. This selective activism causes serious harm. It undermines the credibility of feminist movements globally. It tells Muslim women, Arab women, and women of the Global South that their bodies and suffering are only valued when they can be instrumentalized against governments that Western powers oppose. It tells Palestinian women, specifically, that their lives are not considered properly human by the very movements that claim to champion humanity. And it perpetuates a racist double standard in which the violence of certain states is treated as uniquely condemnable, while the violence of allied states is treated as regrettable, complicated, or simply unworthy of mention.

Authentic feminist activism does not negotiate with geopolitics. It does not ask whether the perpetrator of violence against women is an ally before deciding to care. It does not calculate the social cost of speaking before opening its mouth. The women of Iran matter. The women of Afghanistan matter. The women of Saudi Arabia matter. The women of Gaza matter, equally, unconditionally, and without the need to first establish their suffering’s political usefulness to any particular agenda. Activists who claim the feminist mantle while selectively deploying it must be called out, not to silence genuine concern for Iranian or Afghan women, but to demand consistency. The standard must be universal, or it is not a standard at all. When feminism becomes a tool of propaganda, it does not merely fail the women it ignores; it actively harms them by lending moral credibility to a selective framework that renders their suffering invisible. Real feminism begins where political convenience ends. It speaks when speaking is costly. It refuses to let borders determine the value of women’s lives. Until that standard is applied consistently, to Tehran and to Gaza, to Kabul and to Warsaw, to every woman in every conflict regardless of which government her oppressor answers to, what is being practiced is not feminism. It is politics wearing feminism’s face, and it deserves to be named for what it is.