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Fighting repression in the Land of the Free: an Arab-American feminist perspective

By:   []

Date: 2021-12

This article is part of a series for the annual and global 16 Days of activism against gender-based violence published in collaboration with the Women Human Rights Defenders Middle East and North Africa (WHRDMENA) coalition as part of its #SheDefends yearly campaign. The articles reflect on the past, present and future of feminist movements and the meaning of global solidarity.

For decades, US and European governments, as well as corporate media, have been condemning authoritarian repression and violence against women in the Global South – from Africa, to the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific Islands and Latin America. And tragically, these same voices have too frequently misused grassroots human rights and feminist struggles to push for violent military interventions.

As an Arab-American professor and activist, I have witnessed over 30 years of repression within the US against feminist and queer people of color, and those involved in racial justice, anti-war, and decolonial social movements. I often wonder, where is the international outcry over repression and misogyny within the United States?

Given the recent escalation of US repression of Black and Palestinian activists, it is more clear than ever that railing against authoritarian repression in the Global South is a far cry from real concern over peoples’ freedom. It is especially hypocritical to demand an end to gender violence in the Global South when the US was not only founded upon rape and sexual assault as a tool of enslavement and colonisation, but also continues to rely on sexualised violence to dominate BIPOC communities. Consider the more than 1,200 reports of sexual assault and the controversy over hysterectomies targeting immigrant women in ICE custody; the forced sterilizations of Native and Black women; and police sexual violence.

Sensationalising human rights abuses abroad turns public attention away from such human rights abuses in the US and helps maintain the fiction of the US as a democratic nation state with equal rights and freedom for all.

Solidarity with Palestine

It is no surprise that many anti-imperialist Black activists and feminists from the Civil Rights era to today have stood in strong solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.

This solidarity was always global in scope, as it was forged in the 1970s context of global anti-imperialist liberation movements and a shared consensus that the Cold War sidetracked liberation movements across the world, and that they were being co-opted by military and corporate elites, finance capital, and efforts to control resources and create a new imperialism.

This internationalist frame conceptualised South Africa and Palestine as key sites of Western neo-imperialism and identified them as locations whose struggles were intrinsically connected to all forms of anti-colonial critique. It was in this context that instances of feminist solidarity such as the alliance between the US-based Union of Palestinian Women’s Association (UPWA) and the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) emerged.

Continued FBI surveillance and repression of Black, Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim residents expanded such solidarity. A principal example of this is the FBI’s 1996-2000 investigation into Chicago-area Muslim Americans called Vulgar Betrayal, which eventually encompassed nearly every FBI field office and impacted the lives of hundreds of citizens or legal permanent residents. Algerian-American Assia Boundaoui, who uncovered this operation, produced the film ‘The Feeling of Being Watched,’ in which she documents how FBI surveillance trickles down into the everyday lives of Arab-American Muslim youth, families and communities in the form of paranoia, distrust, fragmentation, and the destruction of community relations and philanthropy.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/fighting-repression-in-the-land-of-the-free-an-arab-american-feminist-perspective/
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