Unite the Kingdom burka stunt was pathetic and anti-feminist racism

If I ever had doubts about how protestors at Saturday’s Unite the Kingdom rally feel about Muslims (which I don’t), they were quickly laid to rest as my Instagram timeline flooded with photographs and videos of incendiary – and sometimes bizarre – anti-Muslim displays of behaviour, which included a Korean musician playing the cello while wearing strips of bacon on his shoulders, before shaking hands with Tommy Robinson on stage and announcing:

I may be hung like a chipmunk, but I’ve got enough balls to fight Islam.

I’m sorry, Mr. Cellist, but crispy cured pork will not result in me fainting or repel me back into the shadows like a vampire exposed to garlic. I also found his self-denegrating joke about the size of his package to be, in all honesty, quite sad. It plays into racist Western stereotypes about Asian men that have sought to emasculate them. It was an example of the ways in which people of colour belittle themselves to fit into white-dominated spaces. But I digress.

Saturday’s march was less ‘Unite the Kingdom’ and more ‘Unite the fight against Islam’ – the crusader references at the march were too many count. Far-right racists often accuse British Muslims like me of playing the victim card, but never has there been more blatant hatred for Islam on display than there was at Saturday’s march, which one attendee called ‘an incredible family day out in London‘ in a post on Facebook group Britain’s Voice, showing just how polarised British society has become. I am not sure you can call a rally where a 15-year-old girl was sexually harassed on camera ‘family friendly.’

However, the cherry on the top was Collectif Némésis’ niqab stunt.

Unite the Kingdom: an anti-Islam trope as old as time

Three members of the French right-wing ‘feminist’ group – I am intentionally putting the word feminist in quotation marks – took to the stage during last Saturday’s rally clad in black niqabs (the Islamic face veil) and abayas (an over garment worn by some Muslim women) before whipping them off in unison to a crowd of jeering men yelling “take it off.” How very feminist of them.

Not only was Collectif Némésis’s stunt reductive, resorting to the use of Muslim women’s clothing yet again as a symbol of what they perceive to be oppression, which is an anti-Islam trope as old as time, but by politicising our clothing and placing us on the frontline of their racist, bigoted political agenda, they are endangering us. And endangering fellow women isn’t very feminist, is it?

Muslim women bear the brunt of anti-Muslim hatred

The intent is clear: to stoke racist tensions by reinforcing the pernicious view of Islam as an oppressive force against women. And it is Muslim women who bear the brunt of these tensions.

It is well-documented that anti-Muslim hatred is gendered, with more Muslim women in Britain experiencing anti-Muslim harassment and hate crimes than Muslim men. Arguably, that’s because the hijab makes us more visibly Muslim. According to Tell MAMA, a non-governmental organisation monitoring anti-Muslim hatred in the UK, 65% of Islamophobic incidents in cities happen to girls and women, and stunts like the one Collectif Némésis pulled off last Saturday just embolden those who seek to harm Muslim women.

The consequences are serious; last month John Ashby was given a life sentence for raping and strangling a Sikh Woman last October in Walsall who he thought was a Muslim woman.

Mainstream British media outlets also bear some responsibility for the entitlement and impunity the far right feel when it comes to expressing their hatred towards Muslim women. When it comes to media coverage of the hatred that was openly expressed towards Muslims and Islam last Saturday, all you can hear are crickets.

Collectif Némésis’s actions contradict feminism

Then, there is the anti-feminist aspect of Collectif Némésis’s pathetic burlesque. The three French activists can be seen in the video encouraging the men in the audience to shout, ‘Take it off.’ The sexual objectification of women via the removal of clothing is misogyny at its finest. It also plays into the Orientalist and colonialist-era obsession that some white men in the West have with unveiling Muslim women. As a visibly Muslim woman, I feel equally hated and fetishised by far-right white men.

Collectif Némésis claims to be a feminist group, but really what they exhibited at the Unite the Kingdom rally was their blatant support for Britain’s misogynistic, patriarchal far-right movement whom, if they were to gain power, would rescind women’s rights. According to Politico, one in three Reform supporters are fans of Tommy Robinson, a party that has spoken about repealing the Equality Act 2010, imposing a tax on childless women, and lowering the legal abortion limit, among calls for a return to traditional family values reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale. Women who degrade, ridicule, and harm other women to win the approval of the same men who would hurt them, are, what queer feminist activist and writer Mona Eltahawy calls: foot soldiers of the patriarchy.

Right-wing women like those who are members of Collectif Némésis hide behind the guise of feminism and ‘liberating’ Muslim women. They have absolutely no interest in making life better for Muslim women; their hatred is one and the same.

Featured image via Instagram/CNN News 18

By Yousra Samir Imran

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