On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad said that liberals in the West tell her that if she talks about how women are treated in the Middle East, “you’re going to cause Islamophobia.” But “my fear and the fear of millions of Iranian women” is rational because she was told growing up in Iran that “if you show your hair, you’re going to go to jail. You will receive lashes. You will get killed like Mahsa Amini.” She also criticized the Combating International Islamophobia Act passed by Democrats by stating that it’s those who beat and kill women and those who leave Islam that create the phobia, not those who speak out against it.
Host Bill Maher asked, “Why are liberals so moronic about the problem?”
Alinejad responded, “[F]or years and years, we have been warning them about the dangers of morality police. You know why? Because most of them speak perfect English and they have — who actually talk about Islam and Islamic countries. They never go and live under Sharia laws, but they don’t even let us talk about our own experience. I grew up in a country where I was told that if you show your hair, you’re going to go to jail. You will receive lashes. You will get killed like Mahsa Amini. But here, they tell me that if you talk about this, you’re going to cause Islamophobia. Phobia is irrational, but believe me, my fear and the fear of millions of Iranian women and [women in] Afghanistan is rational.”
She later stated, “I invite them all to go and live under Sharia laws in Iran and Afghanistan, they would say no. They always, always try to downplay our cause, but they don’t even dare to live only one day wearing the burqa or hijab. Some of them, actually, I challenged Ilhan Omar. … She’s coming now with legislation gathering information around the world [about] who causes Islamophobia. I was like, oh my God, even here in America now someone monitoring us that we’re going to cause Islamophobia? Those who [lash] us, those who kill us, those who hang us, those who — if we say that I don’t want to be a Muslim anymore, they’re going kill you. Those actually create phobia, of course, not me, if there is phobia.”
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