Kambiz Foroohar

Colgate University’s Kraynak Institute for the Study of Freedom and Western Traditions hosted exiled Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad for a student meeting and public lecture on Monday, April 28. Alinejad, founder of the nonprofit My Stealthy Freedom, spoke to students and community members about the ongoing struggle for women’s rights in Iran and directed sharp criticism at Western progressives, who she said have abandoned Iranian women out of fear of being labeled Islamophobic.

Associate Professor of Art and Co-Director of the Kraynak Institute Carolyn Guile introduced Alinejad at the event, noting her role as a prominent voice against compulsory veiling in Iran since launching My Stealthy Freedom: a social media campaign that invited Iranian women to share photos of themselves without the hijab. She has since been the target of multiple alleged Iranian government assassination plots on American soil and lives in exile in New York City.

Alinejad opened her lecture by grounding the audience in the realities of life under the Islamic Republic. In Iran, she explained, women cannot access education, obtain a government ID or participate in public life without covering their hair, a policy first mandated by Ayatollah Khomeini. She described taking off her hijab in secret as a teenager as a small, guilty act of defiance. Social media later gave her and other Iranian women the ability to identify allies in a place where doing so was dangerous.

The talk grew more pointed as Alinejad turned to the Western response to Iran’s crackdown on protesters. She described receiving videos from Iranians of massacres carried out by the government during protests and said she and her team spent weeks documenting the dead without knowing whether their own family members were among them; an internet blackout imposed by the regime made it impossible to find out. She said more than 10,000 protesters have been physically blinded by the government as a deliberate act of intimidation.

Throughout the lecture, Alinejad repeatedly challenged her audience to examine what she called the selective outrage of Western progressive movements.

“Where are all the progressives on Iran?” Alinejad asked.

Here, she suggested that the American left has directed its dislike of the Trump administration towards her people by mounting a sweeping opposition to its actions in support of them.

She said that fear of being labeled Islamophobic has caused left-leaning politicians and activists to stay silent on atrocities committed in the name of Islamic ideology, a silence she distinguished carefully from anti-Muslim bigotry. As a former Muslim whose family remains Muslim, she said her opposition is to Islamic ideology as a political force, not to Muslim people.

She illustrated what she described as a double standard with a social experiment she conducted in New York City. She said she entered a Christian church holding a sign reading “Jesus doesn’t exist” and was met with respectful attempts at conversation. When she planned to repeat the experiment outside a mosque with a sign reading “Muhammad doesn’t exist,” she said the New York Police Department advised her against it, telling her that her life would be in danger. She concluded this meditation with a poignant question about the suggested double standard.

“I can criticize Jesus in America,” Alinejad said. “But I cannot criticize Muhammad in America?”

Another anecdote recounted by Alinejad involved U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Alinejad said she approached Omar to ask her to promote the free hijab movement. She stressed that it was not an anti-hijab movement, but one affirming that women should be free to choose whether or not to wear the hijab.

Omar refused and clashed with Alinejad again over a 2022 Washington Post article Alinejad wrote in opposition to Omar’s bill against Islamophobia.

Alinejad also pushed back on the suggestion that her activism puts others at risk. She directly addressed concerns that joining her movements had led to people being arrested, asserting the necessity and inevitability of this in any fruitful movement. She referenced the Iranian government’s imprisonment of her father, sister and brother in 2019 — a retributive move against Alinejad’s women’s liberation activism — to accentuate her personal stake in this battle and her fearlessness on the public stage.

“I don’t owe people. Label me,” Alinejad said. “Why should I feel guilty? Those who put my innocent brother in prison should feel guilty.”

She closed with a challenge to students uncertain about how to engage with the issue. Citing the United Nations’ 2005 Responsibility to Protect doctrine, she argued that international law already permits intervention to protect civilians, and that Western governments invoking international law to criticize military strikes have largely ignored it when it comes to Iran.

She reiterated her stance on speaking out, encouraging listeners against self-censorship.

“Stop being politically correct,” Alinejad said. “This is a barbaric regime … This is the culture of ISIS, [of] the Taliban.”

Despite current contention over questions of military intervention and Western policy, Alinejad returned to a core message of political neutrality throughout the evening.

“This is not about left and right,” Alinejad said. “I don’t worship a political party. I worship my values.”

Lecture attendee Savannah Koch, a visiting junior from Northern Kentucky University, found Alinejad’s courage particularly inspiring.

“She’s inspired me to move beyond my fear of being ostracized for my opinion, caring less about that and more about standing for what is right,” Koch said.

Senior Ean Hill echoed Koch’s sentiment and hoped that it could ground more open dialogue about complex issues like the ones Alinejad discussed.

“I felt very inspired by her words and hope students will heed her message to abandon judging the politics and opinions of others instead of engaging in productive dialogue with them,” Hill said. “Freedom of speech means nothing if we are too afraid or unwilling to speak to one another.”

Another attendee, senior Sarah Tabibian, said that Alinejad’s talk helped contextualize her own Iranian heritage.

“It felt like [Alinejad] was speaking to you personally and from her heart,” Tabibian said. “As someone whose own family fled Iran in 1979, hearing her perspective felt particularly resonant. She offered a living connection to a struggle I had only ever understood through my family’s stories.”