March 8, 2024, 12:01 a.m. I press “validate”. A photo appears on my Instagram account – almost a thousand pairs of shoes that we painted blood red – and under the photo, a text which ends like this:
On this day dedicated to women’s rights, our role as women who have become feminists through the flesh is to identify, denounce and condemn areas of lawlessness specifically targeting women. Denounce governmental, religious and traditionalist systems that allow women to be raped, subjugated, mutilated, threatened, stoned, forced to marry, isolated, imprisoned, terrorized, killed, hanged and made invisible.
So-called intersectional feminists, stop supporting our attackers. We are the ones you don’t want to see and we won’t be silent. This photo is our response to your blindness. No peace for women without denunciation of their tormentors.
We are Iranian, Afghan, Israeli, Pakistani, Algerian, Yazidis and many others, denouncing the ravages of sexual apartheid imposed by radical Islamism. We stand alongside women victims of barbaric traditions such as excision, in France and elsewhere. We stand alongside those who suffer in their homes, from the violence of men who hate them. We are these women whose bodies are sold, whose bodies are drugged to better submit them. We are all united. We are universalist feminists.
In the background of the photo, we stand proud, placards in hand, the Eiffel Tower in the background.
Next to me, Mona Jafarian, with whom we organized the event. She fled Iran, just like Hilda. There are dozens of us, from all walks of life, all religions and even suffering. The day before, I finally found a lawyer for Aïcha*, whom I met during a discussion group at the Maison des femmes from 93. She fled Algeria with her 3 children to escape sharia law. She is terrified that her husband will find her. I think of her holding up my speaker.
10 hours. I read the comments under the photo. There are some very beautiful ones. And then. “This hatred of Islam is crazy”, “free Palestine”, “band of extremists, you have blood on your hands”.
Like when I posted the appeal, and activists from We All and other famous (and subsidized) feminist associations called me Islamophobic, fascist or “white supremacist”.
14 hours. Delivery of the check for the profits from my book 125 and thousands to the National Union of Families of Feminicides. 28,000 euros for families broken by the horrible fatal outcome of domestic violence.
16 hours. Amélie*, a former beaten child, her eye marked with a scar left by her father, contacts me in panic. “We were exfiltrated, they gassed us.” She sends me videos of the Paris demonstration for women’s rights. She was holding an Israeli hostage sign whose abuse and sexual abuse the UN confirmed in its report. About thirty Jewish women hoped to provide them with support. Because the Hamas hostages were raped, mutilated and killed BECAUSE they were women, in a terrible project orchestrated by a terrorist movement advocating in its manifesto the eradication of Jews, unbelievers and female submission.
The small procession of grandmothers and young mothers, for the most part, is surrounded and then smothered by “feminist” activists carrying Palestinian flags, shouting “fascist Zionists”. In a video that Amélie sends me, a young woman lowers her veil to shout “dirty whore”. On the panels of the CGT, supposed to be apolitical, Palestinian flags and slogans are pinned which have nothing to envy of those of the BDS. You should know that this procession, which some call “the Jews”, had to wait nearly 10 days of deliberation by the organizing associations to find out if it could parade with the other French people. Because for “intersectional” feminists in our country, this question is debated. In the Parisian street, violence rises, the police choose to exfiltrate the small group. Amélie calls me in tears: “We tried. My eyes hurt. But at least I filmed, maybe this time, people will believe us.”
22 hours. After a first conference that I gave in Puteaux on feminicides in France, I am starting a second at the UEJF under the sign of openness. I find Mona and many Iranian and Afghan activists, relieved that we are finally supporting them. Relieved that we are finally asking the words of sexual apartheid by linking them to radical Islamism and its deadly global project. I listen to Diaryatou’s story, her forced marriage at 14 in Guinea, the subsequent serial rapes, her excision, “radical Islam expresses itself like that in my country”. I then drink the words of Father Desbois who returns from Ukraine and tells me about his life with Yazidi women, his arrest in Iraq and his death sentence in several countries designated as lands of Islam because “I expressed words of sympathy towards the Jews.
1 hour. I find my niece waiting for me in my bed. His father is Algerian. I realize that she does not have the right, as a Jew, to go to her Muslim paternal grandparents who live in Kabylia.
I think of Mona, of Aïcha, of Diaryatou and all these women who are my sisters on a daily basis, not to look pretty in speeches, and I am lost in the face of the refusal of a certain left which has changed so much since the time when she shaped me, faced with her inability to name, on Women’s Rights Day, radical Islam and the barbaric traditions which represent the greatest threats to them in the world.
24 hours of my life as a Jewish woman. And secular. And stunned.
*First names have been changed
Sarah Barukh is a feminist activist