I can’t remember when was the first time I stumbled upon Valizadeh's website, Return of Kings. In a world that, as people of colour, our sheer existence is resistance to a system of white supremacy, it is often times my natural instinct to question non-white-looking people's ethnicity and frame their work with respect to their place of privilege. He was half Iranian, half Armenian, I learned. Months later, the Jian Ghomeshi rape scandals surfaced. I remember a white friend mentioning Ghomeshi’s ethnicity and another white person correcting them because, “I don’t think his race is relevant to this debate. His actions do not represent his community.” The offending white person thought for ten seconds, nodded and apologized while i stayed silent.
Last week, I was discussing Roosh with fellow feminists and ended my speech with, “And, he’s Iranian. Like why???” A white man answered, “Everyone have their bad apples, right?” And everyone around me (all white white white) nodded, and so did i.
But the thing is, in this society we Iranians and Muslims are all bad apples. From "random" airport screenings to the low value of our passports to sanctions after sanctions and to being the "Muslim terrorist refuge camel-riding" girl at school, we are always reminded that we are all bad apples because of our "wrong" place of birth, that are lives lack value compared to those of a lighter skin tone. This, together with the reality that our ethnicity lacks representation in the media, makes the Valizadeh and Ghomeshi case about more than misogyny. God knows how grateful I am that the debate about Ghomeshi and Valizadeh was mostly limited to their acts and not ethnicity, at least to my knowledge (I avoid articles' comments section).
I remember the cold Montreal November night sitting at my uncle’s apartment with my father discussing Ghomeshi and I thought back to my high school years in a white (and racist) town. Whenever I met someone and was immediately asked about my origins (usually the first question the white person in question came up with after ten minutes of “Wow, how did you end up here”, “How is it like for women out there?”, “Are you Muslim? where is your hijab”, etc), I was told something about Jian Ghomeshi - that he's Iranian, that the white person in question enjoys Q, or other irrelevant statement that i had to nod and smile to. I wondered what those white people thought about Ghomeshi now. Ghomeshi used to be the topic of conversation at every gathering with my relatives and family friends in the diaspora, as he seemed to be the one Iranian beloved by all of Canada and being loved by white people is not something we Iranians are used to, and he gave us hope. We admired his voice, his intelligence, his looks. As first generation immigrants, my family didn't position our love for Jian with respect to the lack of representation of our ethnicity in media, because we had no expectation to be represented, because we were only too happy to be accepted as second-class citizens on this stolen land - if we had a conventionally good-looking Iranian man being a popular show host at CBC, that was just cherry on the top.
To all my white friends: for me, as a person of colour, it matters so much that Valizadeh is half-Persian, because your average white person probably can’t name more than two Persians anyways. When the representation of our lives is limited to the nuclear deal and bomb plots (that never happened but white heads somehow make this connection because the Middle East is a patch of land full of war and bloodshed amirite), there’s a pain that comes with hating Valizadeh. A “but why do you have to be Iranian?”.
This is all to say that Valizadeh has uploaded “Toronto Mayor John Tory Is Islamophobic” and started his long rant about “Canada, the most Islamophobic country I’ve set foot in” by asking, “Look at me. Do I look white to you?”
“My dad is from Iran,” he says, pronouncing the name of the country with a Farsi accent. He declares that his ideas on patriarchy and masculinity and his motto that “men should be strong and women should submit” come from Islam. According to Valizadeh, his misogyny has been taught by Prophet Mohammad, he says, pointing to the sky. "Canadian white privileged feminists" he says, are not "checking their privilege" and "rich white politicians" are persecuting him for his beliefs. Hmm... I thought misogynists didn't believe in the concept of privilege?
“The only place in Canada where I’m safe is a mosque. I’ve been hanging in a mosque all day praying to Allah, praying to Mohammad to keep me safe,” he says, pronouncing Allah and Mohammad the Arabic way.
I don't wish to get into why Valizadeh's recent video is absurd, given the man has published an islamophobic article on his website and sided with white racists up until today and now he suddenly becomes an oppressed Iranian Muslim, co-opting our struggles as Muslims, Iranians and Muslim Iranians and justifying his beliefs and further defaming Islam as an oppressive misogynistic religion and Iran as a dangerous country for women. Thanks to the amazing mobilization campaign against Valizadeh by many wonderful feminists, Valizadeh feels threatened in Canada where technically hate speech is not covered under free speech, and now he's falling back on freedom of religion. I doubt that will get him very far in gaining him some respect on the country, but it will undoubtedly further tarnish our identities.
Paniz Khosroshahy is a third year student at McGill involved with McGill Students for Feminisms. She loves to hang out in closed QTPOC spaces, is allergic to liberal feminism and the unfortunate hijacking of the word "choice", and can't give two shits about accusations of being "part of the problem", misandrist or "reverse-racist".