Since launching its "topless jihad" protests across Europe and elsewhere on April 4, Femen has stirred up a media maelstrom, with commentators, mostly Muslim men and women living in the West, taking to the airwaves or the Internet on CNN, the New York Times,Al Jazeera English, and the Huffington Post (and elsewhere) to call the group racist, classist, imperialist, colonialist, Eurocentric, Islamophobic, orientalist, neo-orientalist, cowardly, or, at best, naïve, and foolish.
At least one of those opining veered into infelicitous nonsense: According to Ilana Alazzah, a Muslim activist, Femen’s protest recalled “blackface,” with its version of feminism “excluding women of all formats,” even those women who “don’t have vaginas.”
Another detractor, the Arab-American blogger Laila Alawa, contended (falsely) that the group told “Muslim women to sit down and shut up.” The Canadian writer Murtaza Hussain, after noting, with apparent portent, that Femen activists are “mostly white Europeans,” considered that their approach “reeks of arrogance.” Even the usually balanced blogger Hind Makki availed herself of hyperbole, in announcing, on Al Jazeera English, that Femen “really criminalizes every single Muslim man out there.” A “Muslim Women Against Femen” page appeared on Facebook, and a “Muslimah Pride Day” was proclaimed.
