‘You Are Standing With Our Jailers’: Iranian Dissident Chides Mamdani for Hijab Day Post

An Iranian dissident is calling out the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, for celebrating World Hijab Day while women in Iran face arrest, beatings, and death for refusing to wear the mandatory veil. “Really? Right now?” Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American journalist and women’s rights activist, wrote on X on Wednesday in response to a post Mr. Mamdani shared this week commemorating World Hijab Day.“To be honest, I feel tortured in my own beautiful city of New York, watching you celebrate ‘World Hijab Day’ while women in my wounded country, Iran, are being jailed, shot, and killed for refusing the hijab and the Islamic ideology behind it,” Ms. Alinejad wrote. She added that Mr. Mamdani’s silence on the ongoing protests in Iran, paired with his “celebration” of the hijab, “is shameful.”Ms. Alinejad continued: “You are not standing with women. You are standing with our jailers.” Ms. Alinejad, a prominent critic of the regime and its compulsory hijab laws, knows the regime’s deadly tactics firsthand. She fled Iran in 2009 and has lived in exile in America since. Even here, she has been the target of several foiled assassination plots.Her scathing rebuke of New York’s first Muslim mayor comes days after Mr. Mamdani’s office of immigrant affairs shared a post on X to “celebrate the faith, identity, & pride of Muslim women & girls around the world who choose to wear the hijab,” calling it “a powerful symbol of devotion & celebration of Muslim heritage.”Other prominent critics of the Islamic Republic have expressed outrage at the post, including French author and activist, Bernard-Henri Lévy. “World Hijab Day… How dare you?” Mr. Lévy wrote on X. “How can the ‘shining city upon a hill’ celebrate the hijab at the very moment when thousands of women in #Iran are being jailed, tortured, and murdered for the simple act of refusing to wear it?” An ex-Muslim and Middle East commentator, Dan Burmawi, questioned Mr. Mamdani’s suggestion that Muslim women “choose” to wear the hijab. “They’re either conditioned into it or pressured into it,” he wrote on X, recalling seeing his mother go outside without a hijab for the first and only time. “She looked alive, free, and happy in a way I never saw before or after.”

‘You Are Standing With Our Jailers’: Iranian Dissident Chides Mamdani for Hijab Day Post

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