The recent escalation between Iran, the United States and Israel has reactivated a recurring argument: the situation of women under the ayatollah regime as a justification for the attack and the violation of international law.
Repression is not new. Since 1979, women’s rights have been severely restricted, and in recent years pressure has intensified with campaigns such as the and with the death penalty to quell the movement “, active since 2022.
In December 2025, after new protests for a change of regime, the repression left among y victims, according to different sources.
But is that really the reason for the joint attack? The defense of women’s rights has occupied a central place in the public justification of the offensive. Benjamin Netanyahu and stated that the operation sought to pave the way for the freedom of the Iranian people; Donald Trump spoke in similar terms, .
The contradictions about female suffering
However, the bombings hit civilian infrastructure, including . The contradiction is evident: while female suffering is appealed to legitimize intervention, war increases their vulnerability and reinforces internal repression under the argument of security.
This inconsistency is not exclusive to the United States or the Iranian case. Afghanistan offers an equally telling example. Since the return of the Taliban regime in 2021, more than a hundred edicts have been approved prohibiting women from secondary and university education, working in NGOs and their presence in public spaces, even going as far as .
The UN has described this situation as ““However, the response of the Western powers has been clearly uneven: there are many communications from but no pressure measures comparable to those directed against Iran have been applied.
This inaction suggests that, once Afghanistan was no longer a strategic priority, They stopped occupying a central place on the international agenda.
white saviors
The recurring rhetoric of “liberation” that we have seen from Afghanistan to the recent offensive against Iran in 2026 finds its most lucid explanation in the work of anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, . Abu-Lughod denounces that the Western narrative of the Muslim woman as a passive and defenseless victim is not an act of empathy, but a tool of colonial paternalism that strips these women of their own essence to turn them into the pretext for military interventions.
This “white savior complex” allows leaders like Donald Trump or the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, exercise a simplifying complex realities to present the culture of the “other” as intrinsically oppressive.
Under this framework, the salvation of non-white women becomes a geopolitical asset: their faces are used to justify bombings and sanctions, but their voices and local contexts are ignored. In the end, as Abu-Lughod argues, these policies do not seek to transform structures of oppression, but rather to use women’s vulnerability to validate agendas of control that, ironically, often end up aggravating their precariousness under the fire of war or economic isolation.
The current war scenario is perhaps the most obvious example of how this “white savior” principle operates, but it is not the only one. In the speeches of far-right parties we have seen how this same argument is used to persecute North African migrants, accused of mistreating their wives and attacking local women.
Ultra-right and women’s insecurity
This phenomenon of instrumentalization finds its theoretical basis in the concept of “femonationalism”, coined by sociologist Sara Farris in her work . Farris exposes how the European extreme right has “hijacked” feminist rhetoric to turn gender equality into a tool of exclusion and stigmatization against the migrant population, especially the Maghreb.
In Spain, the Vox party exemplifies this drift by systematically linking immigration with the increase in . This narrative, which Marine Le Pen has also exploited in France by describing migration as reveals a profound inconsistency: while these parties use the figure of the “external aggressor” to fuel gender Islamophobia, they tend to simultaneously deny the existence of structural sexist violence in their own countries.
The inconsistency of this “convenience” feminism becomes unsustainable when observing the domestic management of these parties, where the supposed defense of women disappears to give way to a systematic dismantling of their rights.
In the administrations where the extreme right has gained influence, we have witnessed in the items destined for equality policies and the elimination of council departments and programs to care for victims of gender violence, under the pretext of combating “ideological spending.”
This institutional hostility also translates into political and media violence directed against figures who embody the feminist struggle. Far from protecting women, this discourse exercises disciplinary violence against those who do not fit its traditionalist ideal, demonstrating that its concern for female safety is merely reactive: they only care about violence against women when the aggressor is the foreign “other,” but they exercise and legitimize it when the victim is a political or feminist woman who challenges their hegemony.
The moral shield to justify wars
Ultimately, the analysis of these scenarios – from the bombings of Iran to the equality cuts in our own institutions – reveals an uncomfortable truth: women’s rights are not the end of these policies, but rather their geopolitical alibi. We are used as a moral shield to justify wars and as an argument of exclusion to criminalize migrants, while in practice the resources that guarantee our real security are dismantled.
Today, more than ever, the words of Simone de Beauvoir are relevant:
Never forget that a political, economic or religious crisis will be enough for women’s rights to be questioned again. These rights are never taken for granted; you must remain vigilant all your life.
