Category: War & Militarism

FIST ISSUES STATEMENT ON THE WAR ON IRAN

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At the time of this posting, the world remains on edge as we wait to hear whether a final settlement of this war is reached, or whether the war will sooner or later flare up again with more violence, death and destruction.  Meanwhile, the killing of civilians in Lebanon and Gaza has continued unabated.  The time for feminists to speak out for peace and in solidarity with our sisters everywhere is now.

Members of Feminists In Struggle have approved by consensus a statement against the U.S./Israel War on Iran and in support of Iranian feminists. 

Here it is below:

FIST stands against the unjustified and reckless war being waged against Iran by the Trump Administration.  The Epstein Axis, led by Trump and Netanyahu is in part about distracting their populations from issues of systemic rape and pedophilia by the elites.  But is also about acquiring and protecting wealth, power, and empire, while being indifferent to the deaths of innocent civilians.

We  must oppose this war as it violates all of the Geneva Convention rules, including starting a war of choice not justified by self-defense, committing war crimes by targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure (hospitals, schools, energy facilities) and openly admitting genocidal intent (Trump’s recent threat to send Iran “back to the stone age” ).

Women suffer from war, often disproportionately, from the increased violence, displacement, poverty and fanaticism it engenders. Clearly, this war is not in our interests.

However, our opposition, as feminists, to this war does not mean we support the authoritarian theocratic government in Iran.

SUPPORT FOR FEMINISTS IN IRAN

While many on the left believe that the only two possible positions in this conflict are to side with the theocratic regime or the U.S. attack, FIST takes the position that we must support neither, but instead support Iranian ​Feminists and other progressives, now being murdered and jailed by their government by the thousands (current figures are 7,000 killed, 40,000 arrested) as a result of recent uprisings. The attack by the U.S. will only strengthen the hand of this cruel regime and worsen its crackdown against its citizens.

Women in Iran face systemic legal discrimination and operate under male guardianship that restricts their rights in marriage, divorce, travel, and employment; legally, a woman’s testimony has half the value of a man’s; inheritance by women is a pittance of what men receive; a woman needs her father’s or grandfather’s permission to marry and husbands have an almost absolute right to divorce, while initiating divorce for women is difficult; Iranian law mandates strict, state-enforced hijab with penalties that include flogging, fines and imprisonment (and in the case of the death of Jina Mahsa Amini murder–which is what sparked the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement of 2022-2023). Women in Iran have been resisting this sex apartheid system since 1979!

.EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON THE U.S.

The unprovoked attack by the U.S. on Iran is having and will continue to  have devastating effects on U.S. society.  The over one trillion dollars spent on weapons each year benefitting war profiteers, leaves little for education, childcare, healthcare, affordable housing, DV shelters, and public benefits that so many women need to survive.

The war will give the Trump administration an excuse to increase the military budget even further and defund human needs programs (many of which particularly impact women).  Working people will have an even harder time to survive, as prices across the board increase, possibly leading to a worldwide depression. There is also the possibility of a further spread of the conflict (many Gulf states have now been forced to become involved) and a World War III scenario cannot be discounted

While serving as distraction to the scandal over the Epstein files, this war is being waged mainly for reasons of imperialism: the controlling of resources—in this case, oil—of another country, and it reinforces a worldwide economy based on fossil fuels, which can only hasten the ongoing ecological planetary crisis. None of this is in the interest of women in the U.S., Iran, or elsewhere.

For the above reasons, we say NO to Islamic (or any) Theocracy. We say NO to U.S. imperialism. We say NO to government funds going into the pockets of war profiteers and advancing the aims of the warmongers while regular people in all nations suffer. We demand a U.S. government that honors international law, that prioritizes spending for peoples’ needs and centers the needs of women, and that promotes peace throughout the Middle East and the world.

AN UPDATE ON ERA LITIGATION – SPECIAL GUEST POST BY WENDY MURPHY

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By Wendy Murphy, J. D., Impact Litigator

Last week we received a ruling in our lawsuit (Equal Means Equal v. Donald Trump) to establish women’s full legal equality by challenging the constitutionality of the Selective Service Act, which forbids women to register for the military draft. It is a very rare example of a law that explicitly treats women and men differently. Most instances where women suffer unequal treatment are in the enforcement of laws, and in the actions and inactions of government officials.

As expected, the judge ruled that we do have standing because the primary plaintiff is a woman who tried to register for the draft, but was rejected solely because of her sex.

Because women have standing, the court had to address the merits. This is vitally important because courts routinely deny women standing as a way of avoiding having to address the issue of women’s inequality. This keeps the problem of women’s inequality invisible, which obviously contributes to the problem of activism. Simply put, most women aren’t even aware that the Constitution has established them as unequal second-class citizens. This helps to maintain women’s subjugation because women will not fight for equality if they don’t know they don’t have it. They will, instead, suffer horrendous injustices, and feel hopeless and upset, but never come to understand that the primary cause of their suffering is the Constitution.

Because standing is so important, we are happy to have prevailed on the standing issue, especially considering that the government spent most of its brief arguing that we lacked standing.

As for the merits, the court ruled that it cannot address the question of whether the Selective Service Act is unconstitutional because the Supreme Court has already ruled – in 1981 – that it is, and only the Supreme Court can reverse itself. This ruling is inconsistent with what a different judge ruled on the exact same issue a few years ago in New Jersey where the court said that the Supreme Court’s decision is not binding precedent because the conditions under which that ruling was decided have changed.

The court also ruled that the ERA is not valid because the deadline expired long before the last state ratified. Again, we were not surprised by this, and to some extent we wanted this to be the ruling because it enables us to appeal.

An appeal is appealing (pardon the pun) because it is an opportunity yet again to show the federal courts that many people support our view that the ERA is valid, and while courts have yet to agree, we will not stop fighting until the Supreme Court decides the issue.

We do intend to appeal, which  means the First Circuit Court of Appeals will soon decide the issue.

We will have an amicus brief and welcome all the help we can get.

Meanwhile, we will also be filing similar cases in other jurisdictions. It is important that we file more cases soon because in December 2026, women will no longer be able to achieve standing on the Selective Service Act challenges. This is because Congress quietly inserted into the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act in December 2025, changing the registration process so that men will be registered automatically for the draft when they turn 18. For now, they must fill out a form, but in December the government will do that for them. This will deprive women of standing because they can no longer suffer the “legal injury” of being rejected by the government, and it is not enough of an “injury” to say the law itself harms women by excluding them.

This law change was done solely because of our case, so it’s a good sign that they are paying attention and so worried about women filing lawsuits that they bothered to burden Congress with the task of making the draft registration process automatic even though we haven’t had a draft since 1973 and won’t likely have another one anytime soon.

We take such small victories very seriously –

Sometimes victories don’t look like victories, but in high stakes litigation, anything that teaches us something or helps educate the public is important.

See also Wendy’s article in the Boston Globe: Unequal Draft, Unequal Rights

EXCITING FORUM PLANNED FOR APRIL 18th ON FEMINISM IN IRAN

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TICKETS ON SALE NOW!

FORUM: Woman, Life, Freedom & the Struggle against Theocracy & War in Iran Tickets, Saturday, Apr 18 from 11 am to 1 pm | Eventbrite

 

Woman, Life, Freedom & the Struggle against Theocracy & War in Iran

Saturday, April 18 at 11 am Pacific Time/2:00 p.m. Eastern

 

Hear Iranian feminist Maryam Namazie speak about feminist struggle in Iran & the need to oppose BOTH imperialist war & Iranian theocracy

SPEAKERS:

MARYAM NAMAZIE is a multiple award-winning Iranian-born UK-based activist and writer who has long opposed the Islamic regime and political Islam from a Left perspective. She has organized internationally for women’s rights, asylum seekers, and freedom of expression, including through the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and One Law for All. In her work on Iran, she consistently argues that the central struggle is a popular uprising against theocratic rule, not a proxy conflict between states, and has been equally critical of war, insisting that both militarism and the regime undermine the fight for woman, life, freedom.

ANN MENASCHE is a founding member and co-coordinator of Feminists in Struggle, a civil rights lawyer, lesbian, and lifelong radical feminist and socialist. She has spent much of her life organizing against imperialist war and for women’s liberation. She has found inspiration from the woman, life, freedom movement in Iran, and those who speak out for peace, whether in Israel, Europe or the United States.

FORUM WILL TAKE PLACE ON ZOOM AND IS WOMEN-ONLY.

 

FEMINISTS SHOULD SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE US/ISRAEL WAR AGAINST IRAN

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By Ann Menasche

This piece is the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Feminists in Struggle as an organization.

Trump and Netanyahu are two peas in a pod.  Both are crooked politicians, narcissists, misogynists and psychopaths who are all about acquiring and protecting wealth, power, and empire, indifferent to the toll measured in innocent civilian lives in other countries and even among their own people.  Together as heads of two nuclear armed nations, they have launched a war of choice against Iran, which, though the excuses keep changing, are fundamentally all about maintaining U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and the world, while Israel , after its killing spree in Gaza, is given the green light to carry out ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and the West Bank,  in pursuit of its  dream of a “greater Israel.”

This war is already causing the whole Middle East to go up in flames, threatens an even wider war, and has begun precipitating worldwide economic crisis, that we will all feel with higher prices for food, fuel, and other necessities.  It means more billions for bombs while more Americans face homelessness, hunger and lack of medical care.   The threat of U.S. ground troops being sent into Iran, if carried out, could lead to large numbers ofAmerican soldiers coming back in body bags just like during the Vietnam War.

The war is not making the Israeli population any safer either, as they hide in bomb shelters night after night. normal lives, work, education, disrupted.  The violence could spread here inside the U.S. as well.

No question, women suffer from war, often disproportionately, from the increased violence, displacement, poverty, and fanaticism it engenders. It is what patriarchy, at its most naked, looks like. Opposing this war should be a no brainer for feminists.

But what of the authoritarian theocratic government in Iran which oppresses women in draconian fashion, and kills its own people?   Opposition to the War does not mean support for the Iranian regime. But liberation does not come through the bombing and murder of schoolchildren, the destruction of homes, hospitals, universities, and civilian infrastructure, or from the heavy boots of imperial armies.  The power-over legacy of colonialism is one main source of the problem, not the solution.

The Women, Life, Freedom movement will rise again in Iran, but not under these conditions.  And the genuine feminist revolutionary transformation it will engender won’t be to the liking of the patriarchs and warmongers in Washington and Tel Aviv.  That we can be sure of.

Besides, regime change begins at home.  The thousands of peace protesters in the United States and Israel are a beginning.  Feminists should be in the leadership of this movement.

PEACE NOW!

 

 

War, Peace, and Feminism

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During World War I, Alice Paul and her sister suffragists called out the hypocrisy of President Wilson and the US government in denying the rights of women at home while claiming to be fighting a war for freedom and democracy abroad. 


So little has changed. President Biden is beating the drums of war, proposes an unprecedented $770 billion dollar military budget, and risks nuclear confrontation between the great powers, all in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.” Meanwhile, women in the U.S., who make up a majority of the poor, are denied housing, health care, equal pay, and accessible, affordable childcare. Even the pandemic-related child tax credit program that provided government relief to low-income families has been allowed to expire. We are poised to lose Roe vs. Wade, which will have a devastating effect on women’s freedoms with little action from the White House.


Biden has also failed to take the simple step of instructing the archivist to publish the Equal Rights Amendment already approved by the requisite 38 States, which would put women’s sex-based protections into the Constitution. His administration is thus undemocratically depriving us of a crucial tool to challenge our continued second-class status as a sex.


Those who are familiar with the history of U.S. wars abroad over the past century, have long known that U.S. foreign policy has everything to do with oil and empire and not a scintilla to do with democracy. Our military-industrial complex is a destructive money-making machine; it is the epitome of patriarchy in action, fighting to maintain status as the biggest bully on the block with no regard for human beings or their rights. Our government has repeatedly spearheaded the overthrow of democratically elected governments from Chile to Guatemala to Iran, rained untold destruction on Vietnam to prevent the people there from determining their own future, and currently counts as its closest allies (and arms to the teeth) the military dictatorship of Egypt, the religious fundamentalist sexual apartheid Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the ethnic apartheid regime of Israel. The decades-long occupation of Afghanistan not only failed to liberate the women there from the Taliban, but instead murdered 71,000 civilians, mostly women and children, and after the U.S. finally withdrew its troops, the imposition of murderous sanctions is now threatening the civilian population with mass starvation.


We must call out this hypocrisy today loudly and clearly, just as Alice Paul did more than a century ago.  Fortunately, women around the globe are recognizing that war is not in our interests. Medea Benjamin of the women-led organization Code Pink, long a voice of the U.S. peace movement, has been speaking out against the threat of war with Russia over Ukraine, as well as demanding diplomacy and an end to NATO expansion.


On February 15th a group of women from the United States and Russia released a joint statement, “Independent American and Russian Women Call For Peace” raising their voices against militarism and war and calling for diplomacy and peace. They wrote:
“We are women from the United States and Russia who are deeply concerned about the risk of possible war between our two countries, who together possess over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. We are mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and we are sisters, one to another. Today we stand with our sisters in Ukraine, East and West, whose families and country have been torn apart, have already suffered more than 14,000 deaths…For the U.S. and Russia, the only sane and humane course of action now is a principled commitment to clear, creative and persistent diplomacy – not military action…We stand together and we call for peace. Stand with us.” 


Thank you, sisters!