Bar Refaeli leads in Islamophobic ad

Israeli model Bar Refaeli was shown taking off a niqab in an ad campaign called "freedom is basic" for an Israeli clothing company. The model, who has worked for brands like Giorgio Armani, shared the advertisement on her personal Instagram page and the clothing company aired it on Instagram and YouTube on Oct. 29 as well.

In the video, Refaeli is shown removing a niqab to lyrics stating, "finally freedom." The ad has been deleted from several platforms, including the model's own Instagram, but received a lot of backlash in the short time it was posted, according to Buzzfeed News. Marwa Balkar shared the video to Twitter and later told Buzzfeed, “To say that we don’t have freedom of choice, is taking away our freedom of choice. That’s the irony of all this. The ones that believe we’re oppressed are the oppressors.”

In class, we talked about the ways in which Muslim women are often depicted as being victims and highly oppressed by their own religion and culture. This ad fuels that idea, by showing that a Muslim woman's choice to cover means that she has given up her freedom. To echo what Balkar told Buzzfeed, this proves that so much of Western feminism is not intersectional. Non-Muslim feminists continue to try and explain to Muslim woman how oppressed they are, without truly understanding the agency and choice involved in covering.