In his documentary ‘The Power of Nightmares: Rise of Politics of Fear,’ English filmmaker Adam Curtis poignantly observed, ‘Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand.’
The recently concluded Paris 2024 Olympic Games offers a startling example of how politics of fear can transpire the noble competition and interfere with the support for the champions. It all started with the hysteria that surrounded the opening ceremony, featuring accusations of insulting Christianity, promoting pedophilia, and even being a satanic ritual. Far right-wing politicians and talking heads found the opening ceremony to be a perfect opportunity to spread transphobia, one of the focal points in their discourse in the past years.
Probably, that’s why the 46-second boxing match between Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and her Italian counterpart Angela Carini resonated with many far-right politicians and commentators. Carini, who ‘has never been hit so hard before’, tearfully withdrew from the game. The immediate support wave for Carini immediately brought hate towards the Algerian boxer.
‘I know you won’t give up, Angela, and I know that one day you will earn with effort and sweat what you deserve. In a finally fair competition’ (emphasis added)’, tweeted Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Whereas one can understand Meloni’s words of support for her compatriot, it must be emphasized that the veiled accusation of the lack of fairness was probably one of the most harmless examples of hate speech that Khelif was subjected to.
So where does the far-right wing’s obsession with Iman Khelif come from? And how do the events surrounding the 2024 Paris Olympic Games reveal that the alternative world imagined by the Western reactionary right-wing politics is a threat to fundamental human rights everywhere?
Feul for the far-right ecosystem
The 2024 Paris Olympic Games did not mark Iman Khalif’s debut in international competitions. She has participated in world boxing championships since 2018, when she came 17th, and in the 2019 championship, she finished 33rd. In the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, she was knocked out in the quarter-finals. By 3 August 2024, her boxing record was 38 wins (only 5 are KOs (Knock-Outs)) and nine losses. Her KO percentage to her winning was 13.16%.
This ratio is much lower than that of other competitors. For example, Luca Anna Hamori (16,67 KOs percentage) lost to Khelif on 3 August 2024, and Amy Broadhurst who defeated Khelif in 2022 in the championship finals in 2022, has a knockout rate of 14.29%. The video of the match between Brohadhurst and Khelif depicts a standard game, which was praised at the time for the abilities of both competitors.
It seems that up to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, Khelif’s existence in the world of sports did not cause any issues or problems. Why such a severe attack now? Why did Elon Musk, Donald Trump, JD Vance, and JK Rowling, just to name a few, start to attack an Algerian boxer that they had never heard of before?
The most intuitive answer is that Khelif offered a convenient channel fitting the dominant far right-wing driven discourse that has taken hold of the media and the Internet. This discourse uses hate speech to ‘protect’ traditional values, one of which is an idea of a (very distorted and somewhat outdated) womanhood.
It is a paradoxical relation where women can be hated while womanhood is to be protected and guarded. For instance, Jessy Waters of Fox News, commenting on the Democratic party nomination of Kamala Harris as a candidate for the US Presidential elections, said that ‘to be a man voting for a woman just because she is a woman, is either childish (that person has ‘mommy issues’), or playing to female audience: ‘I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman’. Thus, voting for women simply makes you as a man a woman, which, for Jessy, is one of the worst things to be.
The far-right wing one is a type of womanhood perceived as an occupational role where women are reduced to their wombs producing children. These wombs do not enjoy the right of self-determination (as the Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade) and are expected to be docile obedient wombs as in the Tradwives trend.
It seems that these attacks on women who do not adhere to this traditionalist vision, such as transgender people or women who do not look or behave like they ‘should’, come from this obsession with women as wombs and nothing more.
West’s transphobic hysteria
The US Republican Party’s attacks on transgender people’s rights have escalated in the past couple of years. Thus, seeing Khelif dominating the short game against Carini was used to fuel a cultural war that already existed in the USA and in the UK. British author J.K Rowling, who self-identifies as a Terf – an acronym that stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, accused Khelif of being a smirking man after defeating the Italian.
Even Donald Trump used Khelif in one of his rallies as a talking point, describing her as a person in transition and stating, ‘he is a good boxer’. However, Khelif is not a transgender person. In fact, in his defense of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting (another boxer accused of being a male), Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, stated, ‘We have two boxers who were born as women, who have been raised as women … and who have competed for many years as women.’ So why is Khelif accused of being a man?
Firstly, it is simply because Khelif does not fit the discourse partially because of not fitting the idea of (white) womanhood. This is exemplified in the Daily Mail’s article, which describes Khelif as a biological male. In the article titled ‘Inside the tough childhood of ‘biologically male’ boxer Imane Khelif whose 46-second demolition of female rival sparked fury’. The Daily Mail explored the lives of Khelif and Carini, illustrated by images of both. While Carini’s photos, as a baby girl or wearing a swimsuit, were chosen to reflect her femininity, including a swimsuit photo, Khelif’s photo shows her in an ill-fitted suit and training clothing to push the narrative of being a male.
Even though the article shows photos of Khelif as a young girl, the article ignores these facts and insists on calling her biologically male. These claims prompted Khelif’s father, who appeared in a video, to denounce these accusations and urged Khelif to publicly state, ‘I want to tell the entire world that I am a female‘.
As a part of the Western cultural hegemony, standards of what is beautiful and what is not are created and codified. What is beautiful has always been almost exclusively white. The 1960s and 1970s controversial comments about considering women of color not as beautiful or not even women are still relevant today. In one of the recordings, Nixon and Kissinger discussed Indian women as the most unattractive women in the world, describing them to be the ‘most sexless’ while noting that at least Africans ‘have a little bit of animal-like charm’.
Similarly, on 2 March 2024, actress Sydney Sweeney appeared in Saturday Night Live (an American late-night live sketch comedy show), which, for some reason, caused conservative commentators to declare that her appearance ended wokeness. Finally, body positivity and admitting more people to the beautiful club was over.
Khelif is not only not sufficiently female; she is also different: she could be even described as the perfect ‘Other’ to be targeted. Riding the wave of hate the Hungarian boxer Luca Anna Hamori, who faced Khelif in the quarter-finals, shared an image in her stories on Instagram depicting Khelif as a dark-horned monster about to fight a much smaller opponent.
The photo was created by a Twitter account called DR Clowen world_Insider. The Clown World is a meme used by the far-right wing to represent the world post-Western civilization. This depiction of a dark seemingly assumed ‘male’ monster attacking white women is not an old troop for the white supremacists. For instance, the movie The Birth of a Nation (1915), told the story of an innocent white girl kidnapped by a man of color, providing excuses and justification for the racial violence in the US. After all, what to do with monsters but to kill them?
Iman Khelif’s case proves, if anything, that the politics of fear and hate is not only well and running, but it has developed for its benefit the entire infrastructure willing to destroy individuals for… well, nothing. The infrastructure benefits from the support, or perhaps ignorance, of public personas such as Elon Musk or J.K Rowling. Let’s hope that the courts will find that their activities did constitute acts of aggravated cyber harassment.
In the meantime, Iman Khelif became a World Champion in the women’s welterweight during the Paris 2024 Olympics. What a Woman!
