The violent persecution of Hatun Tash
by Stephen Knight, spiked:
An ethnic-minority woman has faced multiple attempts on her life. So where is the outrage?
Intersectionality is at the core of identity politics. Touted as the best way to tackle inequality, the intersectional model tells us to prioritise voices who face multiple forms of disadvantage. It’s a hierarchy of sorts. For instance, a white woman may experience disadvantages due to being a woman, but intersectional ideology assumes that she won’t have it as bad as a non-white lesbian. Think of it as a points-based system that dictates who is most deserving of our attention.
These intersectional identities are what social-justice activists claim to care about most. So why is it that so few people have heard of the name Hatun Tash? On paper, the case of Hatun Tash is a textbook example of everything that intersectional, race-obsessed identitarians claim to care about – namely, she is an ethnic-minority woman who has faced violent attacks.
In 2021, Tash was stabbed in the face in broad daylight by a male assailant at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London. What had she done to provoke this attack? She had attempted to peacefully speak her mind – as hundreds do in Speakers’ Corner every week. The suspect remains at large.
This attempt on Tash’s life fell out of the news cycle with astonishing speed. Remarkably, human-rights organisations, activists and the online outrage machine appeared to sit the whole thing out. Worse still, the Metropolitan Police actually arrested Tash – twice – when she tried to raise concerns about her safety.
As though all this weren’t horrifying enough, it was also reported last week that a different man has pleaded guilty to a separate plot to murder her at Speakers’ Corner. Once again, this news failed to animate the organisations and activists that claim to care about the rights of women and ethnic-minority people. Here we have an ethnic-minority woman who has been mistreated by the police and targeted multiple times by violent men – all because she dared to speak her mind. And yet, the great and the good have responded with silence.
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