Q&A panellist Mona Eltahawy calls Scott Morrison a white supremacist

Feminist Mona Eltahawy follows up her ABC ‘call to violence’ by dialling up the outrage-o-meter.

Outspoken writer Mona Elthahawy at the Wheeler Centre event at Melbourne Town Hall on Sunday. Picture: Sophie Quick

Egyptian-American author Mona Eltahawy was apparently just warming up on Q&A last week. At a Melbourne feminism festival on Sunday, her outrage-o-meter dialled up another couple of notches.

Scott Morrison is a “white ­supremacist Christian evangelical” and a “wannabe Trump”, Eltahawy told an audience of 2000 at Melbourne Town Hall, to claps and cheers.

She lambasted white women, a considerable portion of the crowd, for being the “foot soldiers of the patriarchy”, urging them to “burn the patriarchy down”.

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And, finally, she invited the crowd to stand and shout as one, “F..k the patriarchy”, and shout they did.

The Wheeler Centre’s feminism festival, Broadside, promised “two days of an unapologetically feminist agenda”, and Eltahawy was certainly unapologetic.

Her expletive-laden performance on the ABC Q&A program last Monday and her question “How many rapists must we kill?” to stop men murdering, beating and raping women led to 200 complaints to the ABC, the show being yanked off Iview and an ABC investigation into a potential breach of editorial standards.

On Sunday, she took to the stage in a full-length sequined coat, and quickly dispensed with any notion of contrition for the Q&A performance. “I want to start by saying I’m wearing sequins ­because this is my way of saying f..k the patriarchy,” she said. “This is what I would wear if I was dancing on the grave of misogyny and patriarchy, especially here in Australia, which you have plenty of.”

The visiting journalist, author and social commentator, a US resident, continued her full-frontal foray into domestic matters.

“Ask yourself what does it mean to live in one of the richest countries in the world, where you have a white supremacist Christian evangelical prime minister who is appealing to a certain demographic in your country, who wants to ban boycotts and protests,” she said. “Your Prime Minister is like a mini-Trump, a wannabe Trump, and Trump is a wannabe dictator. This is supposed to be a democracy.”

Eltahawy told the audience her swearing was a calculated political act, part of her “radical rudeness”.

She was also highly critical of white women for failing to appreciate that their proximity to whiteness is a form of power and privilege in itself.

Asked by an audience member whether it was possible to use white privilege to change attitudes to women from within the system, Eltahawy urged her to “find ways every day to defy, disobey and ­disrupt”.