Maybe i'm getting brainworms from twitter and this isn't a real thing and there's nobody defending this, but there is no way in hell hijab is a way to show "modesty in women". I know that there is a lot of westerners who are assholes and prejudiced against muslims and a lot of leftists want to defend them, and you should defend them, but don't do it by defending backwards practices. Hijab objectifies women.
Most of the time, women who wear hijab are pressured into doing it by an external force. It could be their immediate family, their relatives or their neighborhood. This isn't a fucking trope, it's the reality of it. It is very rare to see someone who decides to wear hijab by themselves. Sometimes people who migrate to west choose to keep wearing it as a way to connect themselves back to their home, but it isn't a common reason to wear it.
I'm not saying attack hijab, because it is not your duty to criticize islam as an outsider(and probably you won't have sufficient information nor experience to do so), but when you see some assholes attacking a hijabi woman for her hijab, defend her right to wear what she wants(even if she's forced by her family to wear it), not the hijab.
This is true, but i don't think i ever saw them defended by leftists. I think the issue is you can see negative effects of christianity and judaism since you live in a country where they are common and it is harder to see negative impact of hijab since there aren't a lot of muslims in US. One of my friends had said something like "Western leftists/liberals would never be this gentle against christianity since they are negatively affected by it, but hijab and islam etc. becomes empowering because they will never once have to deal with the negative consequences."
I defend Islam, as a leftist, as NOT WORSE THAN Christianity or Judaism. There's literally people arguing that Islam is somehow uniquely violent or hateful or terrible. That's put me in a spot to say that it's not that bad, really.
I saw this from chuds and internet atheists, but never from left spaces.
No, you are right. But it's a startlingly popular view.