Solidarity means more in Tehran than Washington
Is this it? Could this, finally, be the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran? As huge crowds of women and men surge through the Iranian streets, burning hijabs and calling for “Death to Khamenei!”, is an impossible dream finally about to come true?
What’s happening in Iran is the biggest women’s rights protest ever in the Islamic world. Yet the response from some of the leading feminists in the United States, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, has been strikingly muted. Each one has made what can be characterized at best as a tepid, pro forma response, one that contrasts sharply with their statements and actions during the Trump administration. It looks as if each one of these women regards Donald Trump as a far greater threat to women than the Islamic Republic of Iran is.
“The white giant in chains!” This is how Bahar, one of Iran’s greatest contemporary poets, describes Mount Damvand, the towering volcano that looms over the horizon in the Tehran region.
At the end of his qasida (ode) Bahar pleads with the volcano to end its silence with an explosion of fire and lava to “cleanse the world of tyranny and corruption”.
For the past two weeks, the nationwide uprising across Iran has reminded many Iranians of Bahar’s poem with the question: Has the volcano begun its final eruption?
Iran is awaiting the release of about $7bn (£6.3bn) in funds frozen abroad, state media said on Sunday, after it allowed an Iranian-American to leave the country and released his son from detention.
Baquer Namazi, 85, was permitted to leave Iran for medical treatment abroad, and his son Siamak, 50, was released from detention in Tehran, the UN said on Saturday.
“With the finalisation of negotiations between Iran and the United States to release the prisoners of both countries, $7bn of Iran’s blocked resources will be released,” said the state news agency, IRNA.
Iran’s Islamic regime is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. The regime’s greatest victims are the Iranian people.
Iranians have been fighting to be free for the last 43 years. A series of protests have broken out in Iran after the killing of a 22-year-old Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, who was beaten to death by the morality police in Tehran.
Iran has arrested a young woman who defied morality police by eating in a restaurant without wearing a hijab, in an image that went viral on social media and inspired thousands of anti-regime protesters.
The photograph showed Donya Rad eating breakfast in a restaurant in Tehran, alongside a female friend who was also not wearing a headscarf.
The Iranian government has arrested dozens of journalists reporting on the widespread unrest triggered by the death of a young woman following her arrest by authorities.
Iranian security forces have arrested at least 28 journalists and photographers since the latest wave of anti-regime protests began nearly two weeks ago, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported this week.
The women-led demonstrations were sparked by outrage over the death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini after she was arrested by the Islamic republic’s so-called morality police. Amini was arrested on September 13 for allegedly breaching Iran’s strict rules for women on wearing hijab, or headscarves, and “modest clothing.”
Not long after Iran’s ultra-conservative president issued an edict for greater enforcement of the religious code, three women wearing black chadors patrolled the streets of Rasht almost every day in a green-and-white van that marked them out as members of the morality police.
President Raisi’s order on July 5 commanded the Guidance Patrols to seek out women failing to wear their headscarves properly. It represented an attempt to enforce Islamic law across a younger and increasingly secular population.
OTTAWA – The Liberals say it’s up to national security agencies to decide whether Canada deems a branch of Iran’s military to be a terrorist group, which the Conservatives are calling a cop-out.
Members of Parliament passed a motion in 2018 to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, but it remains off the list.
With Iranians facing a violent human-rights crackdown, the Conservatives have renewed their calls to have the Revolutionary Guards listed as a terror group.
U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf since World War II has fluctuated between “offshore balancing”—relying on local powers to maintain stability—and “onshore balancing” through direct military engagement.
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have sought to revive the first strategy in order to reduce U.S. military casualties and refocus the United States on the challenge posed by a rising China.
The “morality police” came for me exactly 13 minutes into my lecture on gender and sexual politics in post-revolutionary Iran. Four sets of auditorium doors swung open simultaneously. In they came, boots pounding, weapons clanking. The Tehran lecture hall erupted in confusion as the komiteh, as the morality police are known, filled the room.
New video shows protests in Gohardasht last night in Alborz province. Despite heavy crackdown by the regime's repressive forces & over 200 martyrs+10000 protesters arrested, people pour into streets challenging the entirety of the religious fascism ruling Iran #IranProtests2022 pic.twitter.com/HFtlHyxi7J
— Hossein Abedini (@HoAbedini) September 27, 2022
Iran has recruited extremist foreign militias to help “wipe out rioters from the streets of Tehran”.
Demonstrators continued to take to the streets in Iran on Sunday to protest the death of Mahsa Amini who died in police custody after being arrested for incorrectly wearing a hijab.
Militias from Syria, Lebanon and Iraq calling themselves “the volunteers from Islamic lands” announced they were joining the clampdown on public dissent in a social media post.
WATCH: In the #Gharibollah Street in #Tehran, #Protesters are chanting, "Khamenei will be overthrown this year!"#IranProtests2022 #IranProtests #Mahsa_Amini #Protests pic.twitter.com/aYFXWp052A
— BNN Iran (@BNNIRNews) September 26, 2022
Mahsa Amini was just 22 when she died in suspicious circumstances while detained in Tehran. Mahsa, from the northwestern Iranian province of Kurdistan, was pronounced dead on September 16 from suspected brain damage caused during her time in police custody. She is believed to have been arrested for wearing her headscarf in what was deemed an “improper” manner.
This is what civil disobedience looks like in an Islamic Republic. #IranProtests #IranRevolution
For 43 years women in #Iran have been forbidden to dance & sing in public or show their hair & they are saying enough. It’s really that simple. #Mahsa_Amini #مهسا_امینی pic.twitter.com/T6ug6JjUNn
— Samira Mohyeddin سمیرا (@SMohyeddin) September 24, 2022
The so-called morality police arrested 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in Tehran for wearing what they deemed inappropriate clothing and took her to a police station, where she slipped into a coma. Three days later, she died in a hospital. Her death sparked widespread anger and led to anti-government rallies that continue to embroil dozens of cities, according to videos posted on social media.
President Ibrahim Raisi’s government has deployed security forces, to crack down on the protesters.
So, what exactly is the “morality police” force and how does it operate?
The Biden administration implemented its agenda to revive the Obama nuclear deal after US President Joe Biden assumed office in January 2021. Now, more than a year and half of negotiations seems to have benefited no one except the ruling and Islamist mullahs of Iran. The endless negotiations seem simply to have bought time for the mullahs, so that they could comfortably advance their nuclear program to their highest level ever. Not only has the Biden administration seen no urgency to change its disastrous path, it is actually redoubling efforts to for Iran talks, presumably after America’s mid-term election on November 8.
