My home Internet is dead (again) so I am struggling to blog through other means (again) so I am back with a quick observation about yet another popular uprising in Iran over the theocratic bullying that's killing their own people (again). Via Bill Chappell and Joe Hernandez at NPR:
Iranian women are burning their hijabs and cutting their hair short in protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died after being arrested in Tehran by Iran's notorious "morality police," who enforce the country's rules on hijabs and other conservative Islamic modes of dress and behavior...
Amini, 22, died on Friday in northern Tehran. She had been arrested on Tuesday and reportedly was taken to a hospital shortly afterward.
Amini suffered multiple blows to the head before she died, according to London-based broadcaster Iran International.
Amini was arrested in her brother's car during a visit to see family members in the capital, the outlet reported. She was originally from Saqqez in Kurdistan province...
"This is Iran's George Floyd moment," British-Iranian actor Omid Djalili said in a video posted online, drawing a parallel between demonstrators who want change in Iran and Americans who called for police reforms after Floyd's death in custody.
Social media has been buzzing with the unrest. On Wednesday morning, top hashtags in Iran included posts about police responses to ongoing protests over Amini's death and another that essentially states, "No to the Islamic Republic..."
Iranians outraged by Amini's death have been demonstrating for nearly a week, with some women setting their headscarves on fire in the streets.
Video shared by BBC lead presenter Rana Rahimpour shows women standing on top of burning police cars, railing against the Islamic Republic.
"One question is whether this will stay as a hijab protest or mushroom into a larger anti-government movement," NPR's Peter Kenyon said on Tuesday.
At least seven people are reported to have been killed since the protests began throughout Iran, the BBC reported...
The Iranian people are frustrated, again. The Shi'a theocracy that overtook their country back in the 1970s has remained notorious about their punishing and abuse of women creating a segregated society obsessed with keeping women second-class citizens. Even the men - fathers, brothers, husbands - are pissed about how the brute force "morality police" have been brazen in their assaults on women whose only crime is to be a woman in the first place.
I wrote this back in 2009, when things looked a bit hopeful that the anger among the majority of Iranians would have been enough to force the government into at least serious reforms:
Now, it's 2009. Ayatollah Khamenei basically calls a questionable election result too early and too eagerly for Ahmadinejad. Even though enough Iranians know among themselves there's no way Ahmad could have won all those provinces so handily, even with widespread reports of ballot box tampering and fraud. Now acting like a bullying teenager caught in a weak lie, Khamenei is threatening violence on anyone who dares question him, and starts acting in a very Shah-like manner with violent arrests, use of acid sprays, the works. Thing is, for all of Khamenei's rhetoric against the Brits, and the Americans, and Zionists and 'foreign interlopers', the Iranian people know that's not really true. There's no evidence the Brits or the Russians or the Americans tampered with the election. It wasn't BBC or Fox News rushing to proclaim Ahmadinejad the winner "by divine will" inside of an hour after the polls closed. This time, the Iranians have no one to blame but their own leaders. And that's why I think the protests are going to continue, because Khamenei is now the target of blame. The violence will get worse, which is the pity of it all, but it's not gonna stop until he's gone...
Unfortunately that was 13 years ago and the Ayatollahs aren't gone, Khamenei is getting old enough for health rumors to flourish but the institution propping him up is still in power.
It's heartbreaking to realize that even with all the outrage that erupts repeatedly across Iran whenever the corrupt priests in power abuse the citizenry, those corrupt powers have remained in place in spite of the obvious outrage against them.
It's heartwarming to know that even with decades of that abuse, the people haven't given up. The Iranians are still fighting back, and one of these days a faction of the power elite - the military, the reformers in office biding their time, someone potent and capable - will turn on the Ayatollahs and bring true freedom to the Iranian people.
1 comment:
I worked as a line cook under a chef who was from Tehran. He was pretty Californian in the way he acted and talked right up until his sister immigrated and got a job there, which he didn't like at all. Aside from that he was a great guy. He was an entomologist who had been in the UC system for 17 years when I met him in 1984, and wrote his master's thesis on the Tomato Hornworm.
He said about the Ayatollah at the time: "He's not going anywhere, shit, his dad's still alive."
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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