Circulated on behalf of Justice For Iran

Following a meeting on January 18, 2011, the Guardian Council ratified the final text of the new Islamic Penal Code and did not find any part of this code to be in contravention of Islamic Sharia law and the Iranian Constitution. Passage of this code renders the former penal Code ineffective, providing the new and more severe code as replacement.

Prior to this and on multiple occasions, Justice For Iran and other monitoring and human rights organizations had expressed their concerns and reservations regarding the text of the new Code and yet, the Islamic Republic paid no mind to any of the said concerns. Read more

For more than half my life, I've been a self-appointed one-woman ambassador for Afghanistan, pointing out to anyone who would listen that there is more to Afghanistan than kalashnikovs, burqas and poppies. In no doubt sometimes irritating persistence, I've tried my level best to convey to fellow outsiders the Afghanistan that I know, a country where resilient, brave, complicated people just go on living their lives amidst the calamities that have befallen them, when our media in the West tends to focus more on their victimization, their hostile deviants, or the spectacular break-down of their state. Both pictures are valid parts of the story, but the shrouding of Afghanistan's beauty as embodied in its people, landscapes, history, arts and rich culture, is a deficit in our understanding of Afghanistan, and it's one of some consequence. It's an imbalance I believe has helped fuel indifference towards a people we can more easily then say, hardly exist.

War is woven into the fabric of everyday life in Afghanistan, but so are dinner parties, over-the-top weddings, giggling school girls, men on the street bickering over endless cups of chai sabz, students bustling in and out of university classes, families watching generator-powered Bollywood soap operas together in the twilight, rubab concerts, and love-stricken teenagers sending each other flirty text messages. It's often easy to forget the violence pervading the country, when one is so swiftly absorbed into the rhythm of the daily life that must go on, in wartime as in peacetime.

But the violence sometimes sharply and suddenly penetrates the ilusory seamlessness of everyday life, with painful reminders of the demons still looming over this society trying so valiantly to move on. When this happens, my enthusiastic descriptions of the 'other Afghanistan,' the beautiful and brave Afghanistan, feel fabricated, somehow fraudulent. The increasing frequency of bombs going off closeby, of assassinations, kidnappings and 'complex attacks' on places one frequents casually and often as in 'normal life' like hotels, grocery stores, malls, restaurants, embassies, and offices causes a slide towards the mindset of being in a warzone. The requisite constant state of alertness and often well justified paranoia, the fretting anxiety for the safety of oneself and others, can start to subsume the assertion that Afghanistan is also a place of good and of beauty. Read more

The times they are a changin'.

But not in Bahrain. Doctors and medical personnel from the Salmaniya Medical Complex in Manama who treated protestors injured in spring demonstrations against the regime, have been sentenced to long prison sentences simply for doing the work they are mandated to do as healthcare workers, as reported in the New York Times this week:

The agency reported that eight people it identified as doctors who worked at a central hospital in the capital, Manama, received 15-year sentences. Other medical personnel at the hospital, the Salmaniya Medical Complex, Bahrain’s largest public hospital, were given terms of between 5 and 15 years.

The sentences were the latest sign that the country’s Sunni monarchy would continue to deal severely with those involved in widespread protests this year, mostly held by members of its repressed Shiite majority. Much of that effort has been focused on the doctors and nurses who treated demonstrators.

Even Saudi Arabia is feeling compelled these days to throw the people a bone: Women were granted the right to vote and run for office this month (though whether they can get to polling stations, not to mention schools and work places, without also being allowed to drive, is yet to be determined). But the oppressive state in Bahrain endures, as so well documented in Al Jazeera's documentary, Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark.

The atrocious behaviour of the Al Khalifa royals must be condemned unequivocally, and their place at the table of civilized nations shunned until the tyranny ends.

Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.

As Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepares for another round of theatrics at the UN this week for the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, victims of his regime and others are routinely ignored, as Ben Cohen points out in yesterday's New York Post. It's a useful time to bring to shed light on of the Iranian regime's favoured means of crushing dissenters: institutionalized and systematic rape.

Beneath the outer horrors of repression in Iran—the scenes of brutal attacks by police and security forces against peaceful protestors witnessed in the streets of Tehran throughout 2009 and 2010—lie the underground horrors that those protestors and other political activists face once they find themselves inside Iran’s prison system. The preponderance of torture in Iran’s prisons is well documented by human rights organizations, and it’s long acknowledged that the Iranian justice system often denies detainees the right to legal representation, to a fair trial, and many are simply ‘disappeared’ within the prison system. However, rape as a form of torture is particularly prevalent as a tool used by the state to punish and debilitate dissenters. Read more

On September 1st, Human Rights Watch issued a news release, Taliban Should Stop Using Children as Suicide Bombers:

The Taliban’s use of children as suicide bombers in Afghanistan is an egregious affront to humanity that should cease immediately, Human Rights Watch said today. In the latest incident, on August, 27, 2011, residents of Baharak district in northeastern Badakhshan province captured a 16-year-old wearing a suicide vest as he was on his way to blow up a local mosque.

Yesterday, the Taliban responded to the accusations from what they called "propaganda media outlets" in a statement on their English language "Voice of Jihad," denying the consistent and overwhelming evidence that they regularly recruit, coerce, force and trick children into blowing themselves up. The Taliban response is illuminating in several respects, from their delusionally euphemistic term "martyrdom-seeking operations of Mujahideen" in place of suicide bombers, to their stated reasons for not using children. They claim to not use children, not because it's revolting and inhuman, but because children are not tactically useful. The response reveals the Taliban's stunning lack of human empathy in that there is no wholesale rejection of the idea of children as collateral, a give-away that in their worldview, everyone is fair game:

children are not able to perform such huge and amazing missions, nor they are able to bring to conclusion the martyrdom-seeking operations as an effective military tactic against the given military targets. ... Martyrdom-seeking operations need a strong resolutions, military training and deep Islamic knowledge and motive. Children do not have these physical and mental capacities to carry out the task.

To even find yourself asking the Taliban to not force children to detonate themselves should make it crystal clear that you're no longer dealing with a rational actor with whom you can rationally negotiate. The case is being pled to the militarized and heavily multiplied equivalent of Charles Manson, to a psychopathic movement that is operating on a different plane altogether, one devoid of civility. It’s a plane we should never want to enter. Read more

A wise ruler might see the writing on the wall and accelerate at least the public relations of reform, in the face of revolution closing in all around. But not so in Saudi Arabia. As well-entrenched dictatorships in its neighbourhood crumble to both local and global applause, the absolute monarchy of the House of Saud is tightening its grip rather than loosening it, and throwing a handout to other beleaguered tyrants while at it.

Saudi Arabia clings to its dubious status as being unique in the world in several respects: It's the last remaining state where women have no rights to vote whatsoever (and of course, cannot run for office... not that there is a lot of elected representation going on in the kingdom). It's the only country in the world where it's illegal for women to drive. Saudi Arabia has the lowest representation of women in the workforce in the world (5%). It's one of the few remaining countries still enthusiastically using capital punishment, and not just for murder by the way: you can be executed in Saudi Arabia for apostasy, drug offenses, sexual deviancy, and witchcraft. Yes, witchcraft. Beheading by sword is the preferred method, but stoning and crucifixion are on the books as well. Since 2009, Iran and Saudi Arabia are the only known countries to have executed children. Public executions remain common.

The social contract that exists between citizens and their government in a democracy, is in Saudi Arabia rather a contract between the conservative Islamist clergy and the government. The citizens (or more accurately, subjects) are mere fodder stuffed into what meagre political space remains. The monarchy opts to hold itself hostage to the Islamists while occasionally throwing a bone to the people, as when a minor prince says this or that reform should maybe be considered, some day. A pathetic little cough of token sympathy to the nation of prisoners under their thumb, as in the promise that the government is contemplating (deeply, no doubt) introducing a minimum marriage age of 17 or 18 for girls. Currently, nothing protects girls from being married off by money-seeking or debt-burdened fathers, and marry them off they do. In 2009, a man married his eight-year-old daughter to a 58-year-old man for a payment of approximately $10,000. The marriage was twice upheld as legal in Saudi courts and the girl was told she could not divorce her husband until she reached puberty (the husband was ultimately pressured to annul the marriage). But rest assured, the (unelected) Shura Council, which has no legislative power itself but advises the Ministry of Justice, has recommended the introduction of a minimum marriage age. Some day. Read more

As revolution swept over Egypt beginning in January of this year, foreign news networks jostled over each other in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Camera equipment tangling in the feet of the crowds, well known anchors yelled their reports above the noise of demonstrators. It was the place to be. Live coverage of the protestors, the police and the speeches beamed over the airwaves of CNN, ABC, the BBC and other networks from around the world. The unsatisfactory response of Mubarak’s government was laid bare for the world to see, inescapable from the cameras, and the scrutiny of their audiences in living rooms from Moscow to Montreal.

In homes far away from the streets of Cairo, we were glued to our television sets, to the unforgettable images of the throngs of people who had flooded the square, refusing to back down until they achieved the overthrow of a regime that had long held democracy at bay and made freedom an abstraction. Soon, we would need to divide our attention back to the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, and forward to the unfolding civil war in Libya.

There was little time left for the beginnings of other revolutions, in Yemen, or Syria. And in Bahrain, there was barely a foreign camera crew to be seen in Manama, the capital of the gulf island kingdom, when Bahrainis rose up en masse and peacefully against the Al Khalifa royals, Sunni Muslims who have ruled the majority Shia since the 19^th century, allowing democratic institutions to exist in name only. Read more

On October 29th, Moe Bu will jump from a plane over two miles up to raise funds for Burma Campaign UK. Here is a message from Moe, courtesy of the Burma Campaign UK:

Dear friend
 
My name is Moe Bu and I am a Karenni refugee and a student nurse in the UK. On Saturday 29th October I am jumping from over 2 miles up in the air from a plane to raise funds for Burma Campaign UK.
 
I am doing it in memory of my mother, for my family and to stop the killing in Eastern Burma.
 
Please support me in my jump by sponsoring me now at:

http://www.bmycharity.com/burmaskydive2011
 
When I was 10 years old Burmese soldiers came to my village and forced us from our village. In the relocation camp, we were not allowed to go out to find food or work. We lived in this camp for over a year before returning home.  
 
After further attacks I fled to a refugee camp in Thailand with 20 other girls. It took us nearly 3 months to walk through the jungle. We walked in the river at night most of the time to escape the soldiers and because the Burmese Army had planted landmines.
 
 One day I hope to return to Burma, and help my people with the skills I am learning. But my people are still under attack from the Burmese Army every day.
 
I face the possibility of never being able to live in my own country. I am determined not to let this happen. I know that together, we can change things if we can put enough pressure on the generals, but I need your help. Please support our campaign - please sponsor me.
 
Please support me in my jump by sponsoring me now at:

http://www.bmycharity.com/burmaskydive2011
 
Burma Campaign UK is working hard to support the people of Burma but we need your help to make a difference.
 
Thank you,
 
Moe Bu

Help raise vital funds for Burma Campaign UK. You can run, swim or trek almost anywhere in the world. Click here for ideas and support and help us stop the killing in Burma.

One would think that suppressing a mass uprising that just won't seem to go away would keep Iran's theocrats awfully busy, but the ayatollahs have been more focused lately on skirt hems and hair-dos. Perhaps it's proscrastination, a make-work project to avoid having to get through all those tedious sham trials for the thousands of dissidents recently rounded up and imprisoned in these heady times. Whatever it is, there has been a steady output of late of new rules and updated regulations concerning personal attire in the Islamic Republic.

In June this year, the republic's "moral police" fanned out in a force of 70,000 to snuff out the fires of what the mullahs-on-high perceive to be a "western cultural invasion". New problems the police force have to deal with in this particular seasonal crackdown include men wearing necklaces, mullets and ponytails. The latter two are not found on the government's list of approved hairstyles (oh yes, there's a list). Long nails, tattoos, tooth gems (whatever those are), and body piercings are also now needing to be banned. This is on top of the perennial problem that Iranian women miraculously and persistently manage to make the shroud-look still come off sexily by wearing close-fitting overcoats and loose headscarves (think Grace Kelly). Then there are the dogs:

...the Iranian parliament proposed a bill to criminalise dog ownership, on the grounds that it "poses a cultural problem, a blind imitation of the vulgar culture of the west. ...

...Under Islamic customs, dogs are deemed to be "unclean". Iranians, in general, avoid keeping them at home, but still a minority, especially in north Tehran's upper-class districts, enjoy keeping pets. Last year Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi, a prominent hardline cleric, issued a fatwa against keeping dogs and said the trend must stop.

Christopher Hitchens wrote recently in Vanity Fair that "if Pakistan were a character, it would resemble the one described by Alexander Pope in his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot:

Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike:
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend …
So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.

It’s become an open secret the world over that Pakistan is playing the United States and has long done so, smiling and nodding as they accept billions in aid from their western patron, while they either actively collude with American enemies or at best, turn a blind eye to the angry turbaned men with kohl-rimmed eyes playing in the sandbox they dug up next door in Afghanistan. Yet the US + company carry on along the same course, accepting Pakistan's behaviour as a fact of life. The money continues to pour in; the Pakistani ISI and army snort and connive, and their government’s executive bashfully shrugs as if to say, what can we do? This is how the game is played.

The US seems trapped in a static psychosis, resolved to the idea that the only way to work with Pakistan is to grin and bear their indiscretions, occasionally berating them publicly and privately so that things don’t fall over the edge completely. Read more