While all religious minorities in Iran, including the "recognized" minorities of Christians and Jews, have it rough, the Bahais' experience of persecution there is particularly brutal. Apart from the occasional coverage of the Bahai community's heroic and novel underground university, not a lot of reporting takes place on the systematic and blatant abuses perpetrated by the Islamic regime against Bahais. This article in The Chicago Tribune this week is a much needed exception, and a sobering telling of the traumatic pasts that Bahais who leave Iran live with even after reaching safer shores:
"(Iranian government officials) actually don't recognize the Baha'i faith as a religion," Panahi said. "So when they find out you're Baha'i, for them it's almost like you're nonexistent." Baha'is in Iran cannot attend universities, participate in government or own a business without fear of having it stripped without cause. Seven Baha'i faith leaders have been imprisoned since 2008, sentenced to 20 years in 2010.
It's always curious to me what stories hit a nerve in the media. What does it take exactly? The exact recipe of horror, devastation, drama, intrigue and injustice eludes me, I confess.
Once in a while, circumstances collide to garner good coverage for a good story, like that of the brave Malala Yousufzai of Pakistan. Long avoided conversations get started, like, hey, those Taliban are actually really kind of mean and they kill little girls and stuff. But then, another story that seems to exhibit just as much injustice, and with an even grizzlier ending, like that of the slain secondary student, Anisa of Kapisa, Afghanistan, get barely a token mention in passing, with the Government of Afghanistan doing its level best to see the story die promptly, and mostly succeeding.
Like assassination attempts against schoolgirls, stonings are another fussy theme. Mostly we don't meddle, but sometimes we let ourselves get real worked up. Back in 2002, when 30-year-old Amina Lawal was sentenced to be stoned to death by a sharia court in Nigeria for having a child out of wedlock, she made frontpage news the world over. Miss World contestants boycotted Nigeria, Oprah got more than...More >>
The "worst day" of Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti's life was the day that a "bad hijab woman" in Semnan, Iran, beat him up, after he took it upon himself to "politely" instruct her to cover herself up. He was hospitalized for three days after the incident. The recipient of his unsolicited advice, it would seem, snapped. Perhaps she had simply had enough of sneering, crotchety, uptight men appointing themselves independent dress code police. As Golnaz Esfandiari writes:
For the past 30 years, Iranian women have been harassed, detained, fined, and threatened by the morality police, security forces, and zealots over their appearance. Women have fought back in different ways, including by pushing the boundaries of acceptable dress and criticizing the rules, which apply only to women.
Officially, the hijab is promoted as “protection” for women against evil in society. For many women, however, the hijab feels like a burden, an insult, a limitation of their freedom and an attempt to keep them under control.
As Canadian fans of Ayatollah Khomeini beat their grovelling wings at an event commemorating the Ayatollah's demise (commemoraring it for all the wrong reasons), Afghans are putting their foot down at persistent Iranian interference in their nation's sovereignty.
As Michael Petrou of MacLean's explains of the event in Ottawa, co-hosted by the Iranian Embassy there and Carleton University's Iranian Cultural Association:
The conference featured a talk by Moulana Sayyid Muhhamad Rizvi, the “Guidance Alim” of a Toronto Islamic school whose teaching materials — some of which which were written in Iran or by a foundation believed by the FBI to be controlled by the Iranian government — refer to “crafty” and “treacherous” Jews.
Also on the agenda was Kurt Anders Richardson of the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, who drooled of Khomeini that he “was the one who emphasized the equality of human beings, the equality of male and female.”
Petrou notes,
This revelation is likely news to millions of Iranian men and women, and would have been news to thousands of more, if they hadn’t
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.
Reports of rape in Iranian prisons- carried out by guards as well...More >>
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...More >>
Ambassadors from Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe are still invited, though. No reporters have managed to catch these countries murdering 400 citizens... this week.
Seriously, can't Prince William and Kate Middleton simply choose not to host representatives for mass-murdering regimes that hate everything the UK stands for at their wedding?
It is their wedding, right? And if it isn't -- if someone wants to make the case that this is a national event put on by the nation for the nation, there's even more reason to make sure the bouncers keep out the riff-raff.
Jonathon Narvey is the Editor of The Propagandist...More >>
The "worst day" of Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti's life was the day that a "bad hijab woman" in Semnan, Iran, beat him up, after he took it upon himself to "politely" instruct her to cover herself up. He was hospitalized for three days after the incident. The recipient of his unsolicited advice, it would seem, snapped. Perhaps she had simply had enough of sneering, crotchety, uptight men appointing themselves independent dress code police. As 
As Canadian fans of Ayatollah Khomeini beat their grovelling wings at an event commemorating the Ayatollah's demise (commemoraring it for all the wrong reasons), Afghans are putting their foot down at persistent Iranian interference in their nation's sovereignty.
