“Women, Life, Freedom” – for the women and the men of Iran
JVL Introduction
Those of us outside Iran are watching in awe at the courage of the women – and some men – protesting the repressive regime. The restrictions on women are particularly harsh and Mahsa Amini is one of millions who have been terrorised by Iran’s “Morality Police” but the death of this 22 year old woman has inspired fury and fuelled protests that have led to over 130 deaths as the regime attempts to continue with their repression.
We publish below, the interview with Shirin Ebadi, feminist, poet and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize about the protests and why the women’s struggle is a litmus test for the struggle for freedom.
You may also want to listen to this moving Farsi version of Bella Ciao to honour Mahsa Amini and the women’s struggle.
This article was originally published by +972 Magazine on Thu 6 Oct 2022. Read the original here.
Democracy in Iran will arrive through women’
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi explains why the women-led protests in Iran may herald the beginning of the Islamic Republic’s downfall.
This article was published in partnership with Local Call.
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Good article but Iran is yet another country where the national rights of the Kurdish people are suppressed. South East Kurdistan has led the fight against the mullahs and rallied the other ethnic minority groups to voice their opposition. Baluchis, Azeris, Arabs and Kurds are all entitled to self determination and articles should reflect this.
I cannot add to what has been said except for one thing, how sad it is that throughout the development and evolution of mankind our children are so easily turned against us, the Elite dressing them up in uniforms and they open fire on us, when will we learn?
It is quite an oddity that Iran ended up a fundamentalist regime anyway. Shia (Shi’a) population dominated countries are usually religiously reformist, leaning towards secular often western-style development – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq might need some evolution on the democracy side but are not naturally fundamentalist either (e.g Iran & Lebanon have quite culturally sophisticated filmmakers).
Iran was a parliamentary democracy that was on the road to nationalising its oil resources, when the US staged a coup d’etat and imposed the monarchical Shah and his death squads. After socialist, liberal and feminist opposition to this among the population had been slaughtered, tragically the only cultural language left in which to express national self-determination was fundamentalist. Hopefully resistance to this won’t open the door to the economic exploitation and domination, that the US was intent on in the first place.
Incidentally the attacks on 9/11 were by 15 Sunni Wahhabist Saudi Arabians and four others. It was scandalous that Blair wove Shia (Shi’a) and so many other Muslim diasporas into his conspiracist Muslim collective guilt narrative. Often these diasporas not only have nothing to do with Saudi Arabia but are long-term cultural rivals.
Iran’s history is not simply black and white. Gavin (comment above) and the hard Left tend to present things to make everything Western seem bad and everything anti-Western seem good. The reign of the Shah was a mixed blessing/curse but he kept the fundamentalists from power. The people’s revolution certainly didn’t aim to produce a theocracy with a bunch of murderous Mullahs running the country. These fanatics were able to hijack the revolution with the help of a delusional Jimmy Carter and French compliance and the rest really is history.
Shirin Ebadi is wonderful and the comments posted so far do not do her justice. Today there are no ifs or buts, we should all stand firmly behind the brave women and men of Iran, and despite Orly Noy’s malevolent attempt to drag an anti-Israel comment out of Ebadi she wasn’t able to. I’m sure Ebadi well knows that the only country that the Iranian regime wants to destroy, aside from Iran, is the Jewish State. The Iranian regime is the enemy of freedom, not Israel despite its many faults.
Just to clarify two things. Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh who was by ousted by US/UK forces in favour of the Shah, was not a fundamentalist. As well as attempting public Oil nationalisation, among his other achievements was introducing social security and land reform.
Years later the US would admit the CIA’s determing role in the coup and accompanying offences. As President Barak Obama clarified…
“In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government,” the president said.
See link – http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/19/politics/cia-iran-1953-coup/?hpt=po_c2