Iran uses rape to impose modesty on women

One indicator of the Iranian regime’s hypocrisy is that there are credible reports that it is applying what it assumes strict moral code thus arresting women and girls accused of inciting immodesty sexually assault them.

In a scathing report of the rape of protesters by security forces, CNN recounted how a 20-year-old woman was arrested for allegedly leading protests and later taken by police to a hospital in Karaj, violently shaken, with shaved head and bleeding rectum.

The woman is now back in prison.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have independently documented multiple cases of sexual assault.

Hadi Ghaemi of the Iran Center for Human Rights, a New York watchdog organization, told me about a 14-year-old girl from a Tehran slum who protested by taking off her headscarf at school.

The girl, Masooumeh, was identified by school cameras and arrested; Shortly thereafter she was taken to the hospital for treatment. severe vaginal tears.

The girl died, and her mother, after initially saying she wanted to go public, did missing.

Reports of sexual assault are difficult to verify due to victims’ feelings of shame and fear, and CNN reported that authorities sometimes film assaults to blackmail protesters into silence.

What is absolutely clear is that protesters continue to find dead.

Consider Nika Shahkarami, a 16-year-old girl who burned her veil in public.

The security forces cornered her.

Days later, authorities announced he was dead.

An autopsy revealed that he had fractures in his skull, pelvis, hip, arms and legs.

So the revolt in Iran is not limited to headgear.

It’s about overthrowing a incompetent, corrupt, repressive and brutal regime.

“If a government does something wrong, the nation should punch it in the mouth,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared in 1979, after the revolution he led established the Islamic Republic.

This is what the Iranians are trying to do now.

I am surprised and disappointed that today’s Iranian people’s revolution has not received more support in the United States and around the world.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this.

First, Iran has prohibited entry to most foreign journalists, so we don’t have camera crews in the streets to film schoolchildren risking their lives to confront the regime’s thugs.

Since we’re not on the ground, I don’t think we journalists have collectively given this story the prominence it deserves.

Second, there is a certain American bitterness towards Iranians, a misperception that they are fanatics chanting “Death to America.”

Indeed, on an interpersonal level, Iran could be the country more pro-American from the Middle East.

On one trip I took my daughter, who was 14 at the time.

A family photo of her embraced by several women reflects how happy ordinary Iranians are to meet Americans.

I once chatted with a young revolutionary guard who was protecting an anti-American museum.

Surrounded by huge banners denouncing the United States as the “Great Satan,” he asked me for advice on how to immigrate to the United States.

“To hell with the mullahs,” he told me.

Fearless young women are at the forefront of today’s protests.

When a member of the Basij paramilitary force spoke in a school, girls took off their hijabs and booed him.

At a girls’ school in Karaj, female students threw bottles of water at a staff member, kicking him out.

The United States and other governments are speaking up and the Iranians appreciate it.

Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian human rights lawyer who is now on medical leave after a 10-year prison sentence (reduced from 38.5 years and 148 lashes), told me she particularly appreciated Iran’s expulsion of a United Nations commission on women’s rights.

But Sotoudeh and others wish the Biden administration did more delegitimize the Iranian government and criticize the executions, and calls on Western governments that have embassies in Iran to recall their ambassadors.

“The Biden administration hasn’t done enough,” said Tala Raassi, an Iranian-American fashion designer who knows firsthand the regime’s brutality: At the age of 16 she was arrested and taken in 40 lashes for wearing a T-shirt and miniskirt to a private party.

I would like to see Biden work with other countries to increase the volume of the international outrage at a high level in the face of repression.

Just as Kennedy delivered his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech and Reagan his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech, Biden could signal American determination with an “Ayatollah, open the gates of Evin prison, liberate iran‘” suggested Amir Soltani, an Iranian-American writer.

The West may also seek to increase targeted sanctions against officials and their family members who host parties abroad or funnel assets abroad.

Meanwhile, the intelligence community should spy more on Iran’s massive crackdown and to filter the informationwhere possible, to hold the country’s authorities accountable.

Pressure on Iran is difficult, because it is already isolated and heavy sanctions have been imposed on it.

But we have to prove why Iran is now starting its next phase:

started to execute protesters to try to terrorize the population into surrendering. Two protesters are known so far to have been hanged and at least 35 others have been sentenced to death or are in custody for capital offenses.

In 1978, as Khomeini’s revolution was gaining momentum, The New York Times quoted an Iranian lawyer with his clairvoyant doubts:

“I hope we don’t get out of a ditch,” she said, “just to fall down a well.”

More than four decades later, Iranians are desperately trying to get out of that pit, led by female students who persevere despite the threat of arrest, torture and execution.

They understand that blatant immorality lies not in a girl’s bare hair, but in the government raping her for it, and they should get much more international support.

c.2022 The New York Times Company