Iran's women a year after Mahsa Amini's death: 'I wear what I like now'

ZeroCool@feddit.ch to World News@lemmy.world – 310 points –
Iran's women a year after Mahsa Amini's death: 'I wear what I like now'
bbc.com

A young woman walks down a street in Tehran, her hair uncovered, her jeans ripped, a bit of midriff exposed to the hot Iranian sun. An unmarried couple walk hand in hand. A woman holds her head high when asked by Iran's once-feared morality police to put a hijab on, and tells them: "Screw you!"

These acts of bold rebellion - described to me by several people in Tehran over the past month - would have been almost unthinkable to Iranians this time last year. But that was before the death in the morality police's custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been accused of not wearing her hijab [veil] properly.

The mass protests that shook Iran after her death subsided after a few months in the face of a brutal crackdown, but the anger that fuelled them has not been extinguished. Women have just had to find new ways to defy the regime.

A Western diplomat in Tehran estimates that across the country, an average of about 20% of women are now breaking the laws of the Islamic Republic by going out on to the streets without the veil.

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Just a reminder: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini would never have come to power if Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the Former Shah of Iran and his secret police hadn't been such shits and they were placed in power by British and American oil interests. They deposed a democratic modernising leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

The brutal oppression of young women in Iran is the direct responsibility of the MI5, CIA and the oil companies to whom they ultimately answer.

Did the evil west also make the Islamists purge their leftist allies after deposing the Shah? The west is absolutely NOT the proximate cause of the terrible behavior of the clerics. Blame is not forever.

The us literally distributed religious texts to extremists to encourage them to hate outsiders because communists were the outsiders we wanted them to push out at the time:

CIA and State Department have been criticized for publishing textbooks intended to indoctrinate children with racism and hatred towards foreigners and towards non-muslim Afghans.

In an effort to aid the anti-Soviet insurgency and inculcate a hatred of foreign invaders in Afghan children, the US government covertly distributed schoolbooks which promoted militant Islamic teachings and included images of weapons and soldiers. The Taliban used the American textbooks but they scratched out the images of human faces which were contained in them in keeping with their strict aniconistic and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. The United States Agency for International Development gave millions of dollars to the University of Nebraska at Omaha in the 1980s and the university used the money to fund the writing and the publishing of the textbooks in local languages.

To be fair, this was in Pakistan and Afghanistan and I know less about Iran. But, yeah. "The west" 100% encouraged this behavior. And we backed mujahedeen extremist warlords in Afghanistan all the way until we pulled out.

The fuck you talking about about, 'Evil West'? I'm nothing to do with those corrupt fucks and neither are pretty much anyone I know. The 'security services' are a faction to themselves working for a certain sector of corporate interest and a peoples and their governments are often not in alignment.

You on the other hand, I've seen you several times and several places talking out of your arse, so much so that you're one of the handful of users that I now recognise. You can fucking do one.

Wow, do you really break down like this every time someone disagrees with you on the internet?

You yeah you I recognize you stand still laddie you can’t have your meat if you don’t eat your pudding. Lash me some more, please, daddy. EDIT: THIS is me talking out of my ass. If you can’t handle my lack of knowledge about cold-weather heat pumps and my mixing of F and C, bug off.

Well, he probably met Russians at some point, that fucking bastard. After all we've done for him. Probably even considered something like universal healthcare.