The Western media are harping on relentlessly about great anti-hijab protests happening all over Iran, with ever more violent repression being meted out to those protesting by a ‘vicious and violent regime’. The nail that they are trying to hang this deceitful web of lies on is the story of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman. The known facts – of the sad death of this young woman – are as follows: during a shopping trip to Tehran with her family, she had emerged from a metro station and entered Talaqani Park, where she was walking with three female and two male relatives, including her brother Ashkan. The group was approached by members of the ‘morality police’ who said she was in breach of the Islamic dress code. Two of the women were given warnings but Amini, despite pleas from her aunt that she was from out of town, the dress code being much less observed in many smaller towns and rural areas, was directed into a van to be taken to a police station for a correction lesson. These ‘lessons’ are usually a 60-minute lecture before being released. A video recording from the station released by the police shows Mahsa Amini standing alone, collapsing on to a chair and then the floor. She had had a stroke or a heart attack and died before the ambulance got her to hospital. This was an unfortunate and terrible occurrence of course but it is one that does happen from time to time to people anywhere in the world. Some of the grieving family have blamed the ‘morality police’ for Mahsa’s death and the increased stress of the incident may well have been a trigger in some way, but to someone who is unknowingly especially vulnerable, many things could have contributed – the shopping trip to the big city, the noise and bustle even. But it is obvious that something, even if it was not greatly stressful for a normal person, increased the likelihood of this tragedy for Mahsa.
Western forces, media, NGOs, spy groups etc. grabbed at this story and have twisted and ‘gilded’ it beyond any recognition as they did their level best to make it into a story of state terror by the Iranian government in order to try to create an anti-government ‘popular’ uprising throughout Iran. All the usual suspects have been given the usual amount of airtime on imperialist media outfits to try to convince the world that a counter-revolution (they would call it a revolution of course) has flared up and that blood was running on the streets all over Iran as the masses rise up against a hated Islamic dictatorship which is resorting to extreme violence to keep the people down.
Of course, nothing of the sort has happened. The masses support their government for the most part, are proud of their country’s achievements, and the living standards of the majority are deemed by them to be generally good.
Morality dress codes come and go in all societies and Iran is not alone in this. We know from hundreds of ordinary everyday bloggers in Iran, people who just daily record and transmit pictures of their streets and communities, that riot situations have been very rare. Those few that have taken place have been manufactured by Western interests. In fact, across Iran, even before Mahsa’s tragic passing, observance of the dress codes by Iranian women is not universally adhered to, there being little or no reaction from the state.
The Iranian people have their own way of influencing their government. The so-called ‘morality police’ have been disbanded and the whole matter is history as far as most Iranians are concerned. However, those who seek to bring Iran down, who want to end its anti-imperialist stance and its friendships with Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia etc., will keep trying to make this story run on in order justify their interference in Iran’s social and economic dealings.
“Never in my 14 years working on human rights advocacy have I witnessed such disillusionment with, and opposition to, the Islamic Republic regime,” said Nazanin Boniadi, a British-Iranian actor and Amnesty International ambassador. “While Iran has become accustomed to mass protests every decade, neither the student protests of 1999 nor the green movement of 2009, or even more recently the November 2019 protests, compare in fervour or magnitude to the current protests.” Boniadi added “The most unprecedented part is that the protests have been female-led.” While playing to the ultra-left gallery that is always there to promote imperialism’s interests as ‘revolutionary’, she continued “The movement’s slogan ‘Women, life and freedom’ is antithetical to the Islamic Republic, which has built itself on being anti-woman, pro-martyrdom and repressive. This uprising is not just about draconian dress codes. The compulsory hijab has simply become a symbol of a wider Iranian women’s struggle.”
Revealing the real point of imperialism’s interest in women’s issues, fellow imperialist stooge, Kasra Aarabi, an Iran analyst at the Institute for Global Change, described the mood in the country as revolutionary. “The people that speak to me believe they are in the middle of a revolution and will not back down. One way or another this is the beginning of the end of the regime. This is not about reform. This is about regime change.”
The endless list of inane celebrity wannabes jumping on this to promote themselves include Donya Dadrasan, an Iranian pop star who lives in Australia, who has poured out invective worthy of a Sun journalist against the morality police on Instagram. And the number of these cretins who stood pouting at the camera while publicly cutting their own hair ‘in solidarity with Mahsa’ is quite staggering.
As in all things, imperialism will try to use any event, any tragedy, in order to launch an attack on those who, like Iran, will not follow the dictates of imperialism. Our job is to look past all the blather and find the real aim of the Western media and its hypocritical narrative. When French male gendarmes were stripping Moslem women on French beaches of their Islamic beachwear that kept them covered, how many of these ink-flingers of imperialism raised even a whimper against it!
In our view Iran should do away with not only with the ‘morality police’ but also with the mandatory dress code for women because, while doing no good to Iran, it provides imperialism and its flunkeys with yet another pretext for poking their snouts into Iranian internal affairs, which are the sole preserve of the Iranian people.
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