COULD THIS TIME, IT BE DIFFERENT WITH IRAN PROTESTS?

 

…Iranian woman cutting off her hair

 

The older Iranian clerics don’t know what to do with Iran women protests.

 

Iran’s protests have grown into “one of the largest feminist uprising the Middle East” has seen.  Iran’s aging clerics don’t know how to respond, said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian (U.K.).  Some have invoked the country’s go-to explanation for protests, that their “the product of a covert foreign intelligence conspiracy.”  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 83, has dismissed the nationwide uprising as “scattered riots.”  Compared with “the Iranian state’s brutal standards” of slaughtering dissidents, the response this year has been more restrained, although more than 200 have been killed by authorities .  Iran’s Islamic hard-liners are also blaming “the Western internet” for corrupting the country’s young women, with one former member of parliament saying that “the only ‘freedom’ that they want is to sleep with somebody each night and behave like animals.”

The high protests are about class even more than religion  , said Azaleh Moaveni in the New York Times.  “For the wealthy woman of north Tehran, the right to be free from the hijab is already a de facto reality.”  They dine at ritzy rooftop restaurants bareheaded, and “served by uncovered waitresses.”   But on the streets where ordinary Iranians live and gather, the morality police’s white vans are a menacing presence.  “Forced hijab wearing is the Berlin Wall of the cerical dictatorship, said Joshua Mara in The Wall Street Journal.  The regime could fall if fluential segments of the world loudly backs them. They “need to hear us shouting: We are with you.”

Copyyright G. ater 2022