- Executing thousands of female opponents, which is unprecedented anywhere in the world. In a recent demonstration by teachers asking for better and equal pay, some 10,000 demonstrators, mostly women, showed up.
Some 1,000 women teachers were arrested in one fell swoop by the Suppression forces and transferred to various prisons.
The head of Islamic Iran's National Prisons Organization recently admitted there were over 100 "independent" prisons around the country, each run for their own use by various so-called security or intelligence organizations.
Most are only quasi-official and some definitely "illegal" if such a word can be applied to the Islamic administration of Ahmadi-Nejad in particular and the Mullahs in general, where their very presence has illegal roots and foundation.
Add to these the latest Bassiji or Suppression forces prisons.
The Mobile ones built on 40 ton container trucks that can be brought close to anti-government protests and people shoveled into them by the dozen. Then driven anywhere where the human contents can disappear into mass graves. After suffering the worst possible tortures but where their screams in the wilderness cannot be heard by anyone.
Anyone have a doubt that among the thousand women teachers arrested any but the oldest or ugliest escaped rape? Or other forms of sexual abuse? If so, dream on. Or better still get a grip on Mullah reality.
NOTE: One way of dealing with these mobile prisons is to puncture their tires when they arrive on scene and before they can drive off with their victims.
The late Shah's SAVAK (transformed into today's mullah version called SAVAMA by the clerics) was a pussycat compared to current variations operating under VEVAK (translating the Farsi acronym VEVAK to the English one of MOIS - Ministry of Information & Security);
- Torturing tens of thousands of women political prisoners. The huge number of women among the political prisoners is staggering and unprecedented - other than when slavery was an integral part of society.
And when the Mullahs decide they are afraid of a group or groups - like the MEK for instance - and slaughter some 30,000 of them in their prisons in the 1980s, many of them women, it is a short step to also deal with "innocent" protestors in the same way.
Like the teachers, or workers who have not been paid for months and know the money is no longer there to pay them. Or their factories and ability to earn a living being put out of business and closed down by the unbridled import of cheap, very lowest quality Chinese goods flooding the market.
- Executing pregnant women, the torture of mothers in front of their children and raping women in front of their menfolk.
Many wondered what caused former President Khatami to buckle and stop promoting "reform" during his second term and become nothing more than a tool to fool the West that the Mullahs had an "elected" - thus democratic - form of government.
Reports from Iran say he was summoned to Supreme Ruler Ali Khamenei's office, where, to his astonishment, he found all the women of his immediate family already gathered. On his way inside, he had been surprised to find some forty or fifty extra bodyguards outside the office.
Once inside, he was given an offer he could not refuse.
Either stop your reformist nonsense or sit and watch repeated gang rape of your women by the dozens of guards waiting outside.
Would you rather live with those shameful scenes for the rest of your life or co-operate with us and do what we tell you?
(There were rumors that Janet Reno was also reined in during her second term as Attorney General by the Clinton administration in a similar fashion when she was allegedly presented with a video of her sexually engaged with two female prostitutes, apparently hired to put her into this compromising position).
"Reforms" - which were a watered down version of the Mullah tyranny anyway, came to a screeching halt and activist students, hopeful followers and others who had put their lives on the line for Khatami, all found themselves betrayed and abandoned.
Pregnant women being executed goes back to the early days of the revolution when women prisoners were used as free prostitutes for the prison guards and the clerics in charge.
And for the 2,000 or so Palestinians Yasser Arafat had brought with him or imported later, who manned the firing squads Khomeini used to slaughter so many true Iranians. So unlike his own foreign national origins.
Teen and pre-teen girls (virgins must not be executed under Islamic law) who died during their brutal sexual abuse, were thrown on the piles of bodies of those already executed in the morning and received a couple of bullets in their long dead bodies to hide the barbarous agony to which they had been subjected.
Adding insult to injury their parents had to pay for those bullets, as did all families for each bullet used by the firing squads.
Female prisoners were allowed to live for as long as they did not get pregnant and died if they did - to hide their abuse and impregnation - inside a prison where no other men could, nor should, have touched them.
Traumatized children, if their sanity prevailed, who watched their mothers being abused sexually, tortured and screaming in pain would likely grow up fearful of the regime and not confront it in the future.
And bear witness to husbands, brothers, fathers and other men who might otherwise oppose the Mullahs if not available to view the proceedings themselves.
- Degrading women's social and economic standing to second class citizens.
Unlike at the time of the late-Shah, women have - except for the token instances to the contrary - lost their freedoms and rights.
Husbands can divorce wives at will, throw them or even recalcitrant daughters out of the house into the streets, refuse to take care of their basic needs beyond minimal food, sometimes not even doing that.
Women have nowhere to complain nor a judicial system which will protect them. Men dominate and their word is worth more than that of a woman.
In one notorious case in which the Western world became involved, a woman defending herself and her daughter against rape by a local official ended up stabbing him and was condemned to death for murder.
Nothing she said was given credence and self-defense was no defense. Only international intervention spared her from hanging.
In other instances, women who have been raped have either been hanged for adultery or stoned for it. Male influence plays a large role in these executions.
Do Iranian women still think life was worse under the late-Shah, as differentiated from simply a monarchy in general?
They still inherit a lesser share than men but with a new twist, if from a non-Moslem family, married to a Moslem, they additionally have even that reduced further under Islamic Iran's often vague and fluctuating legal decisions.
In brief, there is little or nothing in a woman's life in Islamic Iran which measures up to a man's. She does not even have the right to her own children to whom she gave birth. They belong to the father.
These headings illustrate some of the differences:
- Imposing gender apartheid
Women are banned from "male "events, such as sports games like soccer, where they are not permitted to enter a stadium where matches occur.
They are often banned from the very mosques that regulate their lives and insist on their following sharia law. Some Imams simply refuse to grant them entry.
- Controlling women's presence in the streets
Unless willing to risk encounters with morals police or accusations of immorality by men in general and clerics in particular, who are happy to label her a whore at the slightest excuse, a woman has to watch her behavior.
Arguably the same applies in Western countries but nowhere near the intensity found in Moslem Iran or other Islamic regimes.
- Imposing compulsory veiling, controlling the color and forms of women's attire
After toying with the idea for quite some time, Iran appears to have finally decided to design a national costume for men and women to differentiate themselves from other Moslems and create a national identity.
Somewhat along the Communist Chinese mentality of uniform clothing to have everyone dress in only one way and remove all forms of individuality.
The "chador" literally meaning "tent" which Iranian Islam imposes on women, who feel obliged to use it to cover whatever they wear beneath it, presently acts as the Chinese type "equalizer". Usually black, they serve as a loose 'burkha" found in Afghanistan and some African Moslem countries.
Once again, Islamic Iran has injected a twist. Memories of Hitler and Nazis who are clearly heroes to Islam, and the Jewish yellow star they imposed, the color and type of your clothing will indicate your religion! To allow Moslems to avoid contact with infidels, who could pollute them!
In pre-Pahlavi monarchies and early in the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi himself, by religious tenet, non-Moslems were not allowed to leave their homes when it rained as the rain might flow from their clothes onto the pavement where a Moslem would pass or splash onto Moslems and - either way - pollute them!
- Lacerating and splashing acid on women's faces because of their clothing and make up
For a long time, morals police would punish a woman whose hair protruded from under the front of her head scarf in public by stapling the scarf to her forehead. Using several staples to ram home their insistence of decent Islamic appearance.
Suppression or Bassiji forces would use the excuse of illegal gathering or use of make-up or improper clothing to punish women by splashing them, in the face and upper body with concentrated acid.
The permanent, ugly disfigurement branded the woman as a "whore" and punished her to where a man would no longer want her - with or without make-up.
Acid is used generally by the Suppression forces on both men and women.
When the MOIS wanted to arrest Ayatollah Boroujerdi and ended up in a stand off, his followers captured several of the Bassijis and found them all carrying glass bottles filled with concentrated acid to use on his supporters.
While it used to be a vital part of Iranian culture, before Khomeini took over, to guard and protect women, specially those of your family - and still is in ordinary households - this aspect has begun to disappear other than in the form of fanatical repression of women.
Now, women have become not only fair game but preferred targets for the Suppression forces, who take sadistic pleasure in wielding tire irons, full force, at women.
Ruthless deterrent aimed at physically and psychologically keeping everyone off the streets and toeing the regime line obediently.
However, Iranian women have a strong independent streak in their weave and waft. Not naturally drawn to religion or to the clerics themselves, better educated women show their resentment by wearing bright colors and stylish versions of "acceptable" clothing.
With pressure through imposition of fanatical Islamic mores and tenets reaching unsupportable levels for many women, there was a video of a "correctly" dressed young Iranian woman in trousers and long jackets and head scarf, turning on a black chador clad morals policewoman and kicking the blazes out of her before leaving and escaping.
Because women have culturally been a "protected" class - though dependent on men - till recently they have been braver in protesting against the Mullahs, not fully realizing their "immunity" no longer holds true.
- Promoting polygamy and temporary marriage, justified by the mullahs' disgraceful Sharia
The Prophet Mohammad originally instituted polygamy - four official wives and as many concubines as you could afford, to compensate for the explosion of girls and women in his Arab tribal populations and society when he banned infanticide of newborn girls.
India still has occurrences of female infanticide in provincial or poorer parts of society , where a wet cloth is placed over the mouth and nose of a female infant, who chokes and dies. Arabs simply dug a hole in the sand and buried the newborns alive.
An unforeseen consequence of his banning the killing of virgin girls - by which he achieved his intended edict - was the incredible suffering of the very young girls imprisoned and condemned to die by the Khomeini regime and in the decades of Mullah rule after that.
Because of limitations on earning a living, marriage becomes the only haven for a woman - as it used to be in Western countries as late as the early 1900s. The difference here is a capable woman does not have the same opportunities to earn and live her own life without a man.
Polygamy helps some women but for others, as they grow older or less patient with the husband's male dominance, they find themselves "divorced" with no legal formality and on the wrong side of the front door with only an option of finding a generous relative or living as a street person.
There are tens of thousands of abandoned wives and daughters living as homeless street people in the capital city of Tehran alone.
Add to this heart wrenching situation nearly half a million abandoned children of both sexes. The women and children have nowhere to turn and must earn a living selling themselves, running drugs or living hand to mouth, any way they can, to survive.
Clearly selling their bodies is an immediate result but not for the older women who find themselves thrown literally into the street with no income and no government charity or social safety net to look after them.
Adding another reason why an estimated 30% of Islamic Iranians are heavy illegal drug users. Also remember that about 65% of the population is under the age of 30-years or thereabouts.
-Applying medieval and painful punishments such as stoning, whose victims are primarily women
Justice in Islamic Iran vacillates among the different courts and their clerical judges, with religious law judges able to impose their will according to very subjective views of Islamic law. Similar to the Inquisition of times long gone by.
While the Supreme Court has to approve all hangings or executions, here again they decide by whim rather than by tangible law.
A mentally retarded, underage (14-years old) girl was condemned to death and hanged in a North Iran town for annoying the cleric who was her judge.
He went out of his way to carry her file to Tehran and get the approval of the Supreme Court.
Her original sin was to have a lover. The cleric quickly left the area and her family has no way to level charges at him for executing an underage victim. Forbidden officially by Iran's laws but as events repeatedly show, easily circumvented by a cleric acting as a religious judge.
On the other side of the Supreme court coin, some Revolutionary Guard members conducted gruesome killings of some 18 people in a one year period.
The court found the vigilantes were not guilty because their victims were allegedly involved in "un-Islamic" activities. The killers said they believed Islam let them spill the blood of anyone engaged in illicit activities if they issued two warnings to the victims.
According to their confessions, the killers put some of their victims in pits and stoned them to death. Others were suffocated. One man was even buried alive while others had their bodies dumped in the desert to be eaten by wild animals.
The accused, who were all members of an Islamic paramilitary force, told the court their understanding of the teachings of one Islamic cleric allowed them to kill immoral people if they had ignored two warnings to stop their bad behavior.
But there was no judicial process to determine the guilt of the victims in these cases. Pure vigilante justice.
Lower courts have condemned these men to death five times but the Supreme court has also repeatedly overruled the verdicts. One of the condemned must have a powerful person looking out for them.
Women never get a break. Their word or testimony is only worth HALF that of a man. Need I say more?
As a reflection, in the days of the late Shah, the shoe was pretty much on the other foot and men had to be very careful not to be accused by a woman. Or expect long and protracted problems in the courts, which gave the women an edge if any doubt existed.
- Injustice and discrimination in economic participation, employment and education.
Sexist discrimination which would create outcry to the heavens in the USA or even Europe, is a part of everyday life in Islamic Iran, where women are second class citizens as a matter of course, deprived of the right they used to have, to pursue any career or business they chose to have. The Mullahs have restricted women into a limited category of professions and careers.
Again, women may often only do something with the approval and permission of the senior male member of the family. They cannot leave the country without the permission of their husband or if unmarried from the senior male member of the family. Often an uncle.
- Selling innocent girls' body parts due to impoverishment, hunger and many other calamities
A trade in kidneys and transplant body parts is rampant and there are agencies whose whole existence is the laboratory testing of candidates for sale of transplant material. They buy and sell body parts as others might buy and sell rice or cookies.
This trade has been captured on tape and posted on the Internet and if memory serves also on the AntiMullah site, too.
But the most prevalent "body" trade is the human sex trade both inside the country and to the Gulf States.
With so many desperate abandoned women and children available the "religious" Islamic clerics have personally set up brothels using orphans who come hoping to be "cared for" by them. Or sent to them by parents, hearing by word of mouth (recruitment) the clerics may care for their daughters when they can no longer afford to feed them.
Sex slavery out of Islamic Iran predominates in the region and with the Mullah regime investing in huge, modern hotels in Dubai they hold auctions of Persian girls and boys every evening in the basement.
Since Islam allows "temporary" marriages of as little as a few minutes, the girls are "married off" for an hour, a night or for the right price - forever - as sex slaves to Arabs who want to use them and/or to sell them off.
Democratic Speaker of Congress
NANCY PELOSI's eagerness to forget she is a woman and to feel sympathy for the plight of womanhood in Islamic Iran and visit and negotiate with the Mullahs comes as a distinct shock. And a betrayal of what she claims to stand for.
The photo may seem funny. For Iran's women, life increasingly invites miserable death. With death often a welcome relief from prolonged suffering. Ahmadi-Nejad wants all women to feel like this female looks. And control Iranian men via their women folk.
No comments:
Post a Comment