Show of Force?
As the threat of sanctions was hovering down on Ahmadinejad’s government –adding more pressure upon him and the rest of his cabinet– the Iranian leadership was looking for a diversion to take the Iranian people’s minds off the real issues which he will be accounted for.
Teachers striking for equal pay, workers who for months have been barely paid enough to survive, university students uprising across Iran, women protesting, unrest in different parts of the country, the cost of living rising faster and faster, gasoline rationed, and the rivals in the Majlis (Islamic parliament) and other power houses of the Islamic Republic challenging him; they all are the nightmare that Ahmadinejad has to endure in the hope of politically surviving until the next morning.
In a political system with big figures like Rafsanjani and Khatami controlling the money, while Ahmadinejad holds the gun, the Iranian president is faced with obstacles that even his father figure, Chamran, and his godfather, Larijani, are unable to deal with in a serene manner. So what’s a repressive regime to do? Well, why not try focusing the attention to the youth’s social behavior creating an artificial crisis over the dress code?
Iran has a 70 million population with more than 50 million under 30. This makes Iran one of the youngest countries in the world. Along with firing squads and extrajudicial deaths, Khomeini brought his own version of Persian language and vocabulary when took over in 1979. Besides his odd accent, he took new and unfamiliar words -supposedly out of Quran- to daily conversations.
One of those words was one he often used to describe the late shah: Taghout (Satan). By it he referred to the social behavior of modern-day Iranians, their attitude, civility, and specifically their dress code. Ties, jeans and short sleeves for men, as well as uncovered hair for women, became taboo. Consequently, his pasdars (Revolutionary Guards) started persecuting people because they weren’t following the dressing code. Women were attacked by pouring paint on them and by cutting them with blades; men by cutting their ties and ripping off their jeans.
The ironic twist now is that the target of Khomeini’s legacy are precisely “Allah’s Children:” young souls born, raised and educated under Islam and not the Taghout. They belong to a generation who grew without any personal or social freedom since the clerics took power 28 years ago. But despite of that, they have shown more courage, more guts and more determination than the older generation to fight the rulers.
Just yesterday, in the midst of police beating on two defenseless women in Haft e Tir, a popular square in Tehran, people quickly gathered, holding hands with one another and chanting loud and clear against the police, demanding them to let the women go. The police squad, suddenly frightened, radioed for help, but amid the turmoil they were kicked by a young man. Others released the victims from police custody and helped them escape to safety. The young man who also disappeared in the crowd. And today, reports from Tehran said that in another incident near an upscale shopping mall in the north of the city, a girl was being harassed by a police officer for her dress code, but then she pulled a knife and attacked the policeman. People tried to help the girl, but a special police backup unit quickly arrived and manage to take the the girl away by force.
A witness on the scene told PJ Media that after these reactions against police brutality he feels confident, powerful, and “smells freedom in the air.” Is this the beginning of something more?
Added bonus: a video of a young woman, partially undressed, angrily challenging the police enforcing the dress code.
Here’s another:
If the woman portrayed in the static picture is the same as the one in the youtube clip, then she got what she deserved. Overemphasizing the protection of one gender, particularly the female, to the exclusion of the other gender (not to mention the apotheosis of her ‘rights’ about the male and the children) is symptomatic of the double-mindedness of modernity. If the goal is to make the women of Iran or the Middle East as ‘free’ as those in America, then I pray the men in the Middle East become stricter and beat a few more. Isn’t it obvious that the American woman is out of control? For all the rhetoric of ‘liberation’ only one thing should be kept in mind–wait until the American woman sees the blowback that will occur in this country. It is coming and none too soon.
Earl wrote–
“If the goal is to make the women of Iran or the Middle East as ‘free’ as those in America, then I pray the men in the Middle East become stricter and beat a few more.”
Patriarchy is an order of the past. Some people are out of time. It will be women in their own countries that free the Middle East from a stale way of thinking.
Farewell to the last of the Patriarchs, and may Ayaan Hirsi Ali haunt your sleep.
Earl, you’re one uptight pr!ck. That woman does not deserve to be cracked in the skull for only wearing what Western women wear at the beach. Your attitude that American women are out of control says a lot about your relations with them.
Earl, I agree that ‘women’s liberation’ has negative aspects. Certainly family life in this country has deteriorated partly because of it. But the woman in this video is demonstrating an understandable reaction to the tyrannical efforts of the Iranian government to control people’s social behavior. Freedom of conscience is a fundamental right that we in this country would never give up even if it means some degradation in certain aspects of our lives. No one deserves to be beaten bloody by the police because of what they wear. You should be ashamed for expressing such a view.
Anthony,
What you don’t get is that a false dichotomy cannot stand. Matriarchy vs. Patriarchy is a canard. Any culture that was Matriarchal in governance receded into oblivion and economic failure. The auspices have been taken and contrary to your prediction, the social construct that currently stands is but a scaffold. What lies underneath is reality and it is quite hard. When the scaffold, erected by men, collapses—where will the matriarchy be then? Where will the matriarchy be when a foreign or domestic boot marches on our soil, having been prepared for war? They will run behind the men, wailing, lamenting and begging any man to defend them, as gender specific behaviors (so often denied by the female) dictate—and the men this time will take the children while the women, who never appreciated the men or the children that were allowed to live by their capricious ‘choice’ in contravention of the Natural Law, will be raped, maimed, killed and left bereft of those material and physical relations they so coveted and manipulated to keep. No, Anthony, you are the outmoded one, as are the notions that have bewitched your mind. May St. Gianna Beretta Molla, a true feminist, haunt you in your dreams.
Earl,
Since I said nothing about matriarchy, your argument doesn’t have much force. The modern world I refer to is the present world of men and women in political equality—something that can’t exist in your world of beating women. In case you’ve forgotten, women fight in the U.S. and Israeli military, the best in the world. They don’t run away; they fight, they die-and they live and are honored. You should be ashamed of your ridiculous protectionism.
And as for being outmoded, the present world of free peoples and growing globalization is a young and future world. If you want to join the jihad, go ahead. But there is no future in a museum.
Dr. Gianna does not haunt my dreams. I honor her in the only way she can be honored: by her accomplishments. No incense is needed.
All that has bewitched my mind is science and logic, medicine and technology: all pouring out daily in countless discoveries, even reaching to Earth-like worlds beyond our solar system.
These things are far more solid than your airy cathedrals.
Welcome to the future, Earl.
It is all proof of Iranian women becoming fed up.
and NO the two women are different. Photo was from a totally different situation.
Earl, Pajamas editors decided to let your horrifyingly misogynistic comment stand as an example of free speech. We find it appalling.
Anthony,
You are a neoteric (you love the new for the sake of new to the exclusion of what is ‘old’) and consensus approving ideologue, nothing more. You would laud the military and I see particularly that you cite the IDF. Imagine that, this explains why you would not incense the memory of St. Gianna but would only praise her ‘accomplishments’. I suppose you would incense the Talmud though. No, Anthony, I have been in the military–I am an Iraqi War Vet–unlike the oxygen-thieves that often describe themselves as Neo-cons. What you claim is propaganda pure and simple. Construct your mental Utopia but please do not foist the paint on the canvasses of others, especially when they know better than you do. Moreover, I don’t know what logic you could be speaking of because it certainly is not Socratic or symbolic since your rationale is not tautological.
Since the scientists are your new priests and the yarns they spin are your new dogmas, perhaps you should become a student of the Philosophy of Science so that you would know and not be duped by the limitations and boundaries of Science since it claims to be as infallible as any Pope ever did. It would behoove you to pick up Sir Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific discovery and learn about the falsifiability criterion.
As far as saying nothing about Matriarchy that is a bit specious at best. The obverse is implied for you certainly cannot maintain that what is present or current is the mean—or do you? Pray tell, who says that the women is equal? Does nature say she is equal? Does the state say she is equal? Nature, that oracular inspiration for the high priests of science does not say the genders are equal. So, the state or the polity does, which is an artificial construct that lasts as long as the will to power lasts in any government. What you should uphold and laud is what is the subsurface and the substantial notion of ‘being’ wherein any dignity by which ‘equality’ is presumed or predicated must exist if it exists at all. Finally, you will dream what you dream and dream what you cannot control but do not presume that what is not empirically verifiable does not ontologically exist or lie within the realm of ontological possibility. You are a novice and adept of the zeitgeist, indoctrinated with the vision of your elders who came from a ‘past’ that you presume to predicate a ‘future’ upon. When the sacraments of your high priests are ineffective and the Shekennah cloud of your ‘feminine’ wisdom dissipates from the sanctuary of your Kabbalistic and materialistic ‘wisdom’, you will see what dream will haunt you—and it may be horrific.
Earl says. “When the sacraments of your high priests are ineffective and the Shekennah cloud of your ‘feminine’ wisdom dissipates from the sanctuary of your Kabbalistic and materialistic ‘wisdom’, you will see what dream will haunt you—and it may be horrific.”
— or it may be divine. It might even be fascinating. I might be anything seeing as it’s Anthony’s dream to have.
Earl says, “Pray tell, who says that the women is equal? Does nature say she is equal? Does the state say she is equal? Nature, that oracular inspiration for the high priests of science does not say the genders are equal. So, the state or the polity does, which is an artificial construct that lasts as long as the will to power lasts in any government.”
— Do you mean equal or equitable? Is the right eye the same as the left one? Is your nose the same as my nose? Of course they are not the same but they are equally protected by the law. You seem to resent these protections. You seem also to resent the Talmud and I’m guessing the tradition which it is based on but this tradition does recognize that all people have a personal relationship with the Creator and their direct relationship with our Creator implies a sort of equality of value in His eyes, even if we have different roles in society.
This society has yet to fail to the point that the liberal (not Leftist) will to power has evaporated. Earl, we will have had to deconstructed to a far greater degree for your view of the world to become the new mean. The question is, are you self important enough to contribute to these deconstructions in service to your preferred regurgitated pedantry?
>No, Anthony, I have been in the military–I am an Iraqi War Vet-
For whose side
Earl Said: “If the woman portrayed in the static picture is the same as the one in the youtube clip, then she got what she deserved.”
Earl, you are one of those idiots who should be smacked in the mouth. Actually you should be locked up!
Earl must be one of our beloved 26% American Muslims that would commit suicide for the cause of Allah. Even a person with only a double digit IQ knows that it’s a women’s right to dress any damn way she pleases regardless of what a man thinks. Islamic fashion police are just another form of Neo Nazi Fascism that Muslims use around the world to control what the Quran dictates as a person 1/2 the value of a man.
‘Earl’ is a classic example of a religious fanatic masquerading as a pseudo-intellectual. HIs logic is completely circular, and therefore, he imagines, self-sustaining, but his reasoning, in actuality, has no basis in reality.
In point of fact, I know a number of women who could take Earl by his scrawny neck and tie him into an appreciable simulacrum of a pretzel. They are better soldiers than he would ever be, and his supposition that the underlying reality of male dominated society being superior to either a balanced society or a matriarchy is little more than a house of cards, based on a very poor understanding of history, distorted by the lens of his perceptions via a suppressive theology that has no room for true scientific thinking. As is so often the case of his pathetic kind, he masks his inferior knowlege behind a smokescreen of pseudo intellectual vocabulary, trying to pass himself off as a deep thinker – but his depths languish in the region of a continental shelf, with no real thought of venturing into the deeper waters of serious thought.
It is fairly common knowlege that the restriction of feminine dress to the excessive veiling and concealing costumes has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, but is merely a relic of outmoded thought promulgated by the corrupt and deservedly-dead Ottoman Empire. The Quran is, in fact, bereft of any edict requiring the concealment of women by such bizarre and ridiculous clothing, completely unsuited to the environments in which many of these Islamic cultures exist.
No, this is merely proof that in so many cases, a huge number of Moslem males are, quite simply, ignorant pigs – devoid of the necessary social training their parents should have instilled in them to observe moral boundaries, incapable of restraining their lusts at the sight of an exposed patch of female skin – and ashamed of their own bestial responses to this. So they remove the blame for their obvious inadequacies from themselves by the simple ruse of placing the blame – and the responsiblity – on the female, openly lying by proclaiming this to be a precept of Islam, that a woman should conceal herself from male eyes.
This is why so many Moslem males are against the education of women: they want to keep their women ignorant slaves, subservient to the will of the male, and to maintain a stupid, male-dominated social structure that is incapable of any type of substantial social growth…relegating them all, unwittingly, to their continued status as savages and barbarians. The only argument againt carpet-bombing such an ignorant pack of louts is the continued presence of these innocent victimized women and children in the midst of all these stupid and predatory male Moslem ignoramuses. Otherwise, the majority of Moslem males who continue to believe in this ultimately stupid (and non-Islamic) concept are one of the most cogent arguments in favor of genocide that I can possibly imagine.
Earl and others like you, why don’t you move to Iran and then shoot off your mouth??? No human being has the right to take the rights of another one, and no one should be able to beat another and treat them the way these animals are treating my brothers and sisters in Iran.
SHAME ON YOU AND YOUR BACKWARDS MENTALITY.
Roxanne Ganji a proud IRANIAN WOMAN & Iranian Human Rights Activist.
Morcroft says:
>>this is merely proof that in so many cases, a huge number of Moslem males are, quite simply, ignorant pigs – devoid of the necessary social training their parents should have instilled in them to observe moral boundaries, incapable of restraining their lusts at the sight of an exposed patch of female skin – and ashamed of their own bestial responses to this.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics
I was born and raised in Iran. I love my countrymen dearly, you have no idea how it rips my heart to see how our people are savagely treated. I constantly pray for a miracle, and hope for a day all be free from tyrany. Earl, your remarks are incomprehensible.