Pro-democracy forces in Iran are protesting against cruelty of regime’s Morality Police. The brave Iranians have taken to the streets to protest against the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody, whose only offense was wearing trousers deemed “too tight” and a hijab “too loose”. Although women in Iran are protesting on the streets following the brutal murder of Mahsa Amini, this is not the first case where Iranian regime has used its cruel forces against women in the country. Such things are happening in the country since Ayatollah Rohullah Khomeini captured power through so-called Islamic revolution and established reign of terror thus turning the people into mere slaves of whims of the Islamist mullahs.
Mahsa Amini murder has prompted Biden administration in taking further punitive measures against Iranian regime by taking steps to level sanctions against the Morality Police and key figures in the regime. But we need to remember, the same Biden administration has been appeasing mullahs through numerous discounts and unfreezing billions of dollars. At the same time while Washington has been consistently warning Iran to refrain from building nuclear bomb, in my opinion, Iran already has made bombs and just waiting for the opportunity of proclaiming itself as a nuclear power. And I think, for Western countries, particularly the United States, a nuclear Iran is the most effective tool for blackmailing the Middle Eastern countries and force them in buying weapons worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But most of the analysts won’t divulge this truth.
What the Americans are thinking about the recent case of Mahsa Amini and Iranian regime’s cruelty on the people and its Morality Police? Here is an answer from one American citizen:
Sadly, Iran now seems a model for the United States, in two senses.
First, we now have our own morality police, just like Iran. And, like Iran, they concentrate their restrictions on women, as dystopian in concept as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. This isn’t about woke or cancel culture. It’s about the very real changes that are taking place to counter norms that have existed in this country for decades. The movement is growing across all levels of government and the changes will impact us all.
Most fundamentally, the morality squad wants to tell women what they can and can’t do with their bodies. There, the squadron has the support of a Supreme Court majority that cares not a whit for law or precedent but only seeks to impose its own political view. Already we have seen states enact bans on abortion that put mothers’ health at imminent risk. Those women are being told by the morality police: we care about foetuses, not about mothers.
At a grassroots level, the strategic, insidious infiltration of the morality police into our classrooms is growing at an alarming rate. Teachers are being bullied and risk being fired for presenting viewpoints at variance with the morality squad’s view of life. Ironically, some of the same people who worry about our children “being groomed” by open discourse and historical reality have no problem putting automatic weapons into the hands of their minor children as they pose for the family Christmas card.
According to the American Library Association (ALA), 2021 witnessed the highest number of book bans since the ALA began compiling the list over 20 years ago. The unprecedented rise in recent years includes books that have been staples on the student curriculum for decades, among them Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Woman and To Kill a Mockingbird. In 2006, Kansas actually banned Charlotte’s Web because talking animals are supposedly blasphemous and unnatural, while the spider’s death was considered inappropriate subject matter for a children’s book. To the morality police, if talking animals are problematic, one can only imagine how hard they will fight to fend off books with content having to do with LGBTQ communities, the history of race relations in the U.S. and any non-Christian literature. As Ray Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Very The Handmaid’s Tale, where women were forbidden to read and write.
Both women and men stand to lose yet again the hard-won right to marry who they want, as the morality cops take aim at same-sex marriage. Those cops want to reach into the bedroom.
The second way in which Iran is a model for the United States is a more positive one: it may take a strong women’s movement to overcome a lot of the issues we face. The upcoming elections will show how strong a force women are in voting to rescue rights they – and their menfolk as well – hold dear. As the Iranian soccer star Ali Karimi tweeted: “Don’t be afraid of strong women. Maybe the day will come when they are your only army”. It is an army the American nation desperately needs now to diminish the scourge of the morality police.
Hope my readers already have some ingredients of intellectual thought.
