If you wanted to lose weight two pounds a week you would have had lost a lot of it by now. If you had a new born, he or she would be 19 months old by now. If you had a candy bar left out of its wrapper, 19 months later you couldn’t recognize it. If you had bought a pair of shoes it would be worn out by now. Right? Now imagine Hossein Derakhshan sitting in a cell in Iran for 19 months. Now there is this blog launched by his family seeking justice for a man whose pending case is not attractive enough for the Canadians, the country of his citizenship, to follow up on it! Only if Juliette Binoches of the world would carry names of each and every social and political prisoner in Iran.

  

 

مجید توکلی: "موضوع فروپاشی در ایران در ابعاد مختلف سیاسی،‌ فرهنگی، ‌اجتماعی و اقتصادی موضوع بسار پر اهمیتی است. از سال ها پیش تقدم و تاخر مسایل بالا مطرح بوده است و عده ای ایجاد نارضایتی و فراگیر شدن آن را با تشدید هر یک موثری دانسته است. چنین بوده است که برجسته کردن تفاوت فرهنگی و اجتماعی امروز ایرانیان با قرائت رسمی حاکمیت در رعایت امور فردی چون پوشش و عموم تفریحات و سرگرمی ها و ارتباطات در ادامه نیز موثر خواهد بود. در باب اهمیت و تقدم فروپاشی اقتصادی نیز – که تسهیل کننده شرایط انقلابی است، تحریم های اقتصادی که در چند سال اخیر روند تشدیدی داشته است در این روزها رو به افزایش است که اگر چه شرایط زیست و پیشرفت را در کشور با مشکل روبرو می نماید ولی با توجه به خطرات آن برای استحکام قدرت استبداد در ایران هم از کمبود منابع و هم از هزینه منابع قبلی در جبران محرومیت های اساسی مورد نظر خواهد بود و هم از وضعیت نارضایتی که ایجاد خواهد کرد. بنابر این افزایش محرومیت و سختی که در بستر جمهوری اسلامی به یک واقعیت تثبیت شده منتهی شده است در چند ماه آینده نمی تواند چنان فاجعه آمیز برای آینده ایران در نظر گرفته شود. زیرا که پس از دوران سخت دیکتاتوری در ایران، روزهای خوش نیز فرا خواهد رسید."

  

 

IRAN: Prisoner Raped

Bahram Tasviri Khiabani, a prisoner held in Rajaiee Shahr prison in Iran, was raped by two Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards. The victim talks on camera from inside the prison.

  

 

Cookingpundit: "What’s exile? My daughter’s question surfed in the air as I went to close the door behind her music teacher with the two year old toddling next to me. What’s exile I asked myself? Maybe it’s not having had tasted those crazy beautiful white mulberries of back home for over twenty years. Maybe it’s those field trips and setting up a large brezent canvas on the ground to try and catch white drops of mulberries."

  

 

Please execute Sanandaj
Decapitate Mahabad
Please don’t let our babies be born
And don’t let rain to rain and plants to grow
And earth to breath!

Sherko Bekas

  

 

Mir Hossein Mousavi on the execution of five activists: "Is this the divine justice that we were seeking?"

  

 

Execution of five Iranian political prisoners. This is the headline. Farzad Kamangar, Farhad Vakili, Ali Haydarian, Mehdi Eslamian and Shirin Alam Houli were hanged at Evin prison today. Perhaps these executions sit well with us or our Noble peace price winner, Shirin Ebadi, in a speech would not have had said: "Human rights is the foundation of a true democracy therefore the rights of majority must be the main goal of such a government."

  

 

Our Male Chauvinistic Culture


Cultural campaign for women equality is a worthy cause which can be best carried out at the grass root level in a democratic society inside Iran. The virtual space or exile are not the best venues for such campaigns. That is why I think the biggest challenge of our time is political in nature. One may bring up the chicken-egg paradox and argue that these cultural issues breed the kind of backwardness, discrimination, and violence that characterizes the regime in Iran. That might be true to a certain extent in the same way as some may argue that Nazism or Fascism had their underpinnings in the European culture. The political project not only must go on but also given the first priority in my opinion because without the success of the political project, the social project for change has little chance of success.

I believe despite all our cultural deficiencies and chauvinistic males and so on we can do better than this. Some may even argue that many of the things that Shadi Sadr says about Iranian men, are things that western feminists might say about western men. Obviously most of us would trade their political system and democratic institutions for ours in a heart beat. The logical conclusion of Ms. Sadr arguments is that this regime, by virtue of representing our male chauvinistic culture, enjoys some degree of legitimacy although she may not have put it this way.

  

 

The Dual Burdens

Whilst Iranian women struggle for an affirmation of their status as equal citizens and are demanding withdrawal of discriminatory laws against them, the United Nations elects the country’s totalitarian regime to its Commission on the Status of Women. The conditions under which the Iranian women live, have enough grounding for the United Nations to call the regime in Iran on their gender apartheid; instead they have promoted IRI to a seat on CSW. When the laws of a totalitarian regime are supported and legitimized by the international community they will have a direct effect on the perpetuation of injustice, as well as continuation of segregation in the society. This in my opinion is justifying more domestic violence. Sadly what we witness first hand is that Iranian women’s suffering is underestimated by the United Nations recent act. They seem to treat this primarily as a fictionalized case. But these are not the reasons why I write this note. I am writing this because a few days ago I read an article by an Iranian women’s rights activist named Shadi Sadr. In that article Sadr makes several statements against Iranian men and compares them all with the totalitarian regime’s Imam, Ayatollah Seddighi, a man who called women the reason for earthquakes in his Friday sermon, and represents a regime that arrests, rapes, and kills.


Iranian men unfortunately are once again victims of stereotyping and this time not by the American Betty Mahmoody in a movie called “Not without My Daughter” but in Sadr’s article titled “What is Different between Tehran’s Friday Sermon Imam and the rest of Iranian Men?”. The image she has portrayed of Iranian men in her article is misleading. Without raising objection to the original comments and minimizing the Ayatollah’s statement she takes Iranian men to a kangaroo court and denies them all due process rights. Based on Sadr’s statement half the population of the country is guilty of sexual harassment as well as mischievous behavior against Iranian women. Where is the logic in such a comparison? Those men are mostly innocent of the crimes Sadr is convicting them of. After all Iranian men are not a bol de soupe that everything could go in. This is simply wrong.


But then some may say I question Sadr’s motives in writing such an article because I have not been victimized or assaulted in the streets of Iran. I assure you that will be a failing argument. Like some Iranian women I too have experienced that type of vulgarity in the streets back in Iran, i.e. age 9: a young man grabbed my bosom as I walked with my mother and brother, age 13, covered in the mandatory Hijab and walking to school a man came close to me and said: “I want to eat your pussy,” at age 14 I was harassed by a Basiji on several occasions. In his last attempt he pushed me against the wall and pressed himself against me. Whatever our personal experiences may or may not be, we can not deny men’s rights by collectively putting them all in the same camp as the Imam.


Although subjects such as women’s oppression in Iran and gender apartheid are important issues to be raised and discussed, none should admonish us to forget that most Iranian men support Iranian women in their struggle to gain equal rights. We need to acknowledge the difference between the totalitarian regime’s men and the Iranian male population. There’s no room for bias in women’s movement that is supposed to be fighting against bias!

  

 

Stereotyping Half the Population

After Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi’s comments about women causing earthquakes, an Iranian lawyer and women's rights activist Shadi Sadr wrote: “I don’t see any difference between Ayatollah Sedighi and every Iranian man.” She went on to add: “Iranian men belong to the same camp as the [ruling regime’s] Ayatollah.” More than addressing the Ayatollah’s comments Sadr’s article in my opinion is minimizing the issue as well as stereotyping half the population of the country.