Mick Hartley

The totalitarian evil in Tehran

This is a few days old now, but I haven't seen such details anywhere else. From Mariam Memarsadeghi in Tablet:

Mahsa (Jeena) Amini died in a coma on Sept. 16 after repeated blows to her head by Islamist regime thugs enforcing mandatory Islamist hijab. She could have been any 22-year-old Iranian girl, killed because strands of her hair were showing from beneath her headscarf. We know her story only because her brave Kurdish family refused to cower, despite being surrounded by regime agents and threatened to be silent. Mahsa’s family has been bravely telling reporters their girl was healthy, that the regime’s fabricated video purportedly showing her collapsing from a heart condition is a lie. Her father, as well as girls who were arrested with her, testify that they saw bruises on her head, a fact confirmed by a leaked photograph of the bruised, unconscious girl in a hospital bed.

Officials from the hospital where Mahsa died have also spoken out, another courageous act, telling reporters Mahsa had 10 or 11 blows to her head, likely from it being bashed into a wall. The other women and girls who were arrested with Mahsa for violating the hijab have stated that Mahsa’s beatings began in the police van where they were all held.

Most striking is testimony via Twitter and submitted to regime officials from Hasan Shirazi, a first lieutenant in the “morality” police station to which Mahsa was brought. Mahsa was holding her head and screaming loudly when she was taken out of the police van, says Shirazi. A female guard told her she would be released soon, but Mahsa would not stop screaming.

Hearing her screams, a senior officer, Colonel Seyyed Abbas Hosseini, reportedly became very angry and approached the women. According to Shirazi’s testimony, Hosseini told Mahsa to shut up and punched her so hard that she fell to the ground, unconscious. Everyone at the station was apparently silent as Colonel Hosseini then began to kick Mahsa and ask that she be taken to basement level 2, the “darkest unit” of the detention center. The women guards could not lift Mahsa and one cried out in panic that her ear was bleeding. It took 20 minutes for an ambulance to come take Mahsa to the hospital.

Since the imposition of Sharia law in the 1979 revolution, there have been countless girls and women like Mahsa. Today the reality of this nightmare is being disseminated across the world because Iranians are rising up against the totalitarian evil of the regime and speaking out about the lashings, torture, rape, and killings. The actress Banafsheh Taherian is a striking example, showing her solidarity with Mahsa’s family by going public about receiving 60 lashes from regime police when she was 19-years-old. Her Twitter thread about this trauma is excruciating to read, in part because every Iranian has a loved one who has been on the receiving end of these blows and the verbal abuse and humiliation that accompanies them. These are very rare public admissions. Iranians have in large part stayed silent, particularly about torture and sexual abuse in prisons.

Meanwhile, in spite of these horrors, the Biden administration is still committed to continue with Obama's misbegotten attempts to accommodate the theocrats in Tehran.

When President Barack Obama promoted the original Iran deal, his pitch was that the normalization of ties with the Islamic Republic would improve the welfare and freedoms of ordinary Iranians. The exact opposite happened. Even with injections of billions in cash into the regime’s coffers, the people grew poorer and the state more repressive. The so-called “moderate” former President Hassan Rouhani presided over the killing of over 1,500 protesters. That President Joe Biden wants to obtain a watered-down version of that deal with Raisi in Rouhani’s office, and with the supreme leader still in power, shows the moral vacuity of a foreign policy that aligns itself with the most repressive tyrants on the planet, even as they murder women, gay people, political liberals, journalists, and anyone else who dares to assert the most basic claims to their own humanity.

Biden has been willing to stick Americans with extortionate gas prices in order to fight for Ukraine and trash our alliance with India by sticking up for “human rights” in the subcontinent. But when it comes to Iran, the president of the United States and leading officials in his administration have been eager to abandon young Iranians, women especially, who have been fighting courageously for freedom since 2009. The greatest asset America has for a peaceful Middle East is the Iranian people, and yet the Obama-Biden playbook is predicated on their permanent oppression under the heel of a brutal regime of America-hating, Holocaust-denying, theocratic misogynists who beat women to death for exposing their hair.

Hardship in North Korea

A long piece in the Daily NK chronicles the desperate conditions that many North Koreans are currently facing.

There has been a sharp increase in the number of North Koreans dying of disease amid extreme hardship or ending their lives because of depression, Daily NK has learned.

A source in North Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Sept. 19 that a struggling couple in their 50s killed themselves at the beginning of September.

The couple had been living with their twenty-something daughter, who started experiencing symptoms akin to COVID-19. But when she visited a doctor, she was only told she did not have COVID-19 and was not prescribed medicine or given any treatment.

The family, which could barely put food on their table, let alone buy medication, had relied in the past on food and money borrowed from their neighbors. But this time around, the neighbors were too hard up themselves to provide any help.

The couple’s daughter died last month, and the couple ended their own lives at the beginning of the month, the source explained.

In another incident, the members of six families living in a harmonica house (a common type of residence in North Korea) in Pihyon County, North Pyongan Province, died of disease or were driven to suicide by lives of hardship.

All six of the families, who were working in a bearing factory in the Yangchaek Workers’ District, were in extreme hardship because of their poor wages.

According to the source, two families lost their children to a fever, while another husband lost his wife to disease. Two of the remaining three families died from a lack of food, and the husband of the sixth family ended his life from a bout of depression.

With access to enough nutrients and timely medical care, these individuals could have survived. But their immunity had been weakened by longstanding malnutrition, ultimately leading to their deaths, the source said. 

In the past, it was common for the families of North Korean farmers and factory workers (who receive few if any rations) to run out of food. But more recently, no small number of entrepreneurs who had considerable savings from smuggling or trading seem to be ending up in similar straits.

According to a source in Pyongyang, the family members of a shipowner and merchant (Mr. A) quietly ended their lives, unable to endure their hardship any longer.

Mr. A had earned enough money from trade with China to buy two apartments. But after being sent to reeducation for violating trade law at the beginning of this year, his assets were confiscated. The family was ultimately forced to sell off its furniture to make ends meet, the source said.

The head of the people’s unit visited Mr. A’s house several times last month to hand out a circular, but no one answered the door. When the unit head finally went inside, he found the entire family, already dead.

In Gangwon Province, a man in his forties (Mr. B) and his wife had been suffering hardship after the pandemic disrupted their work and ultimately decided to end their lives, to the shock of their local community.

Mr. B had been a long-distance trader who traveled from Wonsan to several areas to do business. He was well-known in trading circles in Wonsan because he would often lend money to other merchants, but after traveling was restricted during the pandemic, he had to close his business.

His income was cut off, and he could not collect the loans he had made, which left him in debt. In the end, Mr. B ended his life along with his family members, leading behind a suicide note that read, “There’s nothing more I can do.”

While starvation was reportedly a frequent cause of death during the “Arduous March” period of privation in the 1990s, nowadays it appears that more people are dying of infectious disease, as malnutrition weakens their immunity, or are driven by hardship to end their own lives.

“Just a few years ago, I would never have imagined that entrepreneurs doing a lot of business or smuggling would be driven by suffering to end their lives,” the source in North Pyonggan Province told Daily NK. “But so many people are facing unbearable hardship even among the formerly prosperous. There is also more criticism of the government behind closed doors for political mistakes that are resulting in lost lives.” 

Of course this kind of reporting can't be independently verified, but the brave individuals who pass this news on to the Daily NK people in South Korea are risking their lives to communicate what it's like to suffer in the Kims' nightmare state. The least we can do is listen and pay attention.

SNP Equalities

The SNP continues to cover itself in glory:

Say hello to the SNP London Branch’s Equalities Officer 👀🙄 https://t.co/79aGub9r8o pic.twitter.com/4jNph5blsw

— Julie Scott 🍒 (@judgejules75) September 23, 2022

Cancelling Waters

At last, the start of a Roger Waters backlash:

Planned concerts in Poland by Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters have been cancelled amid outrage over the musician's stance on the Ukraine war.

The concert's promoter, Live Nation Poland, confirmed the cancellation but gave no reason for it.

The controversy was triggered by an open letter Waters wrote to Ukraine's first lady, Olena Zelenska.

In it, he said, "extreme nationalists" in Ukraine "have set your country on the path to this disastrous war".

He accused her husband, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, of failing to fulfil his election campaign promises to bring peace to the Donbas region and and made no mention of Russia's responsibility for the war.

In response, Mrs Zelenska wrote on Twitter that it was Russia which invaded Ukraine and was now destroying its cities and killing civilians. "Roger Waters, you should ask for peace from the president of another country," she wrote.

Mr Water's open letter led Łukasz Wantuch, a Krakow city councillor, to urge people to boycott the concerts.

City councillors have drafted a resolution to declare Mr Waters persona non grata, due to be voted on at a session on September 28.

"Taking into account Russia's criminal attack on Ukraine as well as the increasing number of war crimes committed by Russian soldiers that are coming to light, [the councillors] express outrage at the theses and statements made by Mr Roger Waters in connection with Russia's invasion of Ukraine," the resolution states.

Mr Waters, currently on tour in the US, hit back in another Facebook post entitled "Hey Łukasz Wantuch, Leave them kids alone", referencing the lyrics of the classic Pink Floyd song, Another Brick in the Wall.

Ooh the wit.

I'll admit that I'm not a close follower of Waters' career, but has he done anything since the jejune Another Brick in the Wall, some 43 tears ago? Why do people still go to see him? Politically the man's a complete disgrace - though I suppose it makes a change to see him attack Ukraine this time instead of the Jews, his usual target.

He denied an earlier media report that he or his management had cancelled the concerts themselves and accused Mr Wantuch of the "draconian censoring" of his work.

Other reports say the Krakow gigs were cancelled by Waters' management. Presumably Waters denies this so he can claim to be the victim. Whatever, they're better off without him.

Sending out breast binders

From the Telegraph - Trans charity Mermaids giving breast binders to children behind parents’ backs:

A transgender children’s charity is giving potentially dangerous chest-flattening devices to 14-year-olds against their parents’ wishes, an investigation by The Telegraph has found

Mermaids, which receives funding from the taxpayer and runs training for schools and the NHS, offered to send a breast binder discreetly to a girl they believed was only 14, even after they were told that she was not allowed to use one by her mother.

Evidence obtained by The Telegraph shows that the charity’s staff have offered binders to children as young as 13 who say that their parents oppose the practice.

Chest-binding has been described by parent groups as a form of “self-harm” and it can cause breathing difficulties, chronic back pain, changes to the spine and broken ribs.

Dr Hilary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics, who is leading a review of trans children’s services for the NHS, describes it as “painful and potentially harmful”.

Campaigners and MPs said on Sunday night that there were “massive safeguarding red flags” over Mermaids and called for an immediate investigation by the Charity Commission.

The Telegraph has uncovered evidence of the Mermaids online help centre offering advice to users who present themselves as young as 13 that controversial hormone-blocking drugs are safe and “totally reversible”.

In the last month alone, this newspaper has seen discussions in the charity’s moderated forum for 12 to 15-year-olds on how to raise money to start taking drugs and the best way to take testosterone.

A moderator also publicly congratulated a teenage user for deciding that they were transgender by the age of 13 and deciding that they wanted drugs and “all the surgeries”.

Mermaids' enthusiasm for medical mutilation originated with chief executive Susie Green. Her husband didn't like the way their son played with girly toys, so they decided to "change his sex" and make him a girl rather than live with a potentially gay son - so off to Thailand with him on his sixteenth birthday to be castrated and be medically refashioned.

And yet she's celebrated as a some kind of ground-breaking hero:

Mermaids holds a privileged position in public life. The controversial charity is paid to train teachers, police forces, NHS staff and social services on dealing with transgender issues.

In recent years, it has received more than £20,000 in taxpayer’s money from grants and more than £500,000 from the National Lottery.

Staff have met government officials, given advice to the NHS and were identified as influential at the soon-to-be closed Tavistock Clinic as it was dolling out drugs to children.

The Nagakin Capsule Tower

Living in pods seemed like the future some 50 years ago - but, as with so many revolutionary architectural visions, it didn't quite work out:

An icon of Japanese Metabolism, the Nakagin Capsule Tower stood in the Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo from 1972 until it was demolished earlier this year. Conceived by the famed designer Kisho Kurokawa, the building featured two central concrete towers, with 140 individual pods slotted into the main structures. A circular window allowed light into the small modules, which were created with the intention that they could be removed and replaced as needed.

This flexibility was an essential component of Metabolist architecture, which fused the concept of megastructures with organic growth, meaning many of the designs of the period embraced prefabrication for its ability to “regenerate” every few decades. Unfortunately for the Nakagain Capsule Tower, though, structural issues prevented the pods from being easily swapped, and the building fell quickly into a state of disrepair.

Photographer Noritaka Minami visited in the last few years up to demolition:

[Images © Noritaka Minami]

Fighting with the Nazis

David Patrikarakos at UnHerd, on Putin's reservist mobilisation as a symptom of Russia's defeat:

“This [mobilisation] means the war is coming ever closer to ordinary Russians.” “Petya” is a Ukrainian soldier on the country’s southern front, and he’s weighing up what recent events mean for those on the front lines. “He recognised that he needed more troops, more people to reach his goals. Before this moment, for ordinary people in Russia, this war was something very far away but now, ordinary Russian people will feel what this war means in their personal life.”

This is important. Even in a dictatorship, which Russia emphatically is — no matter how many democratic veneers Putin tries to paste over his actions — you can’t enrage too many people too many times if you want to govern more or less unhindered. When I was last in Ukraine, over the summer, I lost count of how many people told me the USSR’s failed invasion of Afghanistan was the final nail in its coffin.

...Russians are unhappy. The most searched terms on the internet in Russia following the announcement were, according to one anonymous tweeter, “how to break your arm”; “how to leave Russia”; “foreign passport”; and then “how to avoid mobilisation”. There’s a great joke doing the rounds in Moscow right now, too. “As a reservist, you have been mobilised!” “Who are we fighting with?” “The Nazis.” “Yes, but against whom?”

On the levee

Arthur Rothstein - January 1942. "Memphis, Tennessee. Cars parked on Mississippi River levee."

[Photo: Shorpy/Arthur Rothstein for the Office of War Information]

Abbas at the UN

We last heard of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a month ago when he horrified his Berlin hosts by blithely talking of the "50 holocausts" that Israel had committed against the Palestinians. On Friday he was speaking at the UN in New York, and continued the same tone-deaf bad faith approach, with his determination to vilify the Israelis at every opportunity.

David Horovitz in the Times of Israel - Abbas asked why there is no Palestinian state. The answers were in his speech:

He claimed to genuinely want peace with Israel, but in other passages of his address made clear that he rejects Israel’s very legitimacy: he denounced the Balfour Declaration; he described Israel as a colonizing power for 75 years — that is, since its historic rebirth in 1948; he airbrushed Judaism out of his “eternal” Jerusalem, in which there are only Muslim and Christian holy sites, under relentless, unjustified, daily Israeli attack.

In his narrative, there was no acknowledgment, no sign of internalization, of why Israel might hesitate to relinquish any more of the territory he has sought all these years for a Palestinian state.

His comments included powerful passages on the terrible deaths of children in Gaza, complete with a New York Times front page filled with the faces of young people killed in May 2021’s conflict. But there was no mention that Israel dismantled its settlements and withdrew all its soldiers from Gaza in 2005. No hint that Hamas took over, and has relentlessly provoked conflict with Israel ever since, using its civilian population as human shields for its indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel, subverting all relevant resources for weaponry — and battering home the lesson to Israel that relinquishing the adjacent territory where Abbas demands sovereignty merely empowers the forces that seek our destruction.

In his depiction, last year’s 11-day war between Hamas and Israel was the latest of “50 massacres” carried out by Israel against the Palestinians since 1948; at least this time he refrained from calling them “holocausts.” ...

For three-quarters of an hour, the Palestinian Authority president fulminated against Israel’s refusal to grant the Palestinians full sovereignty on all the territory they seek, and condemned the international community, led by the United States, for failing to force Israel’s hand. He professed bitter indignation at Israel’s brutal intransigence and utter bafflement at the world’s complicity.

But his speech contained the explanations. Like his unlamented predecessor Yasser Arafat, he continues to resist the very fact of Israel’s legitimacy as the revived historic homeland of the Jews, encourages his people to believe that it is a colonizing presence that can be ejected, and incites and rewards murderous hostility toward it.

Lapid on Thursday offered Abbas a one-sentence formula for Palestinian independence: ‘Put down your weapons, and there will be peace.” But as ever, tragically for our people and for his, the Palestinian leader was not minded to listen.

Rebel women

Forcing women to wear the hijab isn't some eccentric by-product of the Iranian revolution, or of Islamic societies in general: it's a key feature.

Janice Turner in the Times:

You might wonder why the Iranian regime doesn’t bend to modernity, placate its critics and end enforced hijab. Even the Saudis have lately limited the powers of their own morality police to harass women in the street. But Masih Alinejad, the Iranian journalist who eight years ago began My Stealthy Freedom, where Iranian women photographed themselves daringly without headscarves, tells me: “This is not a piece of cloth — it is the Berlin Wall”. Control of women’s dress isn’t a by-product of Islamic rule but its foundation: if hijab falls, so does the regime. Each rebel woman, therefore, is another loose brick.

When the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah, it imposed the veil on every female over seven years old. This was not just to signify to the world, and its own people, that Iran was under new anti-western management, but as a method of societal control. Among the slogans of 1979 were “Wear a veil, or we will punch your head” and “Death to the unveiled”.

In her extraordinary graphic novel Persepolis Marjane Satrapi recalls the sudden horror when her childhood freedom ended and she had to don a black shroud to attend school. The veil was neither a Persian tradition nor a practice that, as in Indonesia or Pakistan, grew with the ascendancy of conservative Islam. It was enforced wholesale overnight upon women who previously were free to choose.

What a boon for a tyranny to create laws where you can harass or imprison half the population just for how they look. If letting your scarf slip on the bus was punishable with 74 lashes or 60 days in prison, you’d stay watchful, respectful, obedient. Moreover it gives licence for others to harass women in the street: for clerics or older men casually to slap a “western whore” across the face, for conservative busybodies to chide, for parents to keep their daughters close and young men to scare pretty girls.

By enforcing hijab, the government inveigles itself into your bedroom, it watches you put on make-up, it judges your selfies on Instagram, insinuates itself into your most private places and closest relationships. The Iranian regime’s whole legitimacy is predicated upon this intimate control, so no wonder it has doubled down, with the security services last year accosting 3.6 million women and impounding 14,000 of their cars.

As the Iranian economy has tanked, Raisi has grown ever more obsessed with hijab, spending huge sums on TV programmes and online campaigns to promote compliance, and in February recalling his ambassador to London because an unveiled female violinist played at the embassy. This week he demanded CNN’s Christiane Amanpour wear a headscarf when she interview him at the UN and cancelled when — unlike lesser journalists — she refused.

Hijab law is a means to keep Iran frightened and divided, buttressing Raisi’s withering power. So Alinejad, now exiled in New York, is enraged that western democracies fall in line. She rails against female politicians such as France’s Ségolène Royal or Sweden’s Ann Linde for covering their heads on government visits. She says their excuses, that forced hijab is part of Iranian culture or a minor domestic issue compared with other Middle East problems, are mere cover. They prefer to junk women’s rights rather than sacrifice trade deals or risk accusations of Islamophobia from Muslims at home.

Now Iran’s women need the world’s wholehearted support so that protests do not collapse as they did after state killings in 2019. The mullahs cannot keep a cultured, sophisticated, historically outward-looking country enslaved for ever. Sixty per cent of its 86 million people are under 30 years old and two thirds of recent graduates are female.

But Islam has always fought its battles over the bodies of women: judging national piety by their invisibility. In Turkey, allowing the hijab into colleges and government buildings augured the end of Ataturk’s secular state. In 1958, the Muslim Brotherhood’s first demand of Nasser was veiling all Egyptian women. (He laughed.) In Afghanistan, the returning Taliban’s first act was to shroud every girl.

Now, like the women liberated from Isis territory who threw down their black chadors in disgust, Iranians are shaking their hair free. Their new movement’s slogan is “Women, life, freedom”: because until every Mahsa Amini is liberated, everyone remains enslaved.