We need to speak up more on Mahsa Amini

Samira Taghavi writes:

Few people in New Zealand can comprehend what it is like to live in a country where the police will arrest you for not “correctly” wearing a head scarf. Let alone beat and kill you for it.

Yet this is happening right now in Iran.

Intensely disturbing is that the bulk of our usual sources of political outrage in this country have nothing to say. The Jacinda Ardern Government’s silence, particularly, needs to change.

Think if the PM condemned this with the same passion she condemns misinformation at the UN!

Mahsa Amini, was picked up by Iran’s “morality police” because of her “poor hijab” which purportedly – and fatally – revealed too much fringe. Alas, no high government official will ever be held to account for her death. It doesn’t work that way in a country that takes its view of women from the 12th century. …

I am lucky to live in this country, but I grew up in Iran before leaving at the age of 22 – the same age as Amini.

Had I stayed, my parents would have probably long ago mourned my death.

I know the fear of being picked up by the religious police – I have had that actual experience – without knowing where I was being taken and whether I would leave their custody alive or dead.

For a long time after moving here, I felt my body shiver on seeing a nearing police car. It can be hard to get ever-present fear and frequent terror out of one’s system.

I don’t think we can ever appreciate how terrifying it must be for women in Iran. Ironically Iran has just been elected to the UN Women’s Rights Commission for a four year term.

The Western world is, it seems, often convulsed with angst about human rights, and routinely extends the long arm of disapproval even to people who are long dead. Statues are coming down, buildings and places are being renamed, all to express the strongest condemnation of outrages, including ones that happened centuries ago.

But it appears that outrage can be selective.

While Anglo-Saxon colonisers are condemned, that is often not so with Middle Eastern mullahs.

A good point.

In my view, this is symptomatic of a typically “woke” concentration on condemning the West but not the East; frequently giving my home country and the Islamic world generally, a pass from serious scrutiny.

Our Prime Minister recently felt motivated to effectively denounce justices of the United States Supreme Court, for observing (incontestably) that abortion is literally not included in the text of the US Bill of Rights and that it was a matter for elected representatives to vote on the issue.

Yep got far more worked up by a court ruling that abortion is an issue for legislatures to decide, then on what happened in Iran.

While our Government might be mute on Amini’s death and the Iranian government’s cruelty thereafter, other civilised countries have not on this occasion been so quiet.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada will be placing sanctions on dozens of Iranian individuals and entities, including the country’s “morality police”. The United States has already placed sanctions on the morality police and Iranian security agencies. German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has also condemned the death of Amini and the Australian government supports calls for an investigation into her death.

Sanctions is a good idea.