OCCOM BILL wrote:Here is some TRUTH about how Iran treats Women:
OK, Bill, a good collection of info on the suppression of dissidents who happen to be women; and of women, in general; in Iran.
Now, to go back to the article of Friedman. Are you intellectually honest enough to stack up the info you have found about Iran against the parallel info about Saudi-Arabia?
There isnt even a comparison. In Iran, women go to school and university. In Iran, they can, or at least throughout the last decade could, go outside on their own. In Iran, though the regime is trying to clamp down on fashion styles, a great many women have been wearing only a headscarf, no further face cover. In Iran, girls and boys flirt on the squares. In Iran, there IS a womans rights movement. It is currently aiming to collect a million signatures. In Iran, there are female activists. Female doctors who become local councillors. (I suggest reading through the last few pages of
Insights on Iran.)
I mean - let me make this clear: all of the things you have posted are obviously Very Bad Things. No question about it. They are human rights abuses. Clampdowns of an authoritarian regime. Examples of violent sexism. They deserve condemnation.
But have you even reflected for a minute about the comparison Friedman is making? And about how your examples fit in? I'm talking about this, for example:
Quote:Thousands of Tehran residents join women's anti-government demonstration
Can you imagine a women's anti-government demonstration in Saudi-Arabia?
Quote:NCRI - At 5 p.m. this afternoon, thousands of women gathered in 7 Tir (Rezaiiha) Square to protest against the misogynistic polices of the mullahs' regime in Iran.
Can you imagine thousands of women gathering, by themselves, in a public space, to criticize the regime, in Saudi Arabia? Can you imagine it even coming that far?
Quote:Alipour said, "In one month, 63,963 mal-veiled women were either warned or reprimanded
Do you think there are even 64 thousand women in all of Saudi-Arabia going outside "mal-veiled"? Have you compared what "properly veiled" means in Saudi-Arabia with what it means in Iran?
Quote:One of the regime's female Majlis deputies, Eshrat Sha'egh, expressed amazement at the media for paying any attention to the upholding of their sentences.
Sounds like a fundamentalist, autrhoritarian-minded,
female Majlis deputy. Does Saudi-Arabia have any female parliamentarians?
Quote:In Tehran, women took to the streets in different areas of the city such as University Park, Revolution Square, and Park-e-Lale chanting "Down with the dictator, long live freedom."
They were forcibly dispersed with teargas. Which is bad. But the fact that they
were there in the first place says something, both about the grey area that Iranian authoritarianism has come into and about the position of women.
Can you imagine women being allowed by their husbands to go demonstrate in Saudi Arabia? Can you imagine them demonstrating without being murdered en masse under the Taliban's regime in Afghanistan?
What I am saying, and what Friedman, I believe, was saying more tauntingly, is this. You see a bad thing and become angry, and I praise you for that. You see a bad thing that makes you angry, and decide the object of your anger is the black in the black and white scheme. End of story. But the truth is that even bad things come in sorts and degrees. Brezhnev was a dictator, but he was not the psychotic mass murderer that Stalin was. Gorbachev had his military clamp down violently on Latvian and Georgian independence demonstrators - people died. But he was no Brezhnev. Mussolini was no Hitler; Franco no Mussolini; and Horthy no Franco.
The notion that is continually forwarded by the US right, and in which I see you as partaking, is that Iran is, fundamentally, the same thing as we faced in Afghanistan's Taliban. They're Muslim fundamentalists, so there's just one way in which we can deal with them.
This is ignorant, as there is no comparison. It completely skips over the fact that as a dynamic, pluralistic society, with dissidents and internal competition within the regime, and officeholders and politicians publicly speaking out against their more conservative rivals, and critical newspapers that, when shut down, reappear under another name the next month, Iran is a country that offers much more possibility to exert influence through other ways than blunt threats and violence alone.
By skimming over this threat and potentially moving on to actual military attack, the US are missing an enormous opportunity, and possibly doing more harm than good.
And all of THAT is aside from Krugman's obvious point about hypocrisy, since
every single example of repression of, and violence against, women in Iran in the list you bring, for example, is parallelled or outdone in Saudi Arabia - which we consider our ally.
There is simply little rationality in arguing that we cant reasonably talk with the Iranians because they are terror-breeding, women-hating fundamentalists, when we sit cosily around the table with the Saudis, who are respectively just as much, and much more so!
Random historical comparison: when Franco came to power in Spain in the late 30s, his reign was as bloody as that of the Ayatollahs in Iran in 1980. But move on thirty years, and you're left with a regime that you could still find plenty of newspaper clippings about that demonstrated dictatorial repression and violence, but that only a fool would still have militarily attacked. Because despite it, on the one hand, provably being a repressive dictatorship, it was no longer the irrational force of pure evil that can only be brought to turn with bombs.
Again, I admire your sentiments about the very real human rights abuses in Iran, and I'll gladly sign any petition to highlight it (as public attention to a case can itself often already save lives). But your examples refute neither that
*) Iranian is not the exceptional case that the conservatives make it out to be, the one country in the region that we supposedly cant possibly be in dialogue or negotiate with, because it is ruled with such evil fundemantalism - nonsense. Other countries that we dont just talk with but even consider our allies, from the Saudis to Pakistan or, for that matter, Maliki's Shi'ite coalition, are just as bad or far worse; nor that
*) Iran is at the moment a multipolar authoritarian regime rather than a monolithic totalitarian regime; it is half-open enough to be influenced through dialogue, negotiation, pressure, indirect support to dissident civil society, etc - through "soft power".
Or, in my beloved historical comparisons, it would be an enormus mistake to think that today's Iran is Stalin rather than Andropov, Franco 1937 rather than Franco 1967, Saddam rather than Mubarak. A mistake that easily could cost many lives, if the US admin acts from such a black/white, good/evil perspective.
