If you don’t like it, change it.Iranian women started removing their headscarves in defiance of the laws. The religious police would beat them, arrest them, even spray tear gas in their faces. Still, headscarves were being removed.
So the Ayatollahs decided that harsher measures were needed and relaxed laws preventing vigilantes from enforcing moral codes as they deemed fit.
The vigilantes; young men on motorbikes, faces covered, started throwing acid.
Meet Marzieh Ebrahami. She was pretty once. I suppose she still is.
She was driving herself to a routine dental appointment and has relaxed her hijab for better visibility behind the wheel. It was a hot day and so she made the mistake of rolling down her window.
One of the Ayatollahs' "vigilante enforcers" on a motor scooter pulled up alongside and took it upon himself to give her a quick lesson in proper Islamic modesty.
She was one of an estimated 25 Iranian women attacked with acid in the city of Isfahan in October 2014. Not a single attacker has been prosecuted
Defiance in Iran carries a heavy price tag.
Yet Iranians still defy the laws. Take to the streets. Go to prison. Maimed and killed. Their defiance needs to be supported. Obama rewarded the Ayatollahs with pallets of cash. President Trump, so far, is behaving differently.
When pieces of sh*t like Ilhan Omar comment “the hijab means power, liberation, beauty, and resistance.” I think of Marzieh Ebrahami.
When Western women like Jacinda Ardern wear the hijab out of "solidarity" to the rules of the Ayatollahs, I am flat-out disgusted.
One of the biggest misunderstandings, many times, about rebellion is that it is condemned as radical. Okay, so what is radical? Our country, the most successful one in history, is made up of different opinions. In the old days, when you didn’t like the people you were living near, you moved. You might even start a new town with the aspirations you believe in and have influence in. And people with the same beliefs joined you in your town and you became a city. But when outside sources, in this case governmental control, harmed you for doing it, your dreams and aspirations came tumbling down. And you had a choice, fold up and move, again, if you could, or resist and fight for your dreams.
I read about places where the government was taking distinct advantage of the people, over running them with control and force without the spoils even being used in that country to the point of people being unjustly tried and executed for even thinking of rebellion. One of them in the mid 1700’s.
But the people in the little country finally got enough of it and gathered together to overthrow the evil government that was harming them, and became great. Even though they were outnumbered and the evil country got help from other warring countries. The dream of determining your own fate meant that much to them. So until they get enough of it, and the men along with the women get tired of their women being beaten, killed, or worse like the lady with the acid in her face, it will continue to happen.
And sooner or later they will revolt and win. Such people as Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Idi Amen in Ughanda, The Czars in Russia, Pol Pot in Cambodia, .....the world is full of those that tried to be too powerful and used force and fear to gain their control. And they weren’t overthrown because someone asked them to step down or back.
So I do feel sorry for the women in countries where they are brutalized by factions in control. But I am more sad than sorry they don’t do what is needed to stop it whether through talk or through the same violence they receive. It is their country, they need to control it. And whose fault is it they don’t?
After all, who is more guilty...the wolves or the shepherds? Both, just in different ways. One who kills the sheep or one who kills to protect but doesn’t. And when the wolves run out of sheep, they will start on the shepherds. Supply and demand.
rwood