Hypocrisy on Mahsa Amini murder anniversary
In his press briefing on Friday, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller was asked about how the US is responding to the dire situation for women in the Islamic Republic. The journalist prefaced her question by mentioning the second anniversary of the Sept. 16, 2022 murder of Mahsa Amini.
Amini was a 22-year-old woman from Saqez in Iran’s Kurdistan Province. While on a trip with her family to Tehran, she was arrested by the regime’s “morality police” for not having her head covered properly. According to eyewitnesses, she was beaten as soon as she entered the van that was transporting her to the station for “education” — mullah-style. Three days later, she was dead.
One can only imagine the kind of torture she endured before she was taken to the Kasra Hospital in northern Tehran. Photos that emerged of her lying in a coma matched the medical center’s statement that when she was admitted on Sept. 13, she showed “no vital signs.”
This notice was removed from the hospital’s social-media pages after hardliners called its staff “anti-regime agents.” In parallel, police denied having beaten Amini to death, insisting that she had passed away from a heart attack. It was a lie, of course, and everybody knew it.
Miller responded that Amini “inspired a historic movement that has impacted Iran and influenced people across the globe who are advocating for gender equality, respect for human rights, and particularly, the respect for human rights inside Iran.”
The journalist referred to a new report by a United Nations fact-finding mission on the increase in suppression of women’s and girls’ rights in Iran, and Miller acknowledged that the UN report “is absolutely right. We continue to see a crackdown on women and women’s rights in Iran.”
However, he added, “I would just say the new president of Iran has at various times signaled that he wants to change his approach, and wants to reach out to the West and have a different relationship with the West. There are obviously a number of actions he could take in that regard when it comes to Iran’s destabilizing activities outside of its own borders, but one of the actions he could take would be to stop the crackdown on women and women’s rights inside Iran’s borders.”
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How he was able to utter those words without hanging his head in shame is beyond comprehension.
In the first place, even the clueless State Department knows by now that it’s the “supreme leader” — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who calls the shots in Iran, regardless of the identity of the president.
Secondly, as the powers-that-be in Tehran are busy completing their nuclear-weapons program while engaged in a multi-front war against Israel (directly and via proxies), the only comments about the regime that should be coming out of the mouths of US officials are threats.
Any expressions of hope for an improvement in “human rights” in the Islamic Republic make Washington worse than a laughing stock.
Third, Miller must be aware of the State Department report, provided this week to Congress, revealing that American trade with the Islamic Republic increased by 43% last year, reaching more than $81 million. According to the Washington Free Beacon, which reviewed the “unclassified but not disseminated publicly” report, this “significant jump … suggests the Biden administration is bypassing tough American sanctions on Tehran in order to stimulate its flagging economy and provide the hardline regime with a financial lifeline.”
Keeping the ayatollahs in clover is hardly the way to assist the women and girls of Iran to show their faces and remove their chains. The least that the likes of Miller could do is shed the hypocrisy where their fate and well-being are concerned.
