Why the silence on Iran?
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.
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.
Street protests have since erupted and some 60 deaths have occurred at the hands of government forces.
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.
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.
But still as of the date of writing, with the Iranian government killing citizens in the streets, the New Zealand Prime Minister offers no words.
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.
The reaction to the Russian government’s atrocities in Ukraine is starkly different. So too with the police brutality that resulted in the death of George Floyd, igniting as it did, a global movement of protest and rigorous examination of bias in every corner.
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.
Contrastingly, the people of Iran can only dream of having a secular judiciary, a Bill of Rights that protects from government torture and murder, and enshrines free and democratic elections.
The target choice, therefore, is perplexingly inconsistent.
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.
Thus our leaders should consider some questions.
Do some outrages matter more than others? Would we take the same view if an American police department had been responsible? If Ukraine has worthy victims, then does not also Iran? Beating people to death, because of a slipped scarf, or for any other reason, compares to the worst outrages anywhere and Iranian government perpetrators should be swiftly condemned on all sides.
One truly hopes that our Government will find the motivation to say so.