Iran’s moral code shows hypocrisy

One gauge of the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime is that there are credible reports that it is enforcing its supposedly strict moral code by arresting women and girls accused of advocating immodesty, and then sexually assaulting them.

In a searing report about the rape of protesters by security forces, CNN recounted how a 20-year-old woman was arrested for supposedly leading protests and later was brought by police to a hospital in Karaj, shaking violently, head shaven, her rectum hemorrhaging. The woman is now back in prison.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have independently documented multiple cases of sexual assault. Hadi Ghaemi of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a watchdog organization in New York, said a 14-year-old from a poor neighborhood in Tehran protested by taking off her headscarf at school.

The girl, Masooumeh, was identified by school cameras and detained; soon afterward, she was taken to the hospital to be treated for severe vaginal tears. The girl died. Her mother, after saying she wanted to go public, has disappeared.

Accounts of sexual violence are difficult to verify because of the victims’ feelings of shame and fear, and CNN reported that authorities sometimes film assaults to blackmail protesters into silence. What’s absolutely clear is that protesters keep turning up dead.

Consider Nika Shahkarami, a 16-year-old girl who burned her headscarf in public. Security forces closed in on her. Days later, authorities announced she had died. An autopsy reportedly found that her skull, pelvis, hip, arms and legs had been fractured.

So, the uprising across Iran isn’t just about head coverings. It’s about toppling a regime that is incompetent, corrupt, repressive and brutal.

I’m surprised and disappointed that today’s grass-roots Iranian revolution hasn’t received more support in America and around the world. I think there are a couple of reasons for this.

First, Iran has barred most foreign reporters. Because we aren’t on the ground, I think we journalists collectively haven’t given this story the importance that it deserves.

Second, there is some American sourness toward Iranians, a misperception that they are fanatics chanting, “Death to America.” At the people-to-people level, Iran may be the most pro-American country in the Middle East.

Fearless young girls are at the forefront of today’s protests. When a member of the Basij paramilitary force spoke at one school, the girls pulled off their hijabs and heckled him. At a girls school in Karaj, students threw water bottles at an official and chased him out.

The United States and other governments are speaking up, and Iranians are grateful. Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian human rights lawyer now on medical furlough from a 10year prison sentence (reduced from 38 1/2 years and 148 lashes), said she appreciated the ejection of Iran from a United Nations commission on women’s rights. But Sotoudeh and others would like the Biden administration to do more to delegitimize the Iranian government and criticize executions.

“The Biden administration hasn’t done enough,” said Tala Raassi, an Iranian American fashion designer. At 16, she was arrested and given 40 lashes for wearing a T-shirt and miniskirt at a private party.

I’d like to see Biden work with other countries to raise the volume of international, top-level outrage at the repression.

Pressuring Iran is difficult, for it is already isolated and heavy sanctions have been imposed. But we must try because Iran is now beginning its next phase: It has begun executing protesters to try to terrify the population into surrender. Two protesters are known to have been hanged so far, and at least 35 others have either been sentenced to death or are being held on capital charges.

In 1978, as Khomeini’s revolution gathered steam, The New York Times quoted an Iranian lawyer with prescient misgivings: “I hope we don’t climb out of a ditch only to fall into a well.”

More than four decades later, Iranians are desperately trying to pull themselves out of that well, led by schoolgirls who persevere despite threats of arrests, torture and execution.

They understand that gross immorality lies not in a girl’s uncovered hair but in the government that rapes her for it, and they should receive far more international support.