Attention to the Unseen

Nader Hashemi writes: The story of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was killed by Iran’s morality police for improperly wearing her hijab, has gone global. No one could have predicted when she left her home in Iran’s northern Kurdistan province earlier this month to visit relatives in Tehran that her death would lead to national protests, rocking the Islamic Republic to its core while generating massive international media coverage. The fact that Amini’s death occurred during the annual meeting of heads…

Read More Read More

Roya Hakakian writes: No one can predict how a revolution starts. Nor can anyone know when one injustice will be what causes a people’s fury to overcome their fear. In 2011, in Tunisia, a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, sparked an uprising by setting himself on fire. In 2022, in Iran, the death in police custody of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, has brought Iranians onto the streets in every corner of the country. Amini and her brother had traveled from…

Read More Read More

Jelani Cobb writes: The calcified cruelty, malignant politics, and questionable legality of the decisions by Governors Greg Abbott, of Texas, and Ron DeSantis, of Florida, to transport dozens of migrants in Texas to unsuspecting locales in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., reiterate the point—often made in recent years—that the only check on the behavior of the current Republican Party is the limits of its own imagination. Most of the migrants reportedly came from Venezuela, a country so racked with discord that…

Read More Read More

Trita Parsi writes: Unprecedented protest and resistance has emerged in Iran this week after Mahsa Amini’s death in the custody of Iran’s “morality” police. The level of anger and frustration in Iran today — on display in dozens of videos across social media — appears far greater than in 2009, when Iranians took to the streets to protest a stolen election and push for reform. For two decades now, attempts at reforming the system have been stymied; the regime has…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: The protests started small, outside the Tehran hospital where a 22-year old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died last week after being detained by the “morality police” for an untold violation of the country’s harsh strictures on women’s dress. By Tuesday, the protests were racing across the country, in a burst of grief, anger and defiance. Many were led by women, who burned their headscarves, cut their hair and chanted, “Death to the dictator.” The ferocity…

Read More Read More

Joyce Karam tweeted on September 16: Today, a 22-yr-old woman died in #Iran after being beaten on head by the regime’s “morality police” for not “properly” wearing her Hijab. Her name was Masha Amini. Her crime was showing some hair. Let that sink in… pic.twitter.com/y7KpmJ7Z1X — Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) September 16, 2022 The Guardian reports: Iran has sent police to the streets in a scramble to end protests that have spread to at least 15 cities, as rights groups and…

Read More Read More

Peter Beinart writes: Over the past 18 months, America’s most prominent Jewish organizations have done something extraordinary. They have accused the world’s leading human rights organizations of promoting hatred of Jews. Last April, after Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Israel of “the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” the American Jewish Committee claimed that the report’s arguments “sometimes border on antisemitism.” In January, after Amnesty International issued its own study alleging that Israel practiced apartheid, the Anti-Defamation League predicted…

Read More Read More