Saturday, September 16, 2023

Call for solidarity with protesters in Iran marking one year since Mahsa Amini was beaten to death. Please share hashtags: #MahsaAmini #WomanLifeFreedom #IranProtests

Morality police in Iran beat Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, to death for not complying with Tehran's hijab regulations. Mahsa was arrested on September 13, 2022 badly beaten, left in a coma, and she died one year ago today on September 16th.

Mahsa Amini was beaten to death by morality police in Iran.

Mass protests erupted in Iran, the Iranian regime periodically shutdown the internet and carried out massacres, and executions against demonstrators over the past year.  The world has not forgotten, and new songs are being sung by artists in remembrance of Mahsa Amini.

Furthermore the mistake of replacing short wave radio transmissions of uncensored news with reliance  on internet broadcasts is once again revealed to be a mistake, as it was in Egypt during the Arab Spring. 

The last time this happened in Iran was in 2019, and the Mullahs killed 1,500 people, and I had not heard about it when it happened. The images of nonviolent protests slow to a trickle but some continue to emerge, along with reports of the price paid by protesters for their courageous dissent. Their censorship was successful that time, but let us do our part to prevent them from getting away with it again.

Today, protests will be taking place around the world to remember Mahsa Amini on her one year death anniversary. Find where the protest in her memory will be taking place in your city.

 Please share the messages, videos, and hashtags of this Iranian freedom movement that is also calling out democracies for falling short in their solidarity.

Masih continues to be targeted by the Mullahs for assassination on U.S. soil, and U.S. officials are recommending that she go into witness protection.

Listening to these Iranian activists take to task the Biden Administration for enabling the Iranian oppressors gives me a sense of deja vu.

Dear friends of freedom reading this blog entry, please amplify these Iranian voices, let your elected representatives know that you are watching, and that this is unacceptable. 

This has been going on for far too long in Iran, and the terror tactics have been copied elsewhere with Iranian help.

The Basij, formed in 1979 in Iran, murdered nonviolent demonstrators like Neda Agha Soltan in 2009 during the Green Revolution. 

Hugo Chavez copied the Basij and formed Colectivos in Venezuela. Both are pro-government militias with long track records of repression and murder. The Colectivos in 2014 did the same thing in Venezuela murdering nonviolent protesters like Génesis Carmona during mass anti-government protests. 

Neda Agha-Soltan and Génesis Carmona shot in the head.

Note to Western policy makers: the regime's in Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela are not your friends.

Cuba and Iran have regime's with different ideological formations. Cuba has a communist dictatorship run by the Castros since 1959 and Iran has a Islamist regime run by the mullahs since 1979. However they have two things in common: a profound anti-Americanism that portrays the U.S. as the great Satan, and a fossilized revolutionary tradition that systematically denies human rights to their respective peoples. 

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani meets with General Raul Castro (2016)

Robin Wright referred to Cuba and Iran as "melancholy twins" in The New Yorker in 2015. They are both state sponsors of terrorism, and Iran has been linked to a mass killing of Jewish people in Argentina. 

Venezuela is an off shoot of the Cuban revolution and shares both its anti-Americanism and warm relations with Tehran.

But beyond their similarities they also have a shared strategic outlook that is hostile to Western democracies.

The late Fidel Castro visited Iran on May 10, 2001, four months before the September 11, 2001 attacks, where he was quoted by the Agence France Presse at the University of Tehran stating that "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees." ... "The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up."

Eleven years later on January 12, 2012 in Havana, Cuba the controversial president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared "Our positions, versions, interpretations are alike, very close. We have been good friends, we are and will be, and we will be together forever."

Iran's Ahmadinejad with Communist Fidel Castro and Klansman David Duke

At a time when there is a fear of Iran seeking out asymmetric means to achieve maximum damage against United States interests, their decades long alliance with Cuba cannot and must not be ignored.

Even closer to home, the relationship between the Iranian regime and white supremacists such as David Duke and anti-Semites such as Louis Farrakhan should also be closely examined. 

Nor can we forget the brutal attack against Salman Rushdie here in the United States on August 12, 2022. He suffered stab wounds to the stomach, chest, eye, hand and thigh.

Martin Luther King Jr. was right: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Therefore:

I stand in solidarity with Iranians standing up for their freedom. They are facing off against the terrorist regime in Tehran that is indiscriminately murdering protesters.

I pledge to continue to amplify their voices and will use the following hashtags.

#MahsaAmini #WomanLifeFreedom #IranProtests  

Hope you will too.

 

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