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Iran's women a year after Mahsa Amini's death: 'I wear what I like now' (www.bbc.com)
submitted 1 year ago by ZeroCool@feddit.ch to c/world@lemmy.world
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A young woman walks down a street in Tehran, her hair uncovered, her jeans ripped, a bit of midriff exposed to the hot Iranian sun. An unmarried couple walk hand in hand. A woman holds her head high when asked by Iran's once-feared morality police to put a hijab on, and tells them: "Screw you!"

These acts of bold rebellion - described to me by several people in Tehran over the past month - would have been almost unthinkable to Iranians this time last year. But that was before the death in the morality police's custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been accused of not wearing her hijab [veil] properly.

The mass protests that shook Iran after her death subsided after a few months in the face of a brutal crackdown, but the anger that fuelled them has not been extinguished. Women have just had to find new ways to defy the regime.

A Western diplomat in Tehran estimates that across the country, an average of about 20% of women are now breaking the laws of the Islamic Republic by going out on to the streets without the veil.

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[-] FinnFooted@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The us literally distributed religious texts to extremists to encourage them to hate outsiders because communists were the outsiders we wanted them to push out at the time:

CIA and State Department have been criticized for publishing textbooks intended to indoctrinate children with racism and hatred towards foreigners and towards non-muslim Afghans.

In an effort to aid the anti-Soviet insurgency and inculcate a hatred of foreign invaders in Afghan children, the US government covertly distributed schoolbooks which promoted militant Islamic teachings and included images of weapons and soldiers. The Taliban used the American textbooks but they scratched out the images of human faces which were contained in them in keeping with their strict aniconistic and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. The United States Agency for International Development gave millions of dollars to the University of Nebraska at Omaha in the 1980s and the university used the money to fund the writing and the publishing of the textbooks in local languages.

To be fair, this was in Pakistan and Afghanistan and I know less about Iran. But, yeah. "The west" 100% encouraged this behavior. And we backed mujahedeen extremist warlords in Afghanistan all the way until we pulled out.

this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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