At the FIFA World Cup in Qatar late last year the world was treated to one protest after another.
Many were against the host country’s treatment of people with same-sex attraction and others at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The England squad, for its part, uniquely scaled the heights of woke virtue signalling by continuing to genuflect to the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement and its patron saint, the drugs-crazed career criminal George Floyd, murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis more than two years earlier. Not even the U.S. footballers did that.
How odd it was then, that amid this foment of righteousness, hardly anyone protested against the involvement of Iran in the tournament at a time when the theocratic dictatorship was murdering its women civilians. Both England and the United States played against its national team without the slightest murmur of dissent.
It was more than a month later when the barbarity of the regime began to receive a little attention and that came only when Alireza Akbari, a former top Iranian defence ministry official, was hanged after he was convicted of spying for the UK, of which he was also a national.
By then, however, the death rows of Iran were choc-a-bloc with people convicted over the autumn uprising and the executioners were already busy.
At least four young men had been hanged for their involvement in the unrest while 18 other people were sentenced to death. Some were given just 15 minutes in court to defend themselves.
The West does not approve of this, of course, and Iran is rightly listed as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC), a designation by the U.S. State Department for governments which either engage in or tolerate “systemic, ongoing, and egregious” religious freedom violations.
Yet it is a troubling sign of the times that such appalling human rights violations do not capture the public imagination in the same way that extremely bizarre home-grown ideological causes, or those imported from Frankfurt or Berkeley, clearly do.
The plight of Iranian women is therefore left to a small group of public figures, like JK Rowling and others, while it is a peripheral concern, if at all, for the media, Parliament, celebrities and sportspeople.
Don’t expect Harry Kane and co to take the knee for Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurd murdered by police in Tehran because she was not wearing a hijab, or veil, or to make any public gesture in solidarity with almost 200 other women who were murdered by security forces in the ensuing unrest.
These killings were, without doubt, deliberate. They were aimed at suppressing protests which started in Saqez, Mahsa’s hometown, following her funeral on September 16 and spread throughout the country, often focused around universities.
Scores of women were subsequently killed in Sistan-Baluchistan while 27 died in Mazandaran, 12 in Gilan and 11 in western Azerbaijan.
Victims have included Minoo Majidi, 62, shot by security forces in the Kurdish town of Kermanshah; Ghazaleh Chelavi, 32, an expert climber killed the same day in Amol on the Caspian Sea; Hannaneh Kia, 23, murdered as she returned home after a medical examination; Hadis Najafi, 22, who became famous for a video on social media in which she declared her enthusiasm for the protests, and Nika Shakarami, 16, a girl known for her passion for music.
The single bloodiest day of the demonstration, however, was in Zahedan where violence that erupted following the rape of a 15-year-old girl culminated in a massacre of 63 women protesters. The date was September 30, Iran’s “Bloody Friday”.
Across the border in Afghanistan, on that same day, women were also the target of state violence, this time whipped publicly as they dared to demand an access to education.
They had assembled outside Badakhshan University to protest against their exclusion from higher education if they refused to work a burqa, the outer garment that covers both the body and the face.
Footage shows a bearded man in camouflage army fatigues charging into the group and thrashing them indiscriminately.
He belonged to the Ministry of Vice and Virtue of the Taliban, the hardline Islamists who strolled back into government following the unilateral decision of U.S. President Joe Biden to withdraw American troops from the country little more than a year earlier.
The incident is significant because it points to a clash of culture in Afghanistan between the adherents of an extreme theocracy and a new generation of Afghans who over the previous two decades have grown up to cherish democratic freedoms.
Like Iran, the clash found expression in civil unrest as women lost freedom of movement, work opportunities, the right to dress as they pleased (they must now always wear either a niqab – a veil covering the face – or a burqa in public), and freedom of speech and expression. Access to higher education is being severely curtailed with the small number of women permitted to enter university forced to choose from a much reduced variety of subjects.
Demonstrating is a brave response because the Taliban, like the Iranian mullahs, react with characteristic brutality to any challenge to its authority.
It doesn’t allow protests and disrupts them violently. Journalists who have filmed such responses have been arrested, detained and sometimes tortured, according to Human Rights Watch. This makes it difficult for the world to know precisely what is happening.
Combined with the lack of protection for minorities, and the active persecution of some of them, it means that Afghanistan is not only one of the most dangerous places in the world be be a foreigner but that, in the space of just a year, it has displaced North Korea as the deadliest place to be a Christian.
There are an estimated 200 Catholics among 38 million Muslims in Afghanistan but they, along with a few thousand other Christians, must now practice their faith in secrecy.
The country is so dangerous that the Missio sui iuris to Afghanistan, founded by Pope St John Paul II in 2002, can no longer operate, and the Barnabites, who ran the mission from the Our Lady of Divine Providence chapel of the Italian Embassy in Kabul, the only Catholic church and parish in the country, have returned to Italy.
It is once again the norm for apostasy from Islam to be punished by “honour killings”, for instance, or by committal to a psychiatric institute on the grounds that not wishing to be a Muslim is a sign of insanity.
One Christian told Open Doors that “the Taliban want their ideology reflected everywhere, and so all signs of colour, life and hope have been removed”.
“They’ve been replaced with Taliban slogans, which are a far cry from hope,” he said. “The Taliban are killing our souls and spirits. They are killing the souls of our children by taking all that is beautiful away from them.”
There are plenty of people in Iran and Afghanistan who have had enough. A major challenge for them is how to persist in the face of such awful brutality for however long it takes for change to come.
Another is how they can make their voices heard in the West over the din of those who want to see their own ideologies “reflected everywhere” – even if these have absolutely nothing to do with authentic and actual human rights.
Simon Caldwell’s debut novel, The Beast of Bethulia Park, is out now, published by Gracewing. Click here to learn more.
(Getty Images)
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