Something extraordinary is happening in #Iran:
#Women are really really not giving a fuck anymore
What started as protests over the murder of #MahsaAmini by religious morality #police in 2022 for not wearing her headscarf simmered and now is snowballing. Women and girls are not wearing the mandatory #hijab at ever increasing rates
Beyond the #hijab, there seems to be something of a massive grassroots change happening in #Iran in the last few months
And the government seems unwilling to confront it
“The young generation wants its basic freedoms, and it’s getting them through sheer perseverance” -Donya Amiri
Alcohol, dancing, women and men mingling, rave parties, musical theatre, fashion shows, concerts...
It is remarkable and extraordinary how fast it is happening
@silhouette @zakalwe @benroyce Right? Parts of Persia and Lebanon were like the Paris of the Middle East. Women wore modern fashions, went to university, held professional positions in commerce, medicine and media.
But when the Fundamentalists gain power, freedom loses. Every time. Throughout history, when religious fundamentalists control the government, bad things happen. And it’s religion agnostic, ie, all religion can be perverted.
Look at American Christian nationalists. Or the prosperity gospel megachurches. They have nothing to do with the words of a Palestinian prophet from two thousand years ago.
Help the poor? Na.
Care for the sick? Na.
Turn the other cheek? Nope
Render one’s taxes? Ha
Be kind to the imprisoned. Big ol no
Welcome the stranger? Oh fuck no
The fundamentalists are driving the US, and it behooves us to remove them as expeditiously as legally possible.
@eternaltyro @silhouette @zakalwe @benroyce Well sure, but nobody wants to read my dissertation on colonialism and the Middle East. I’m just saying, my people are still annoyed about the Romans, so..... 🤷🏻♀️But yes, the fall of Persia to the extremists was directly the result of CIA interference. Going further back, I posit that the Balfour Declaration of 1917, written by Walter Rothschild, Arthur Balfour, Leo Amery, & Lord Milner, was the beginning of the long painful extermination of my people, our identity, and our homeland.
The West has destroyed everything it touches in the Middle East, except Israel.
@eternaltyro @silhouette @zakalwe @benroyce
Well....first you have to convince me to go back for a second PhD. ;). My actual dissertation was for bioethics, on the topic of post mortem prenatal ventilation and the ethical concerns therein. And it’s woefully out of date. At the time I wrote it, back in the last century, it was not a procedure done, but only contemplated. Now, of course, in Red States, it’s become increasingly common to ventilate corpses that were pregnant before death.
For some good resources on Palestine, you might consider:
Ramzy Baroud's "My Father was a Freedom Fighter"
Gaza: A History (Comparative Politics and International Studies)
by Jean-Pierre Filiu
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
And an oldie but a goodie; Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky
ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIES
Seán Fenian
silhouette 
MissConstrue
eternaltyro