Friday 14. In March, Iran Human Rights (IHR) presents new horror figures about the regime in Iran.
(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Iran. At least 687 people were executed in Iran in 2013. This is the highest number in 20 years, reports IHR, under the leadership of the Norwegian professor of medicine and award-winning researcher Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam. For while the world has its eyes fixed on Ukraine-Russia now, or on Syria in recent years, the best friends of the Assad regime – in Tehran and Qom – can continue their deadly policies in secret.
For so-called western countries, it seems satisfied only that we have received assurances that Iran has not developed nuclear weapons. As long as the mullahs in Tehran do not develop weapons that threaten the United States and northern Europe, they can largely do whatever they want with their own people. That is the effect of their nuclear project: the so-called Islamist regime, which has remained in power since 1979, can use the nuclear threat as a valuable bargaining chip to lift trade boycotts and visa denials.
And Iran is probably facing new conservative presidents, whom they present as "liberal". Like Hassan Rouhani now from 2013, as with Khatami from 1997. But no change will come from them.
Philosophers. The Iranian regime need not go to war against its own people, such as Bashar al-Assad, because they have gained far more control over their own population.
That is: Iranians most hate the regime. Few countries in the region are as original and secular and diversity-oriented as the Iranians: the country that fostered King Kyros, the legendary king who in the 500s BCE freed the Jews from today's Baghdad, who is hailed in the Bible for this. From this Persian culture also comes the Zarathustra, the three wise men (the magic) and the Bahai religion.
As well as the miniature painting tradition and the architecture wind suburb of Isfahan. And philosophers, Aristotle interpreters and scientists like Avicenna (Ibn Sina). Poets like Hafez, Sufis like Rumi, feminists and Nobel laureates like Shirin Ebadi. And vital underground metal music of today.
Spring. Here in Iran, it was also then that the so-called "Arab" spring began, already in the spring of 2009 – when tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets and protested. But the mullahs were smarter and more evil than Mubarak. Therefore, the opposition are imprisoned, executed or gagged now.
What an irony of fate that this country with countless minorities and denominations, and with a vibrant Jewish environment until recently, would end up in the madness of fundamentalism. This country where the length of women's skirts – to the extent that it is marked by secularism and liberation – in the 1960s and 1970s was shorter than in most European countries. Then came the backlash, Ayatollah Khomeini's return and the battle against the shah's corruption.
Now in 2014, Iran has revised its criminal law. It says, among other things, that you are hanged if you "fight against God". Alternative punishments for such crimes are crucifixion, right-hand and left-foot amputation, or banishment from the hometown. Hanged becomes the "active party" in a gay relationship, if he is married or non-Muslim. The new Penal Code retains the death penalty for minors, writes Aftenposten. Drug judgments are used enough to hide the killings of freethinkers and oppositionists.
This country was what Norway sent asylum seeker Rahim Rostami back in February 2011. And so many other asylum seekers after him. As long as we continue to cooperate with the murderous Iranian regime, by sending back those who flee from there, our morale is no better.
New Time No. 10, March 14, 2014