Plan B Forum

60% of the population of Iran is under 30 years of age and they have had it with the repressive ayatollahs.

They are in the streets despite repressive backlash from police. They are protesting the killing of a Kurdish woman visiting Tehran with her family, accosted outside the train station by the morality police for wearing her hijab incorrectly and not covering her hair entirely. She was taken for reeducation but ended up in a coma after a beating in the police wagon and died soon after.

Iranian women are burning hijab and cutting all their hair off to protest the death of Mahsa Amini, and the gender apartheid of the repressive regime.

I hope these young women and men are successful in changing their country.

I applauded the end of the Shah but it was definitely a 'be careful what you wish for' time.

Over the weekend I watched a really great documentary I must recommend - it’s called Nasrin and it follows the life and work of Nasrin Sotoudeh who is a human rights lawyer in Iran. It shows the emergence of the current women's rights movement in Iran and gives great context to the current uprisings which continue to grow despite backlash and violence perpetrated on the protesters by the regime - there have been many deaths of youth in custody or engaging with police.

After I finished the documentary I turned to the news and one of the breaking stories was a fire and uprising in Evin prison in Tehran, which is where they’d sent Nasrin repeatedly. Apparently the prison is called a university by the folks in the know because the regime imprisons so many intellectuals in its attempts to keep the people oppressed. This article from the Guardian gives a glimpse of life inside Evin prison: https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... vin-prison

In the documentary there is a scene where the narrator Olivia Colman reads a poem by an Iranian intellectual that discusses how the people were promised that the prisons would be made into universities once the people toppled the prior regime under the Shah, but the prisons have become universities only because they are filled with professionals from various backgrounds put there to keep them from inciting the people.

Many pundits and even our president have expressed surprise by the intensity of the continued uprisings. I continue to pray for them and hope that they are able to bring real change to the regime but the police are killing children so they apparently won’t stop at anything to try to extinguish the yearning for freedom from the people.