Many Iranian moderates are no doubt wishing that the separation of church and state was part of the political culture in their country as it is in the United States. It seems that Iran’s politically-weak theocratic government is using a crack-down on “un-Islamic” behavior as cover for attacking and imprisoning its opponents. (That’s one of the unlovely things that can happen when impassioned True Believers egg each other on in the pursuit of greater and greater “purity.”)
In Sunday’s New York Times, Neil McFarquhar reports on the Crackdown on Dissent Under Way in Iran (all emphasis is mine):
• “Young men wearing T-shirts deemed too tight or haircuts seen as too Western have been paraded bleeding through Tehran’s streets by uniformed police officers who force them to suck on plastic jerrycans, a toilet item Iranians use to wash their bottoms. [The photo in the Times shows the uniformed police officer wearing a hooded mask.] In case anyone misses the point, it is the official news agency Fars distributing the pictures of what it calls ‘riffraff.’ Far bloodier photographs are circulating on blogs and on the Internet.”
• “More than 30 women’s rights advocates were arrested in one day in March, according to Human Rights Watch, five of whom have since been sentenced to prison terms of up to four years. They were charged with endangering national security for organizing an Internet campaign to collect more than a million signatures supporting the removal of all laws that discriminate against women.” [See also this Human Rights Watch news release.]
• “Eight student leaders at Tehran’s Amir Kabir University . . disappeared into Evin Prison starting in early May. Student newspapers had published articles suggesting that no humans were infallible, including the Prophet Muhammad and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” [See also Human Rights Watch’s report of a claim that the articles were forgeries, presumably by the Islamic government.]
• “The National Security Council sent a stern three-page warning to all the country’s newspaper editors detailing banned topics, including the rise in gasoline prices or other economic woes like possible new international sanctions, negotiations with the United States over the future of Iraq, civil society movements and the Iranian-American arrests.”
• “‘People don’t want to come to conferences, they don’t even want to talk on the phone,’ said Abbas Milani, the director of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University. ‘The regime has created an atmosphere of absolute terror.‘”
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