RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://mystealthyfreedom.net/en/

The right for individual Iranian
women to choose whether they want hijab.

In Iran women have to cover their hair in public according to the dress rule enforced after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. My Stealthy Freedom is an online social movement where Iranian women share photos of themselves without wearing the hijab.

My Stealthy Freedom is an online social movement that was started by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad on May 3, 2014. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 women in Iran have had to cover their hair in public, but many Iranian women and men feel that wearing a hijab in public should be a personal choice. To address this issue we created a Facebook page where women from inside Iran could share photos of themselves not wearing their hijabs. Our website is a living archive of the photos and videos shared with us by these brave women, and the media coverage (both good and bad) that we receive from inside and outside Iran.

Babette Francis is the National & Overseas Co-ordinator of Endeavour Forum Inc., a women’s NGO having special consultative status with the Economic & Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations

If our Foreign Minister had a mind to do something of genuine value for her oppressed sisters, she might consider re-visiting Tehran on a bicycle while wearing leggings and a coat with writing on the back — ‘offences’ that could see an Iranian woman punished, even executed.
In April, 2015, our Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Hon. Julie Bishop, was criticized online by Iranian and other women for wearing a headscarf, and on occasion a hat, during her official visit to Iran; they deplored her decision to not take a stronger stance on the issue of headscarves — voluntary for her but compulsory for women in Iran. Iranian political journalist Masih Alinejad who now lives in the US, is founder of My Stealthy Freedom page and lobbies for freedom for women from wearing the hijab in public. She says that freedom to dress as you choose is also a free speech issue.

Julie Bishop always looks very fetching in photographs, and she looked even more so in her glamourous headscarf which revealed most of her hair, whereas Iranian women are punished if their headscarf does not completely cover their hair. I should mention that women who are privileged to have a personal audience with a Pope in the Vatican, traditionally wear a hat or mantilla, but it is not compulsory, does not conceal their hair, and is a mark of respect to a religious leader, whereas Julie Bishop was meeting with her political counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian Minister for Foreign Affairs, and not a leading cleric.

So I have much sympathy for Masih Alienjad who wrote an open letter on line to Julie Bishop saying, “You were not brave enough to challenge the compulsory hijab rules yet. We hope you will soon. You may say you were respecting Iran’s culture but compulsory hijab is not part of our culture”. Alinejad had previously challenged Ms Bishop to eschew wearing the headscarf in the country, calling it an insult to “human dignity”.

News Corp journalist Victoria Craw further reports that “other women joined in the criticism, with Australian-Iranian woman Moji Joon saying she was ‘quite disappointed Ms Bishop did not use her political position to take a stance for her fellow females.’ Another woman, Jeanie Mac, wrote: ‘The moral support this would have given the women in Iran who are protesting the wearing of compulsory hijab could have been huge. Instead it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth that she cares so little for women’s liberation and human rights.’ Others commented that they were ‘disappointed’ or ‘disgusted’, with some adding they were ashamed the foreign minister did not have the courage to challenge the rule.

Bishop’s visit marked the first official talks between Australia and Iran in 12 years and covered asylum seekers, intelligence and ISIS. She achieved some kind of deal on intelligence-0sharing to help track ISIS fighters, but Iran rejected her request to accept its nationals who have been deported from Australia. Iranians make up about a quarter of the people held in immigration detention centres.

President Obama appears to have been told that if all these secular dictators could be brought down, a magnificent Arab Spring would blossom. This was, it seems, precisely the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood: to get America’s help to topple the dictatorships — then mostly military and secular — but then to replace them with themselves, Islamists.

After Egypt took down the Muslim Brotherhood, the goal of establishing the Islamic Caliphate in Egypt simply moved to Syria, the only Arab nation where a secular Muslim leader had survived the Arab Spring.

Promoting Islam also seems to have been a major factor in Obama’s equation for America. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit, hosting several closed-door conferences on “Defamation of Religion,” to suppress free speech and internationally criminalize any criticism of Islam with fines and prison. She would rather blame terrorism on free speech than on the violent tenets of Islam.

This escalating subversion should be reason enough for all Western democratic countries permanently to part company with the United Nations. Its history of corruption is neither new nor surprising, or that it is run anti-democratic “club of dictators” whose interests are opposite to ours.

The goals of U.S. President Barack Obama in the Middle East ended the rule of most of the “secular” Arab leaders in the area. His views may have come, partly at least, from propaganda on why Muslim people supposedly lacked freedom there. Obama appears to have been told that if all these secular dictators could be brought down, a magnificent Arab Spring would blossom.

This was, it seems, precisely the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood: to get America’s help to topple the dictatorships — then mostly military and secular — but then to replace them with themselves, Islamists.

One of the enduring myths against the Jews is that they played a key role in the slave trade. The British newspaper Independent recently reported that Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of the left-wing Labor Party–linked movement, wrote on her Facebook page: “I’m sure you know, millions more Africans were killed in the African Holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews…and many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Caribbean.”

Her attack now appears on the website of Jews For Justice For Palestinians whose demands include “ending Israel’s illegal occupation and settlement of Palestinian land, including its illegal blockade of Gaza; and [demanding Israel] acknowledge its responsibility in the creation of the Palestinian refugees, and its obligation to negotiate a just, fair and practical resolution of the issue.”

In addition to being accused of having been part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and of owning slaves, Jews are also charged with being involved in creating the Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation, sharecropping, the labor movement, unions and general mistreatment of black people in the U.S.

If we are to respond to this fabrication, we need to know the facts. This canard of Jewish involvement in the slave trade has been debunked by a number of historians as well as the Council of the American Historical Association (AHA). Historian Seymour Drescher, a noted expert on slavery and antislavery movements, found, “It is unlikely that more than a fraction of 1 percent of the twelve million enslaved and relayed Africans were purchased or sold by Jewish merchants even once… At no point along the continuum of the slave trade were Jews numerous enough, rich enough, and powerful enough to affect significantly the structure and flow of the slave trade or to diminish the suffering of its African victims.”