Iran: Police Assault Women's Rights Demonstrators

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HRW/a1e8d4b62966426d5a912d2d8bc1d1e7.htm

(New York, June 15, 2006) ? Iran must investigate the police beating of hundreds of women's rights activists during a peaceful demonstration in Tehran on Monday, Human Rights Watch said today. The organization called on the government to release those detained after the police attack on protestors.

Eyewitnesses told Human Rights Watch that police and intelligence agents lined Haft Tir Square in downtown Tehran hours before the start of the planned demonstration on June 12. As the demonstrators assembled, the security forces immediately started to beat them with batons, sprayed them with pepper gas, marked the demonstrators with color spray, and took scores into custody.

"The Iranian government has again shown its utter contempt for basic freedoms like the right to peaceful assembly," said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch. "The authorities should free those arrested at once and find out who's behind the police violence."

Before Ahmadinejad swept to power on a wave of anti-American sentiment, Iran had made large strides in transforming itself into a modern Islamic state. There was still a long way to go, but liberalization and openness were peeping-through all over the place. Now, they're back to square one.

You're essentially correct about the wave of hard-line sentiment by the regime, but I think you're wrong to think Ahmadinejad is a result of a wave of anti-americans. Iranians are if not, even more pro-American than most anywhere in the world. There are segments which are anti-American, but they're seculded and associated with the regime.

What a coincidence.

Not so great, I hear. Things might be a touch better in Afghanistan (Taleban was about as bad as you could get), and a lot worse in Iraq (Hussein's regime was actually pretty progressive for women).

And other such colloquialisms meaning hypocrisy when it comes to the west's tender concern for womens' rights in places our elites want to invade i.e. - it is usually a propaganda smokescreen to legitimize invasion. Women are rarely better off afterward. Usually they are just caught up in a new highly insecure state of affairs.