Iran’s elites dodge regime rules — with traitorous – Latest News
“The only thing worse than a liar is a liar who is also a hypocrite,” wrote American playwright Tennessee Williams.
I assumed of Williams’ scathing quote when information broke this weekend that two Iranian ladies, 47-year-old Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter Sarina Sadat Hosseiny, 25, had been arrested by US immigration officers in Los Angeles.
The niece and grand-niece of the infamous Major Qassem Soleimani, slain head of the Quds Force, had been residing luxe lives in Los Angeles.
And the hypocrisy doesn’t finish there.
While the Islamic Republic is killing its ladies for the “sin” of displaying a strand of hair, Afshar and Hosseiny have used their social-media accounts, stocked with lavishly staged pictures of themselves in barely-there outfits, to heap reward on Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the regime’s terror actions.
“The Trump administration will not allow our country to become a home for foreign nationals who support anti-American terrorist regimes,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated as he revoked their permanent-resident standing.
But it’s not the primary time the Islamic regime — which calls for piety and strict observance of antiquated Islamic values from Iranians — has been caught permitting the youngsters of its elite unfettered show of pores and skin and “sin.”
And Iranians who’ve been paying the price of this duplicity for nearly 5 many years are on the breaking level.
Just this previous October, the regime needed to handle one other uproar when videos surfaced of a bride in plunging robe and flowing hair being escorted by her father by way of throngs of unveiled company in a luxurious resort in Tehran.
The bride was the daughter of Ali Shamkhani, senior advisor to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei — a man who had a key function in crushing the Woman, Life, Freedom motion and who amassed a fortune smuggling sanctioned items into Iran.
Iranians have sought revenge by offering expatriate activists like Masih Alinejad with data on regime supporters who dwell and work within the United States however pledge allegiance to the Islamic regime.
“The time is now. I want America to continue exposing their hypocrisy,” stated Alinejad, who instructed me she had forwarded these tricks to senior members of President Joe Biden’s administration, to no avail.
“They can’t blind the women of Iran for showing a strand of hair, but turn a blind eye to the suggestive and ‘sinful’ excesses of their relatives in this country,” she exulted.
Shiva Amini, a former soccer participant who left Iran’s ladies’s workforce in 2017 to hunt political asylum within the United States, agrees.
“Iranian women are considered a mortal threat to the regime,” Amini stated final month on the United Nations.
“After winning a tough match against Japan, our jubilant team was escorted to meet with a senior cleric who chastised us for running — that our moves on the soccer field can arouse men and we should stop. That is when I decided that I can no longer live in Iran.”
The revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran and welcomed Ayatollah Khomeini has been in some ways a call to arms in opposition to the ladies of Iran.
One of Khomeini’s first decrees, a mere 4 weeks after his return to Iran from exile in 1979, mandated the Islamic hijab for all ladies in public areas.
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When a whole lot of 1000’s of ladies took to the streets to protest that and different edicts, Khomeini referred to as them “naked prostitutes” and threatened their arrest for spreading “corruption on Earth.”
The veil thus grew to become a signifier of the regime’s absolute energy over Iranian ladies, relegating them to the fringes of a society that that they had helped advance.
“There are three ideological pillars left of the Islamic Republic,” writes Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Death to America, death to Israel, and the hijab . . . [It] has become the Islamic Republic’s national flag.”
The unhappy irony of the arrest of Afshar and Hosseiny shouldn’t be that they posted footage of themselves residing the great life in America sans that flag.
It’s that they took benefit of America’s plentiful freedoms to spice up a regime that seeks to destroy them.
Iranians are nonetheless reeling from the massacres in January, when up to 40,000 protesters have been detained or killed by the regime security personnel.
If innocence is measured within the quantity of seen hair strands or the show of pores and skin, essentially the most flagrant violators are those that proceed to assist the Islamic Republic whereas sidestepping its brutal strictures.
Nazee Moinian is an adjunct fellow on the Middle East Institute.
