European governments and Leftists, who pretend to care so deeply for human rights, are completely indifferent and ignore horrific human rights violations occurring in Iran.
Both Europe and the global Left have been conspicuously silent on the courageous fight of anti-regime demonstrators in Iran seeking to liberate themselves from one of the most inhuman, oppressive, racist, and gender-apartheid regimes in the world.
Western feminists, who happily don the hijab in “solidarity” with Muslim women in the West, are shamelessly silent, when it comes to standing in solidarity with the women who are removing their hijabs in Iran at tremendous personal risk.
Europe pretends that it cares about human rights. It has spent billions of euros, for example, on the Palestinian Authority (PA), even as people are dying from oppression and hunger all over the rest of the world.
Had the PA’s enemy not been the Jews, but instead other Muslims, Christians or Yazidis, the European Union would have made itself scarce, taking its many billions of euros with it, faster than you can say “postcolonial guilt.”
Just take a look at all the massacres that have been committed against non-Muslims in the Middle East and Africa. The European Union is nowhere to be seen, its billions of euros absent. To the European Union, clearly, human rights are highly selective and some humans apparently do not deserve any rights at all.
The global Left also pretends that it cares about human rights. Just like Europe, it has selected the cause of the terrorist PA above all other causes in the world. No other issue rallies the Left like the terrorist organization PLO. On the other hand, the Left has yet to rally and campaign on behalf of Kurds, Yazidis, persecuted Christians in the Middle East, Biafrans and the many other suffering people in the world.
One of the most glaring – and current – examples of this complete indifference to the plight of suffering human beings, however, is Iran.
According to Amnesty International’s country report on Iran for 2016/17, Iran “heavily suppressed the rights to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly and religious belief, arresting and imprisoning peaceful critics and others after grossly unfair trials before Revolutionary Courts. Torture and other ill-treatment of detainees remained common and widespread, and were committed with impunity. Floggings, amputations and other cruel punishments continued to be applied.
Members of religious and ethnic minorities faced discrimination and persecution. Women and girls faced pervasive violence and discrimination. The authorities made extensive use of the death penalty, carrying out hundreds of executions, some in public. At least two juvenile offenders were executed”.
On average, three people are executed every day in Iran. Iran hangs gay people from cranes to die. Iran executes members of ethnic and religious minorities for “enmity against God” and “corruption on earth”, including Kurds and Sunni Muslims. Iran is one out of 15 countries, in which stoning is either practiced and authorized by law or tolerated. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran is believed to have imposed death by stoning on at least 150 people, according to the International Committees against Execution and Stoning.
Despite all the atrocities that Iran commits towards its citizens, women hold a special place of denigration and humiliation in Iranian society. Young women are reported brutally arrested by the thousand every week for not wearing a “proper hijab.” A woman in Iran is de facto first her father’s property, then after marriage, her husband’s property. According to the UN Secretary General’s February 2015 Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Iran, child marriage is prevalent. The legal age of marriage for girls is 13; some as young as nine may be married by permission of the court. In 2011, about 48,580 girls between the age of 10 and 14 were married. In 2012, there were at least 1,537 girls under the age of 10 who were reportedly married. Pedophilia is thereby widespread and legal.
Married women may not work, attend sporting events or leave the country without their husband’s permission. When arrested, they suffer unspeakable torture in prison. Forced “virginity testing” is also commonly used in prison, a serious violation of international law. Rape is commonly used as torture in prison against both women and men.
However, none of these cruel facts have moved Sweden, whose government considers itself both a ‘humanitarian superpower’ and ‘feminist’. Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström – the one who has condemned Israeli self-defense against Arab terrorism, calling it ‘extrajudicial killings’ – says that what is happening in Iran ‘does not constitute a threat against international peace and security’ and questioned the justification for a Security Council meeting on the Iran protests.
Because the only thing that really gets Sweden upset, is Jews defending themselves against genocidal Arabs. Iranians defending themselves against a murderous, ruthless, and misogynist regime does not concern the northern ‘humanitarian superpower’. Swedish government officials are apparently very happy to see freedom fighters tortured, crushed and executed.
However, there is little about the non-reactions of European and other Western countries to the dire situation in Iran that is surprising. After the P5+1 negotiators signed the Iran ‘deal’, countries such as France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland frantically rushed to do business with the murderous mullahs of Iran, as if the very survival of their countries depended on commerce with a regime that has blood all over its hands.
When it comes to European leaders, apparently, there really is no limit as to how low they will go, especially when there is profit to be made.
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Judith Bergman is a columnist and political analyst
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