I haven’t covered too much of the unrest in Iran, mainly because we’ve seen widespread Iranian protests fizzle out before (in 1999, 2003, 2009, 2011-12 (remember, Obama was far more interested in pursuing his crazy nuclear deal than in helping the Iranian people free themselves from the Mullahs)) up to the most recent protests.
But we finally have a sign that this time may be different, in that this is the first time the regime has (reportedly) offered concessions.
After a series of fiery protests, Iran is reportedly abolishing its morality police and may loosen requirements on wearing hijabs, the country’s attorney general confirmed on Saturday.
Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said at a press conference that the morality police have “nothing to do with the judiciary and have been abolished.”
This is not a small concession. The Mullah claim to being an Islamic State rests on implementing Koranic governance, including Shariah law governing personal behavior, of which the requirement that a woman wear a hajib is only the most visible. But even if true (and there are reports online stating that promises to eliminate the morality police, AKA the Guidance Patrol AKA the Gast-e Ersad, is in fact government disinformation to stop the protests), Iran still has plenty of other internal police organs to oppress its citizens with: the FARAJA (Law Enforcement Command of Islamic Republic of Iran), the PAVA (the intelligence subset of the former), the Basij (a paramilitary Islamic militia run as a subset of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards), etc.
“Of course, the judiciary continues to monitor behavioral actions,” he added. The Iranian authorities will consider whether to adjust the headscarf rules, the attorney general said in a statement.
Born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the religious force, charged with patrolling for and arresting women who violate the Islamic dress code, e.g., by not wearing a head covering or loose-fitting clothing, has existed outside of the judicial system, operated by law enforcement.
The mass unrest that has swept the country in recent months was triggered by the arrest of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini in Tehran for not wearing the mandated hijab headscarf. After she was escorted to a police station, the woman went into a coma and later died in a hospital. While the official state account contends that Amini suffered a fatal heart attack, eyewitnesses claim that several security officers assaulted her in the police van following her detention.
Amini’s death fueled a wave of anti-regime rallies pressuring the theocracy to relax its restrictions. Mostly women and young adults, including many university students, have participated, urging an overhaul of the fundamentalist religious dictates. In a show of resistance, protesters have marched in the streets yelling slogans like “woman, life, freedom,” burned their hijabs, and cut their hair, the New York Times reported. Some protesters have called for the end of the Islamic Republic. In late November, an Iranian general acknowledged that more than 300 people have been killed in the ongoing demonstrations.
Many doubt that the Guidance Patrol has in fact been dissolved, or that it would actually make any difference if it was:
So it is a practice that can be discontinued but the police and Judiciary can still use many other ways to prosecute those not wearing Hijab
— Arash Azizi آرش عزیزی (@arash_tehran) December 4, 2022
Still, even if the regime is only pretending to make concessions to the protesters, this is more than we’ve seen in previous protests, so the regime must obviously be rattled.
The latest update on Iran from ISW:
Protest coordinators and organizations continued issuing guidance on December 3 in preparation for the planned countrywide protests and strikes on December 5-7. The Hamedan Neighborhood Youth posted instructions on how to make hand-thrown explosives, Molotov cocktails, and pepper spray. The Karaj Neighborhood Youth and others published maps of planned protest locations. The Shiraz Neighborhood Youth advised citizens to prepare basic necessities and cash for themselves given the planned strikes.
Statements from the neighborhood youth groups portray a protest movement that is still trying to cohere and experimenting with different approaches. The Karaj group, among others, called for increasingly concentrated protests on each day from December 5 to 7. The Tehran group repeated on December 3 its calls for a different approach, in contrast. The Tehran group acknowledged ”differences of opinion” and insisted that citizens only strike on December 5 because security forces can more easily identify protesters and traverse city streets during strikes due to the reduced traffic. The Tehran group called for protests on December 6 and 7. This iteration within the protest movement is a natural step as it tries to coalesce and organize.
Alas, this hardly sounds like a well-oiled revolution ready to push the regime to collapse and step in when it does.
As in China and Venezuela, it takes a whole lot more than protests to bring down totalitarian regimes. I’d love to be proved wrong, but right now I very few signs that the Islamic regime is actually threatened.
Tags: Basij, Foreign Policy, Guidance Patrol (Gast-e Ersad), Iran, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Jihad
So how much money is the Junta in DC shipping to the Mullahs this time?
lots of historical examples:
will it go like the USSR, loosen the restrictions so they never get them back?
Loosen them up, wait for the protest to die down and then re-institute them?
In my distant past, I read a book, Armies and the Art of Revolution, the gist of which said, if you’ve lost the army, you’ve lost. Otherwise, you can survive.
Has Apple offered to alter the iPhone to make tracking protesters easier for the mullahs?
Lawrence Person, the Author: “remember, Obama was far more interested in pursuing his crazy nuclear deal than in helping the Iranian people”
Crazy? It was not “crazy”, it was a criminal, treasonous and deliberate deed to provide the Iranian regime with it’s own nuclear weapons.
Crazy? You think 0bama was an 6 years old president at the time? Crazy is to automatically find excuses for a criminal statesman.
The protests have (as in the past) metastasized beyond the wearing of head scarves. The people are sick and tired of the entire Islamic regime. Tired of the international sanctions brought on by the regime’s insistence on building a bomb. Tired of the draconian enforcement of myriad sharia laws. Tired of their country being linked to terrorism worldwide. The Shah wasn’t perfect, but life then was way better, freer and more prosperous.
I can’t think of a single religious system of belief that ever did well, trying to morph over into running the secular world. Every single one of them has eventually wound up discrediting both their religious and their secular efforts, resulting in cultural self-destruction.
Jesus had it right: Render unto Caeser what is Caeser’s, and mind your religious faith as a separate issue.
Iran is in danger of destroying Islam itself within its borders; the corruption and malfeasance of the mullahcracy is self-evident, and increasingly getting worse. More and more Iranians are abandoning not only the “Islamic Revolution”, but Islam itself. I expect a resurgence of other faiths that don’t try to run secular life, like Zoroastrianism and Ba’hai. Islam within the borders of Iran is inextricably linked to the corrupt mullahs that have driven that country into the ground, and I don’t think the end state is going to be some vastly devout Islamic nation, devoted to Allah. It’ll more likely be an obverse version of the French Revolution’s destruction of the Catholic Church within French borders, and the total confiscation of everything that belongs to the mullah class.
The path towards getting there ain’t going to be pretty, for any involved. But, I suspect it’ll be there.
This is one reason why I think that any religion that seeks secular domination and control is run by idiots. You want to retain belief in your faith? Don’t try to be the secular authority, or demand that everything be run along religious lines, because if anything ever fails to work out, then you discredit both yourself and your religion. With the obvious follow-on effects; you can see a lot of that crap working out in Europe, today. The idea of religion and the state being anywhere near each other is simple stupidity, for all involved parties. Religion and the morality that go with it may well inform secular decision-making, but to base those decisions solely on religious tenets? You won’t like where that winds up taking everything.
IMAO we’ll know the protesters are serious when “morality police” members start turning up dead.
And when people stay together at night, so that when the gov’t thugs come to arrest them, they can counter-attack and win, instead
So, has the DHS really shutdown their disinformation board?
Same odds that the Iranians have shutdown their morality police.
Authoritarians gotta be authoritarians.