Iran
September 16, 2010 @ 1:23 a.m.
One of the reasons that I haven’t written recently about Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani is that I feel out of my realm of experience and I don’t want to make things worse.
Being Jewish is probably not in my favor in this situation. I had a bat mitzvah and went to Hebrew school, but don’t consider myself particularly knowledgeable about Judaism. My mother never converted from Unitarianism. I had a mikvah before my bat mitzvah; I think that might have been something that was required of me. I was 12, and I had never thought of myself as being anything but Jewish, so it didn’t seem like a demanding request. I’ve been to church a few times; I’ve always liked it, but I went as an adult, and that’s probably different from being made to go as a child. I don’t remember being anything but happy at the end of the two evenings per week that I had Hebrew School from the ages of 6 to 13.
I looked in a few places tonight to try to find information about Ms. Ashtiani’s original conviction. I was wondering if maybe she’d been raped or subjected to long-term sexual abuse and then been accused of adultery by her abusers, because to commit adultery with not just one but two men seemed to me as if it would be a difficult thing for a woman in Iran to accomplish. Another possibility is that her marriage was abusive, and maybe the men she knew were friends who tried to help her in a way that might not have helped any of them? I didn’t find detailed information about the men in question.
The other night my parents and I talked about Vietnam; not for long, just for a few minutes. My slight understanding of Vietnam, aside from all politics and questions of right or wrong in that war, is that the United States wasn’t prepared to deal with anything about the country of Vietnam. Its terrain was foreign, as were the culture and methods of warfare; it’s hard to fight people whose culture has a common root with your culture, but it’s even harder to fight people whom you don’t understand on any level. Instead of a baseline of commonality, you have a baseline of lack of mutual recognition, and I think that removes more of the moments when you can feel that you are a human being fighting other human beings, who might not want to be at war any more than you do. I think that feeling initially and immediately alienated from your enemy on a human level in addition to being at war can eventually make you seem like a monster to yourself.
If fighting with people whose culture is unlike yours is difficult, then mutually respectful dialogue with them when you disagree with them is probably just as difficult. The times in my life when I’ve met Muslims, I’ve enjoyed their company. I feel closer to them more quickly than I do to most Christians, and I found that to be more true the closer the Muslims that I met were to the source of their own ethnicity and religion. To be Semitic doesn’t just mean to be Jewish; the first definition of the word Semite from the online Merriam-Webster dictionary is “a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arabs.”
An Amnesty International article called “Two Iranian women in imminent danger of execution” talks about Ms. Ashtiani, and it also talks about a woman named Zeynab Jalalian, an activist, who is also in prison and who has also been sentenced to death.
I think that people who protest things that are happening in their own countries usually do it because they love their countries and not because they hate them. To protest things that you feel you can’t live with means that you believe in the future. To be an activist is to be part of your country and to care about it.
Equality for all people is something that strengthens a society; it can be difficult to see that sometimes.
Iran claims that both of these women were involved in the murders of their husbands. I wasn’t there; I don’t know what happened. If the women were involved, I think that maybe they were very desperate, and desperation can make people do things that they would never ordinarily do. It’s never easy for anyone to be nice to anyone; I think that kindness is something that people have to learn and to be encouraged to practice, or nobody will do it. In any country in which men aren’t perhaps asked or expected to be kind to women or to consider them as equals, men who go out of their way to be nice to women are probably extremely rare. If those women did commit or not try to prevent murder, maybe it was because they couldn’t take any more of the way that their husbands were treating them, and they felt that they had nowhere to go for help.
Copyright L. Kochman September 16, 2010
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October 13, 2010 @ 9:24 p.m.
--Celebrities undoing the work of Amnesty International and others re: Iran
All of the celebrities and everyone else who has been putting ads for “RED” and similar references on their blogs have been undoing all of the work that Amnesty International and everyone who has been working on the situation in Iran have done.
Here’s an article that was in small print on page 2A of the Burlington Free Press today; I’m going to transcribe the whole article here and then put a picture of it on my Friendster profile.
“Burlington Free Press, October 13, 2010, page 2A
Iran confirms arrest related to stoning case:
Tehran, Iran—Iran has confirmed the arrest of two German nationals as they tried to interview the son of an Iranian woman whose sentence to death by stoning on an adultery conviction has ignited international criticism. Foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said two Germans were detained as they approached the home of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani’s son. His remark on Tuesday was the first official confirmation of the two arrested. Mehmanparast says it’s unclear “whether the two are journalists” but he claimed they are linked to anti-government groups outside Iran. He provided no further details.”
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October 13, 2010 @ 9:30 p.m.
Iran seems to have gotten the message from the example set by the United States government that lying about, harassing, censoring, and threatening innocent people is perfectly acceptable behavior as far as the United States is concerned.
Iran also seems to have gotten the message from the turn that the U.S. government/media/corporate/sports teams/celebrity harassment of me took toward endorsing my death that anything Iran does to brutalize not only its own citizens but citizens of other countries is going to go unchallenged by the most prominent people in the United States, that whatever the Iranian government wants to do in violation of human rights is going to be supported by at least the U.S. government, big media here, and by a pack of some of the biggest celebrities in the world.
Copyright L. Kochman October 13, 2010
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October 16, 2010 @ 2:41 a.m.
I brought in the two most current blog posts that appeared on a Google search of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani.
The blog posts themselves, the websites for them, are covered with captions and ads that Google or someone has put on them to be harassing to me specifically. I'm not going to comment on those harassing captions and ads, I'm just going to put an excerpt from the Christian Science Monitor article here:
“Ashtiani’s son, Sajad, and her lawyer, Houtan Kian, are also said to be missing and presumably detained. Ashtiani’s family has confirmed that no one has heard from Sajad or the attorney since the detention of the two foreigners, reports the Guardian.
“I’m very worried about them because Germany has been very outspoken about the human rights abuses in Iran and Iran might keep them for a long time for a retaliation, like they did with the French academic Clotilde Reiss,” said Mina Ahadi, from Iran's Committee Against Stoning. She claims to have been on the phone with the pair during the arrest.”
From Google at time noted:
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· Death penalties in Iran: Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani's lawyer in ... - 13 hours ago
Iran's rulers are the worst human rights offenders, Mohammed Mostafei, lawyer to Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who was sentenced to death in Iran on adultery ...
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· Iran arrests two Germans for interviewing family of accused ... - Christian Science Monitor - 564 related articles