Anti-hijab protesters in Iran set fire to the old home of former supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who founded the current Islamic Republic of Iran. The home-turned-museum of Khomeini reportedly got set ablaze using petrol bombs, and footage of the arson surfaced online.
“Protests raged on at Iranian universities and in some cities on Saturday as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned the country's ‘enemies’ may try to mobilize workers after failing to topple the Islamic government in more than two months of unrest.
One of the boldest challenges to Iran's clerical leaders in decades, the protests have been gaining steam, frustrating authorities who have blamed Iran's foreign enemies and their agents for orchestrating the disturbances.
‘Until this hour, thank God, the enemies have been defeated. But the enemies have a new trick every day, and with today's defeat, they may target different classes such as workers and women’, state television quoted Khamenei as saying.
Women and university students have played a prominent role in the anti-government street demonstrations, waving and burning headscarves to denounce Iran's strict Islamic dress code for women.
The wave of unrest erupted in September after Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the country's morality police after she was arrested for wearing clothes deemed ‘inappropriate’.
Protests spread into the vital energy sector last month but demonstrations by workers, which have partly addressed demands linked to pay and working conditions, have been limited.
In 1979, a combination of mass protests and strikes by oil workers and bazaar merchants helped to sweep the clergy to power in Iran's Islamic revolution.
On Saturday, activist HRANA news agency said sit-down strikes and protests were taking place on two dozen campuses in the capital, Tehran, and in major cities including Isfahan, Tabriz and Shiraz with slogans including ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom’.
Kurdish rights group Hengaw posted videos purporting to show security forces shooting at protesters in the town of Divandarreh, killing one protester. Reuters could not verify the videos.
The official news agency IRNA said protesters damaged the home of Divandarreh's top state-sanctioned cleric and the office of the local parliament member, adding that two people may have been killed in the violence.
Videos posted on social media purported to show protests in a number of cities in western, northwestern and central Iran, some during funerals held for deceased demonstrators.
Iran's hardline judiciary has sentenced five protesters to death and said it will put on trial more than 2,000 people indicted for unrest, intensifying efforts to crush weeks of demonstrations”. -Helen Popper and Nick Zieminski, Reuters
The hijab crisis in Iran is nothing more than a CIA-orchestrated attempt to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
It wouldn’t be the first time. However, this go-round looks as if it poses a much more serious threat to the government than the previous CIA campaign to foment resistance in Iran during the so-called “Green Revolution” of 2009.
It comes as no surprise that universities are at the forefront of this social movement because universities have been the basis for revolutions throughout history, given the fact that frustrated and volatile young people crowd the institutions.
In the late 1980s, under the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran introduced one of the most progressive family-planning programs the world has ever seen.
Launched in 1989 by the Ministry of Health under the slogan, “One is good. Two is enough”, the program made all kinds of contraception—including condoms, the Pill, IUDs, tubal ligations, vasectomies, and the morning-after pill—available to Iran’s citizens, for free.
Although participation was entirely voluntary, the program’s strategy for success was deeply rooted in education and universities.
For this reason, even if the Iranian regime successfully suppresses the uprising this time, there is still bound to be a next time because the younger generations of Persian women and college graduates have already been infected with the infection that is feminism.
Ayatollah Khomeini is primarily responsible for bringing about this infection by allowing the sale of birth control and thereby fostering a situation where Iranian women are frying their fertility.
Between the years 1979 to 1989, there was a massive demographic surge in Iran, where the average family size was about seven children.
After the wide dissemination of birth control, however, the country’s fertility rapidly plummeted to below replacement rate.
The Iranian birth-control effort is an example of how an Islamic fundamentalist government jettisoned ideology to cope with modern problems, especially when the bottom line was population growth that was perceived to be outstripping government resources.
It only took until 2010 for Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a statement where he admitted that the family-planning programs were the biggest mistake he had ever made and begged Allah for forgiveness.
This blunder on the part of the supreme leader enabled the CIA to exploit a weakness in the Iranian regime by discrediting the ulama as an infallible authority.
Unfortunately, as a result, a significant proportion of Iranians have given into modernist subversion and western matriarchal influences for a society that prioritizes the preferences of unmarried parents who casually conceived and parented their illegitimate offspring as opposed to conventional patriarchy that prioritizes the preferences of married parents who properly parent their legitimate offspring.
At this point, the only man who has the potential to unify a dismantled Iran is ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad, a man of the people who proved himself as mayor of Tehran when he paid the dowries of poor Muslim women so that they could get married, is the only Iranian figure at the moment who could lead a movement of Persian nationalism that would restore order and put an end to the acts of resistance.
But, until that is to occur, the Iranian’s attempt to neuter the God-given gift of fertility cannot and will not exist without the horrendous social consequences of the sort they are experiencing today.
After all, if the sanctimony of childbearing is deemed an impediment to women’s salvation and becomes seen as something that people are more than willing to try to circumvent, it’s no wonder why a religious headscarf perceived as a tool of oppression stood very little chance of remaining prevalent in today’s increasingly secularized society.