The Iranian Regime Needs to be Destroyed

Phyllis Chesler reviews "The Stoning of Soraya M" about the ghastly way in which women are treated in Iran. And this bum in the White House chose to take a neutral stance while Iranians risked their lives marching in the streets in order to rid themselves of these misogynist turbaned scum. And he is also perfectly willing to allow that horrific regime to obtain nuclear weaponry. His saying in words that he doesn't want Iran to have nuclear weapons mean nothing. He must act militarily to prevent that from happening.

Death to the Turbans, No More Stoning: Free Iran



Defiantly, bravely, they are marching for their freedom in the streets of Teheran. The mullahs’ men are gassing, beating, shooting and jailing them.

The people are chanting: “Death to the turbans,” “Down with the dictator,” “We want democracy.” The demonstrators are risking their very lives in order to tell the world the truth about Iran: that it is one gigantic prison in which elections are rigged, children are sacrificed to clear landmines from the fields, and women, intellectuals, and homosexuals are routinely jailed and murdered by corrupt dictators who sponsor terrorism abroad.

We tell children that if they “tell the truth, they will be safe.” But this is a lie. Truth tellers invariably get into trouble. Even in the West, whistleblowers get harassed, maligned, isolated, fired. Those who expose family “secrets” are treated as evil or crazy and are often driven out of the family. The evil-doers are protected, those who expose them are punished. This seems to be a fairly universal phenomenon.

While I am no fan of the Islamist Mir Hossein Moussavi or of his Islamist wife, at least Moussavi ran on a platform which promised to ban the stoning of Iranian women.

Last night I finally saw The Stoning of Soraya M. The film is both beautiful and terrible, painfully graphic, quite true to Sahebjam’s narrative, well worth seeing. I have been writing and speaking about this stoning for about five years now but I was still riveted to my seat. I had to cover my face several times as the actual stoning was re-enacted.This is ironic, given my stand against female cowering/”covering.” But this time, doing so allowed me to avoid the most unpleasant reality; perhaps this is a self-destructive act. We must face evil in order to stop it.

Some points about the story and the film which the reviewers may not have noticed:

First, Soraya Manoucheri could have lived–had she granted Ghorban Ali, her husband, an immediate divorce, given up her two sons whom Ali, a frequenter of brothels, had turned against her, and simply accepted her fate as a vulnerable, impoverished women with absolutely no way to support herself and her two daughters other than prostitution which is both shameful and illegal. This small amount of spirit, or outraged dignity that Soraya showed is precisely what doomed her. It makes no difference that the 40 year-old Ghorban Ali could have married the 14 year-old who had aroused his lust anyway, without having to divorce Soraya. He would still have had to pay some support and this he refused to do. He chose to falsely accuse her of improper behavior with her male employer and to have her stoned to death.

Second, although Soraya and her magnificent aunt Zahra were relatively “spirited” women, neither really believed that their lives were unbearably tragic and/or they were incapable of acting on that belief. To save her life, Soraya would have had to flee immediately, (yes, into the same dreadful poverty and prostitution); that, in the era of the mullahs, once targeted by an evil man, there would be no escape for her or for any woman. Failing that, Soraya would have had to wrestle the rifle out of the hands of the man guarding her, and turned it on him and then on herself in order to avoid the most torturous of deaths.

If they are lucky, Iranian prostitutes routinely spend many years in prison, as do rape victims. In 2001-2002, Iranian filmmaker Manijeh Hekmat released a film Women’s Prison which depicts the heartbreaking lives of women behind bars from 1979-1999.

Many prisoners have been accused falsely of being prostitutes, or have been forced into prostitution and then punished for it–or have killed their potential rapists or longtime rapists.

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