Iran Tyranny: Female Activists Sentenced to Death (Mahsa Amini)
Noriko Watanabe and Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Shia religious leaders and political elites in Iran utilize tyranny to crush any signs of freedom outside their Islamist worldview. Hence, the recent announcement of the death penalty on the Kurdish female activist Pakhshan Azizi is all too predictable.
Voice of America reports, “This marks the second death sentence for a female political prisoner in Iran in recent weeks. Earlier, Sharifeh Mohammadi, a labor activist held in Lakan Prison in Rasht, was sentenced to death by the city’s Islamic Revolutionary Court, also on charges of rebellion.”
Iranian authorities have been increasingly fearful of female activists since mass protests in 2022 -following the brutal murder of Mahsa Amini.
Medya News reports, “Azizi has been deprived of the right to contact her family or receive visits from them since 6 July 2024 on the orders of Evin Prison’s security authorities. She has also been denied the right to instruct her lawyer during her detention, and was subjected to torture and duress to force her to make confessions.”
The United Nations (UN) fact-finding mission said it has “established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police.”
The UN fact-finding mission also said the state apparatus of Iran used shotguns, assault rifles, and submachine guns against demonstrators, “thereby committing unlawful and extrajudicial killings.”
The tyrannical Shia Islamic theocratic state seeks complete power concentration. Hence, the authoritarian state apparatus of Iran killed Mahsa Amini (22), Sarina Esmailzadeh (16), Hadis Najafi (22), Nika Shakarami (16), and many others for how they dressed – and because they held notions of freedom, liberty, and hope.
Depravity since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 is nothing new because untold numbers have been killed – while others tortured and imprisoned for long periods.
The UN report confirmed the reality of Iran. It said, “Some of the detainees faced sexual violence, including rape, rape with an object, threats of rape, electrocution to the genitalia, forced nudity, groping, touching and other forms of sexual violence.”
One can only imagine the hardship, mental torture, and tyranny befalling Pakhshan Azizi, Sharifeh Mohammadi, and many others at the hands of the tyrannical state.
In the 1980s, Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri (1922-2009) wrote to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He said, “Did you know that young women are raped in some of the prisons of the Islamic Republic?”
Accordingly, from the concerns and warnings of Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri – to the deaths of Mahsa Amini, Sarina Esmailzadeh, Hadis Najafi, Nika Shakarami, and many others – to the recent death penalty against Pakhshan Azizi and Sharifeh Mohammadi: the tyrannical Islamic Republic of Iran continues to crush dissent and kill and persecute the women of Iran.
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