BBC report: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-62967381
A better source’s report: https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/khamenei-aide-visits-mahsa-aminis-family-media
Tudeh (communist) Party of Iran statement: https://www.tudehpartyiran.org/en/2022/09/20/statement-of-the-tudeh-party-of-iran-down-with-the-dictator-there-is-no-end-to-the-regimes-murderous-thuggery/
A woman was seemingly murdered by the IRI’s religious police after being taken into custody for not wearing her hijab “properly”. Iranian officials deny this and claim she died of a heart attack. Looks like no one is buying this line.
Danny Haiphong thinks a color revolution is underway because of Iran’s pivot to the east. I haven’t seen this sort of line taken by anyone else yet, but I’m more keen to trust the Tudeh Party than a non-Iranian, as much as Haiphong is usually right. From my understanding and their own statements, Tudeh is not clamoring for some relationship with the West and are very aware of and against NATO, EU and U.S. imperialism. I doubt they’d be in favor of these protests if they thought they were spearheaded by western NGOs.
Lots of protests all over the country. Many chants recorded such as “long live socialism, long live communism” and “death to the dictator, down with Khamenei”. Complicating matters is that the murdered woman was Kurdish-Iranian and fittingly a lot of the protests began in heavily Kurdish regions of Iran. This is not to dismiss the plight of Kurdish people or their capacity for revolutionary struggle, but Kurds have been insidiously used and abused by the West to forment ethnic tensions in Iraq, Turkey, Syria and elsewhere before, and western media outlets are seemingly attempting to continue that legacy by drawing a clear divide by Iranian Kurds and non-Kurds.
There is a fog of reporting currently, with a lot of protest info being relayed to western media by Chatham House, a British think tank known recently as having been pushing a lot of anti-Russia stuff. U.S. officials also immediately “demanded accountability” of Iran and claimed the act was “unforgiveable”.
Any MENA comrades have thoughts? Do you think this could be a revolutionary moment, or a cynical attempt by NGOs to weaken Iran after they’ve closened to China?
I don’t necessarily think it’s a color revolution, it’s likely that the women are just fed up with how horribly they’re treated. However I didn’t know the woman who died was kurdish, there might be more to her murder than just not wearing hijab “properly”.
Sounds about right for Iranians from what I know, this makes me think it’s a colour revolution even less. But that doesn’t mean that America won’t be jumping at the chance of capitalizing on any internal strife.
I would’ve said to read about this from Arabic media but a bunch of Arab countries have grudges against Iran, no idea if there would be that kind of bias in the reporting. I’ll try to look for something and put it here.
alaraby is a pan-Arabist outlet that has pretty good articles from what I’ve seen. They take a progressive line and have a great article on how equating the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe V Wade with sharia was islamophobic and that most Muslim nations guarantee access, altho limited, to abortion.
I just noticed that you posted a link from them as your source lol, I shouldn’t have been replying when I just woke up.
I’ll make sure to check the article on roe v wade, sounds interesting.
edit: removed part of my comment as i mixed up with something else