“Masih Alinejad is a whore, and not a heretic as some people claim her to be,” wrote Vahid Yaminpour, an influential conservative Iranian commentator and TV personality. “We shouldn’t elevate her to the level of a heretic. She’s just trying to compensate her psychological (and probably financial) needs by recruiting young women and sharing her notoriety with younger women who are still not prostitutes.”
Yaminpour’s comments in his Google Plus (which is banned in Iran) comes two days after Iranian state television aired a report claiming that the Britain-based journalist Masih Alinejad, founder of the “My Stealthy Freedom” social media campaign against mandatory veiling, had been assaulted and raped in London in the presence of her son.
The broadcast described Alinejad as a “nexus of sedition” for her campaign, which has garnered over 430,000 likes on Facebook. Hundreds of Iranian women from inside the country have posted pictures of themselves taking their headscarves off in public.
State television painted the campaign as promoting indecency amongst Iranian women, and alleged that an “unstable” Alinejad had stripped naked on a London street and was shortly thereafter raped by three passersby while her son stood watching. The report also claimed that London’s Metropolitan Police, together with BBC officials, had sought to keep the alleged rape confidential, but that the story emerged on social media sites and generated a broad reaction. “During her time in Iran this same individual was also banned from the Iranian parliament for ethical corruption,” it continued.
Alinejad swiftly rebutted the report on her Facebook page–which has 224,000 followers, as opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) Facebook page, which is liked by 16,463. She posted that she was in good health and had not endured an attack of any sort. She also wrote that, though she had originally been supportive of President Hassan Rouhani, hoping that conditions inside Iran would improve and that exiled journalists like herself could return, she now sees that the country will not be changing meaningfully any time soon.
Iran’s state television is a hardliner-controlled propaganda arm of the regime establishment and has historically been used as a tool of political repression. It is run by political opponents of President Rouhani’s policies of moderation, and has shown a hysterical anxiety around Alinejad’s “Freedom” campaign, which has resonated across Iran with unexpected force.
Alinejad also posted a video clip of herself singing on a London tube station platform, and directly addressed Ezatollah Zarghami, head of IRIB. “If I were to sing freely in my own country instead of in London, what would you do with me? There are millions of Iranians like me, who love singing and freedom. Do you deny their existence, or rape them in your imagination?”
She ended her post with this: “Now why don’t you also broadcast this video of mine on state television, since you’re so adept at running frivolous news and have fixated on me amidst all the news of executions and assaults. Broadcast this, so that people see that I’m in good health and high spirits in my perch in exile.”
Alinejad’s Facebook response to state television’s bogus broadcast has as of publishing received 5,000 likes.
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This is where Islamist regimes just don't understand how western society functions. They think that because this is the way men in their cultures would behave then it must be the case everywhere else. You already see every kind of garb imaginable in London and the idea that a naked woman in the street would immed iately be pounced upon by male passers by is completely ridiculous and the reason for this is quite simple: in our society sex is freely available between consenting adults. If you like someone you are free to sleep with them and no-one cares except, ironically, the increasingly vocal Muslim minority here who appear to be determined to turn the UK into just the kind of cesspool of bigotry and intolerance their parents and grandparents were keen to leave.
More than anything, Islamic societies are sexually repressed and this is at the root of many of the problems. The men are tortured by it but deprive themselves of the joy of entering into blame free, consensual relationships with willing, emancipated women because this is the price they must pay in order to maintain social, political and economic control. They just can't let go and they can't see that in liberating women they would be liberating themselves. Of course, they don't recognise it in those terms: instead it's all "God's will". I often think that God, if He exists, must be pretty pissed off about this.
I don't doubt that British men are as fixated with sex as men everywhere else, and probably do think about it every seven seconds, but "the lunatic" is confined to the bedroom and is not at the controls. Crucially the lunatic is not making public policy. No-one is forced to live in a state of continual frustration and the rest of the time we all just go about our business. Young, pretty women are still whistled at in the street, and that's regrettable, but that's as far as it goes: any attempt at physical contact results in a ride in the back of a police car and no-one would ever suggest that a rape victim had deserved it, not publicly anyway. These assumptions and expectations won't be changed overnight but ditching the veil has be to be first important step towards recalibrating male behaviour. Whether that can ever happen outside a secular democracy remains to be seen - I personally doubt it. Before people are given a choice in what they wear, they have to be given a choice about what they believe.
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Also, note how no-one is taking any notice whatever.