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Coventina

(26,846 posts)
Wed Dec 7, 2022, 08:17 PM Dec 2022

The Real Reason Iran Says It's Canceling the Morality Police

Last week, Iranian Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri announced that the Guidance Patrol, widely known as the Morality Police because it enforces the Islamic Republic’s laws on personal behavior and dress, will be suspended. Though Montazeri quickly added that the judiciary will continue to monitor public conduct, the announcement is a clear acknowledgment of the toll that the demonstrations have taken on the regime since September, when the death in Guidance Patrol custody of a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, led to widespread protests.

In the typical fashion of senior Iranian officials, Montazeri was vague and did not make clear whether the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has approved the decision. Nor did he disclose what will happen to women who appear in public without the mandatory hijab, or headscarf. Iran’s state television channel has since denied the announcement. Still, the protesters are buoyed by the news, though they remain unappeased—buoyed because this is a small victory, but unappeased because disbanding the Guidance Patrol, if that proves to be the case, is only the beginning for them. In an interview with the BBC, one unnamed protester said, “A revolution is what we have. Hijab was the start of it, and we don’t want … anything less but death for the dictator and a regime change.”

The regime knows this. The many elders of the Islamic Republic learned long ago—from the fate of the preceding regime, in fact—that to concede to protesters is to reveal vulnerability. In January 1979, Iran’s last king, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, tried to quell the dissent he faced by appointing as prime minister Shapur Bakhtiar, a reformist whom some close allies of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the de facto leader of the movement to depose the shah, regarded highly. But Khomeini immediately rejected the move, calling the new prime minister and his government illegitimate and vowing that the movement would go on until the monarchy had been dismantled.

The regime also knows that, even if it was capable of reform, it has missed the opportunity for it. The 2009 Green Movement was the theocrats’ last, best chance. Back then, the protesters were asking “Where is my vote?” because they still had hope in bringing about change by electing a potential reformist, Mir Hossein Moussavi, from among the supreme leader’s approved candidates. But the rigged election followed by a violent crackdown proved that the system was too recalcitrant.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/iran-morality-police-abolished-protests-strike/672376/

Interesting times......

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