Iran Schoolgirl Poisonings Investigation
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A crisis over suspected poisonings targeting Iranian schoolgirls escalated Sunday as authorities acknowledged over 50 schools were struck in a wave of possible cases. The poisonings have spread further fear among parents as Iran has faced months of unrest.
My great-grandmother was the first woman that worked as a comptroller for Sears and Roebuck— the amazon.com of prior days in America.
Speculation in Iran’s tightly controlled state media has focused on the possibility of exile groups or foreign powers being behind the poisonings. That was also repeatedly alleged during the recent protests without evidence. In recent days, Germany’s foreign minister, a White House official and others have called on Iran to do more to protect schoolgirls — a concern Iran’s Foreign Ministry has dismissed as “crocodile tears.”
She escaped a Kentucky hell-bent on oppressing women and made a lovely life for herself in Massachusetts using her intellect to objectively run circles around the smartest men of her time.
“These poisonings are occurring in an environment where Iranian officials have impunity for the harassment, assault, rape, torture and execution of women peacefully asserting their freedom of religion or belief,” Sharon Kleinbaum of the commission said in a statement.
While this article is about Iran, I can't help but think about how American politics is divided on this dystopian view on gender.
Suspicion in Iran has fallen on possible hard-liners for carrying out the suspected poisonings. Iranian journalists, including Jamileh Kadivar, a prominent former reformist lawmaker at Tehran’s Ettelaat newspaper, have cited a supposed communique from a group calling itself Fidayeen Velayat that purportedly said that girls’ education “is considered forbidden” and threatened to “spread the poisoning of girls throughout Iran” if girls’ schools remain open.
The difference between poisoning women for getting educated and paying big technology companies to monitor uterine cycles and gps coordinates is shockingly thin.
However, Kadivar also noted that hard-liners in Iranian governments in the past carried out so-called “chain murders” of activists and others in the 1990s. She also referenced the killings by Islamic vigilantes in 2002 in the city of Kerman, when one victim was stoned to death and others were tied up and thrown into a swimming pool, where they drowned. She described those vigilantes as being members of the Basij, an all-volunteer force in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.
I am an activist. My threat model can be reduced to avoiding areas where people post memes about violence on social media. Where violence is normalized, people are dehumanized.
“The common denominator of all of them is their extreme thinking, intellectual stagnation and rigid religious view that allowed them to have committed such violent actions,” Kadivar wrote.
I am lucky to have free movement to escape oppressive environments. Many people, not so lucky. These schoolgirls? Where are they to go to learn?
Do you believe they should be allowed to learn to read and write? To be granted the autonomy to grow and dream and become more than what men would damn them to be?