The Desperate Effort to Silence Iranian Feminists

[niyad]

The Desperate Effort to Silence Iranian Feminists
9/22/2022 by Shaghayegh Norouzi and Samaneh Savadi

Editor’s note: Protests have raging across Iran over the last week after the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman in the custody of the Islamic Republic’s morality police due to her defiance against the strict dress code. The country’s desperate effort to silence Iranian feminists has taken the form of violent responses and crackdowns of both in-person demonstrations and online activism.

Link to tweet

Unbelievable footage from Amol in northern Iran: people in their hundreds pushing back the riot police and state security forces #MahsaAmini #مهساامینی pic.twitter.com/ZolwhOjR6X
— Fazel Hawramy (@FazelHawramy) September 21, 2022

On Thursday morning in New York, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was set to interview with CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour at the United Nations General Assembly, but it was canceled at the last minute after Amanpour declined to wear a headscarf.



Mornings are not easy for an Iranian feminist abroad. Most days, we wake up to harsh news coming from home: Another NGO is suspended, another friend is arrested, another bloody crackdown on a legitimate protest.
May 12 was one such morning. We both woke up to something that seemed exciting at first but turned out to be an extraordinary challenge to our work: tens of thousands of new followers, but all fake followers and bots intent on harassing us. In a matter of hours, we were under attack and overwhelmed. It wasn’t just us; more than 20 Iranian feminist pages on Instagram that are based abroad and around 30 pages inside Iran were attacked simultaneously. We did not know who was attacking us or why. Our first reaction was to change our pages from activist to private while feeling disappointed and angry. Later we discovered that we had lost all of our social media insights because we had temporarily switched to private.

This overnight, coordinated takedown happened soon after Firuzeh Mahmoudi, executive director of United for Iran, wrote this in Ms. magazine:
“Through social media, mobile apps, weblogs and websites, Iranian women are actively participating in public discourse and exercising their civil rights, mostly anonymously. Luckily for the growing women’s rights movement, the patriarchal and misogynistic government has not yet figured out how to completely censor and control the internet.”
Unfortunately, it seems that the Islamic Republic of Iran has found a way to censor and control us over the internet.

Their plan is twofold:

Overwhelm feminists abroad with fake followers, hundreds of private messages, slurs and bullying so that we cannot do our job of advocating online and defending our sisters inside Iran.
Target feminist activists inside Iran, interrogate, arrest and imprison them with impunity.



People participate in a protest against Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi outside of the United Nations on Sept. 21, 2022 in New York City. Protests have broke out over the death of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody for allegedly violating the country’s hijab rules. Amini’s death has sparked protests across Iran and other countries. (Stephanie Keith / Getty Images)
. . . . .

They forced us to leave our country and now are trying to force us to leave our online community. Still, in the face of the constant bullying by the Islamic Republic of Iran, we’ve found each other again, we’ve moved closer to other activists, we’ve acted more forcefully to fight back against ignorance and bullying, and we’ve learned so much. In Farsi, we say: در نومیدی بسی امید است، پایان شب سیه ، سپید است. “Don’t give into despair. A bright morning always follows a dark night.” We believe in that. We are near the end but not for the Iranian feminists, but the Islamic Republic of Iran. Until then, we work, and we fight until we see the light for us, for you, and everyone else. We will build our Iran again.

https://msmagazine.com/2022/09/22/iran-women-morality-police/