“This man, Ebrahim Raisi, is the enemy and RINJ Women are calling what is happening in Iran the Amini Revolution, honouring Mahsa Amini, God’s daughter. Here is why this revolution is needed,” say feminist activists now working for women’s safety and good health in many Iranian locales including Qum, Rasht, Oshnavieh, and Tehran from Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, under a security watch,” explains veteran women’s rights humanitarian worker.
By Melissa Hemingway and Micheal John
“Femicide is common in Iran but Mahsa Amini’s murder was too much, not just because the world watched her fall, but because there but for the grace of God go all of us women,” said protest organizer Behar, from Tehran.
“Some 5,000 political prisoners were murdered and buried in mass graves by the Iranian government starting in 1988. Most Iranians believe that the person they were supposed to vote for, Ebrahim Raisi, was instrumental in these crimes from the standpoint of organizing a retrial for each of these persons and then sentencing them to an unceremonious death and mass burial,” the activist-author-medical-practitioner Behar Abbasi told FPM.news in June 2021. Ms. Abbasi occasionally writes for FPMag, for example her expose on Ebrahim Raisi in June 2021.
Ms. Abbasi says from Tehran that she and her colleagues are very worried about what is also happening to women in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and all over Africa, especially Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda, Eritrea, and Libya. Revolution must be spelled with all capital letters. We must stop the theological femicide before we can win the fight for equality,” she has said repeatedly in the past 15 years.
“When a bullet hits a woman coming near our shelters or birthing clinics, we don’t know if the gunman is Iranian, Taliban, ISIS-k or some psychotic husband who lost some control of his chattel-wife,” says Grace Edwards from Kandahar, “but our guards shoot to kill no matter who. And that is how we will win this fight and change the world by defending ourselves, as men would defend themselves, because that proves our equality too, by staying alive!” she added.
Ms. Edwards also castigated using Arabic swearing the “Iranian Guardsmen” whom she says are ‘pretending to be obscure Iranian militias in Syria.
She cursed the government influencers from Iran who are ‘propping up Bashar al-Assad and running that government [paraphrased without the expletives].’ Ms. Edwards trained as a humanitarian organizer in Iraq for a very short time and in Syria for four years before being promoted to director of the Afghanistan operations in early 2021 by The RINJ Foundation.
The medically apparent murder of Mahsa Amini between 13 and 16 September 2022, for not wearing her headscarf (hijab) in public in a tightly fitted manner—in the opinion of Ebrahim Raisi’s morality squads— may not be a surprise. This smacks of Ebrahim Raisi’s theological femicide.
This last brick, on a pile of bricks, in a windy world, held by tired arms against the bosom of Iran’s oppressed women, was too much.
One-too-many femicides is bringing the entire, loose column of a deranged murderous government down. Here comes the Amini Revolution.
Accused of crimes against humanity including mass murder, is the newly elected president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi. Photo Credit: khamenei.ir – https://farsi.khamenei.ir/photo-album, CC BY 4.0, Link
Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
Not just the RINJ Foundation feminists who have Ebrahim Raisi labeled as a global pariah.
Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, said in 2021: “That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran. In 2018, our organization documented how Ebrahim Raisi had been a member of the ‘death commission’ which forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed in secret thousands of political dissidents in Evin and Gohardasht prisons near Tehran in 1988. The circumstances surrounding the fate of the victims and the whereabouts of their bodies are, to this day, systematically concealed by the Iranian authorities, amounting to ongoing crimes against humanity,” said the human rights shero of 2022.
“If Ebrahim Raisi was Sonny Barger, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would be Ebrahim Raisi’s unholy outlaw gang of psychopaths from hell. (And Ebrahim Raisi, of course, would be dead.) But the whole point is that Sonny Barger’s gang fell under an organized crime statute, the USA Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act and the Jewish women among us feel the IRGC should be acknowledged as a global terrorist organization,” said Katie Alsop of RINJ Women when asked for a comment. She also noted in a conversation that her organization is 100% behind the World Jewish Congress’s call for declaring the IRGC a terrorist organization.
According to the World Jewish Congress (WJC) (self-proclaimed diplomatic arm of the Jewish people), the IRGC has plotted terrorist activities in at least Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kenya, Bahrain, Turkey, and the United States of America. Others say that list is much larger.
The WJC invites readers to “Join the list of those, who believe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) should be labeled as a terrorist organization worldwide.”
“Today, I’m announcing that we [Canada] will implement sanctions on dozens of individuals and entities, including Iran’s so called morality police,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.
Similar remarks by Melanie Joly, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Canada, during her address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
“We’ve seen Iran disregarding human rights time and time again. Now we see it with the death of Mahsa Amini and the crackdown on protests,” PM Justin Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa.
“It is extraordinary that such a foul human rights abuser like Ebrahim Raisi would be the president of a nation of mostly very nice people,” said Gracie Edwards who is the director of humanitarian operations in Afghanistan for The RINJ Foundation.
Ms. Edwards, a Syrian-born Canadian, and her team, has sent volunteers to help women in Iran, but also to study the tactics of these courageous women in Iran, because the Afghanistan women’s battle against femicide is in its incipient state, if not a mournful state.
The same is true, Ms. Edwards says, for her sister team in Syria now run by Dr. Nassima al Amouri in the southwest of Syria and Dr. Buni in the northeast of Syria.
Accused of having a significant role in Iran extra judicial killings in 1988 of up to 5000 persons, Ebrahim Raisi was in past years Iran’s top judge before becoming president in 2021, replacing a moderate. He holds ultra-conservative views. Ebrahim Raisi has been under USA sanctions for years, and now Canadian sanctions because he has been linked to past executions of political prisoners. FPM.news sources say that most Iranians understand this but had heard justifications of a religious nature for the mass murders which left thousands of unmarked graves as the incipient legacy of Mr. Raisi.
Iran’s president is the top executive in Iran and second-highest ranking leader to the spiritual head of the nation, after what Iranians call the Supreme Leader, perhaps a demagogue. Photo Credit via The RINJ Foundation: khamenei.ir – https://farsi.khamenei.ir/photo-album?id=42906#i, CC BY 4.0, Link
Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
September 2015, “setting up new operations in Syria where every step of the way saw interference from Iranian influencers in Damascus,” according to Ms. Edwards, now in Kandahar sending trained feminist workers to Iran in support of the Amini Revolution with ReaperTeam Overwatch providing safety and security for women actvisits.