Amid Absurd Charges Against Israel, Real Outrages Go Ignored
It’s open season for the real Middle Eastern rights abusers.
Iranians attack morality police after women are detained. (CNN)
With eyes trained on US campuses, where Muslim and leftist students and outside agitators have been screaming for divestiture from Israel, other Middle Eastern countries are free to commit egregious human rights abuses that go unnoticed by the wider world.
“Iranian women,” The Telegraph reported on April 27,
are being sexually assaulted, tasered and beaten in a fresh morality police crackdown on those flouting Tehran’s strict dress codes.
Multiple videos posted online show women being bundled into the back of vehicles for infractions as minor as wearing a coat that is too short or too colourful. . . .
Women in Iran told The Telegraph of sexual abuse and being denied entry to public spaces such as subway stations, universities, and cafes for not complying with headscarf rules or for wearing fitted trousers.
The latest severe measures started on April 13, just hours before Iran launched hundreds of suicide drones and missiles at Israel.
Many Iranians speculate this timing was chosen because global attention was diverted.
The report tells of one 25-year-old woman who was arrested near Tehran because “I had my headscarf loosely draped around my neck.” Accosted by plainclothes goons, Taranom (not her real name) was molested, thrown to the ground, dragged into a van where there were four other detained women, then “taken to a police station where they found dozens of other women.”
Taranom waited in a room for five hours, then had to sign papers saying she wouldn’t go without a hijab again and wouldn’t file a complaint about what had happened to her.
Since Mahsa Amini’s death in September 2022, more and more Iranian women have been going in public without the hijab. The mullahs are now cracking down on it, in no small part because they know they can easily get away with it.
Agence France-Presse reported three days later, on April 30, that
Iraq’s parliament [had] passed an anti-LGBTQ bill...that criminalizes same-sex relations, carrying sentences of 10 to 15 years in prison....
The new law...makes "biological sex change based on personal desire and inclination" a crime, and punishes transgender people who undergo and doctors who perform gender-affirming surgery with up to three years in prison.
A self-exiled gay Iraqi man named Ali, explaining why he couldn’t even consider going back to Iraq, told AFP that LGBTQ people there are already “exposed to various types of violence, such as murder, rape, kidnapping, and extortion.”
The US State Department groused that the new Iraqi legislation “can be used to further hamper free speech and personal expression and inhibit the operations of NGOs across Iraq.”
But even that very mild rebuke would have been too much for the campus protesters, who are, after all, decrying “genocide” by a country they claim to be so uniquely evil it can only be dissolved.
The absurdity of the charge of Israeli “genocide” was more evident than ever this week as Israel reopened the Erez Crossing into northern Gaza for the first time since October 7, when Hamas, as part of its cross-border assault, attacked and damaged the crossing with mortar fire.
That gave Israel cold feet for a while, but now an Israeli official said he hoped the reopened crossing would “help reach a target of 500 aid trucks entering Gaza daily.”
The latest Israeli government report on May 2 says that on May 1, “406 aid trucks were inspected and transferred to the Gaza Strip...and 196 trucks were distributed within Gaza, 121 of which contained food.... 173 pallets containing tens of thousands of packages of food aid were airdropped, in coordination with partner countries over northern Gaza.... 26 bakeries are currently operational in Gaza, providing close to 5 million breads, rolls, and pita breads daily....”
Since the beginning of the war, the site specifies that 26,746 trucks carrying 508,815 tons of aid have entered Gaza.
It’s a strange form of “genocide,” but when much of the world is under a tsunami of Jew-hatred and lies, facts don’t count and morality gets stood on its head.