Read all about the assasination of the 22 year young Jhina Mahsa Amini or Zhina Mahsa Amini (Kurdistan-Iran)
Gino d'Artali
Indept investigative journalist

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When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali

France 24
9 Oct 2022
Video by Liza Kaminov
<<'We will fight' ': Iran protests following death of Mahsa Amini enter fourth week.
Schoolgirls chanted slogans, workers went on strike and protesters clashed violently with security forces across Iran on Saturday, as demonstrations over the death of Mahsa Amini entered a fourth week. Anger flared after the 22-year-old Iranian Kurd's death on September 16, three days after her arrest in Tehran by the notorious morality police for an alleged breach of the Islamic republic's strict dress code for women. Iran said on Friday an investigation found Amini had died of a longstanding illness rather than <blows> to the head, despite her family reportedly saying she had previously been healthy. Amini's father told London-based Iran International that he rejected the official report.
<I saw with my own eyes that blood had come from Mahsa's ears and back of her neck,> the outlet quoted him as saying Saturday. The women-led protests continued even as ultra-conservative President Ebrahim Raisi posed for a group photograph with students at Tehran's all-woman Al-Zahra University to mark the new academic year. Young women on the same campus were heard shouting <Death to the oppressor>, said the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR). In Amini's hometown Saqez, in Kurdistan province, schoolgirls chanted <Woman, life, freedom> and marched down a street swinging headscarves in the air, in videos the Hengaw rights group said were recorded on Saturday. Gruesome videos were widely shared online of a man who was shot dead while sitting at the wheel of his car in Sanandaj, Kurdistan's capital. The province's police chief, Ali Azadi, said he was <killed by anti-revolutionary forces>. Angry men appeared to take revenge on a member of the feared Basij militia in Sanandaj, swarming around him and beating him badly, in a widely shared video.
'We will fight'
Internet monitor Netblocks reported outages in Sanandaj, and national mobile network disruptions. Another shocking video shows a young woman who appeared to be unconscious after allegedly being shot in Mashhad. Many on social media compared it to footage of Neda Agha Soltan, a young woman who became an enduring symbol of the opposition after being shot dead at protests in 2009. Despite internet restrictions, protesters have adopted new tactics to get their message across. <We are not afraid anymore. We will fight,> said a large banner placed on an overpass of Tehran's Modares highway, according to online images verified by AFP. In other footage, a man is seen altering the wording of a large government billboard on the same high-way from <The police are the servants of the people> to <The police are the murderers of the people>. The ISNA news agency reported a heavy security presence in the capital, especially near universities. It said <scattered and limited gatherings> were held in Tehran during which <some demonstrators destroyed public property>. Street protests were also reported in Isfahan, Karaj, Shiraz and Tabriz, among other cities. US-based campaigner and journalist Omid Memarian tweeted: <Videos coming out from Tehran indicate that there are so many protests, in every corner of the city, in small and big numbers.> Hengaw, a Norway-based Kurdish rights group, said <widespread strikes> took place in Saqez, Sanandaj and Divandarreh, in Kurdistan province, as well as Mahabad in West Azerbaijan.>>
Read more and watch the video here:
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20221009-join-us-and-stand-up-iran-protests-following-death-of-mahsa-amini-enter-fourth-week

The Guardian
9 Oct 2022
Supported by The Guardian
By Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor
<<Iranian security forces arresting children in school, reports claim.
Iranian schoolchildren were being arrested inside school premises on Sunday by security forces arriving in vans without licence plates, ac-cording to social media reports emerging from the country as protests against the regime entered their fourth week. The authorities also shut all schools and higher education institutions in Iranian Kurdistan on Sunday - a sign that the state remains concerned about dissent after weeks of protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman. Footage showed protests in dozens of cities across Iran early on Sunday, with hundreds of high-school girls and university students participating in the face of teargas, clubs, and, in many cases, live ammunition by the security forces, rights groups said. Tehran has denied that live bullets have been used. On Saturday, Iran's main news channel was briefly hacked and interrupted with images and messages in support of the continuing protests. Footage of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in a meeting with state officials was replaced by images of protesters who have died.
An image showing Khamenei in crosshairs and in flames was also aired during the interruption, for which the hacktivist group Edalat-e Ali claimed responsibility. The images were accompanied by the words <join us and rise up>. The semi-official Tasnim news agency confirmed that the state TV news broadcast <was hacked for a few moments by anti-revolutionary agents>. The scale of the continuing protests is disputed, with government officials claiming that western-backed media are giving a false picture of scattered gatherings that quickly dissolve once the security forces arrive. However, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group said on Saturday that at least 185 people, including at least 19 children, have been killed in the countrywide demonstrations. Supporters of the protests, which were first sparked by the death of Amini after being arrested by the morality police in Tehran for not wearing the hijab correctly, say the persistence and originality of the often spontaneous demonstrations shows the depth of young people's alienation from an elderly and socially reactionary ruling class that is out of touch with their values and attitudes.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/09/iranian-security-forces-arresting-children-in-school-reports-claim-state-tv-hackers

And a related articles:
The Guardian | The Observer
8 Oct 2022
By Kamin Mohammadi
<<Why Iran's female-led revolt fills me with hope.
It was in the strange days between the Queen's death and her funeral that the bad news from Iran broke through the blanket coverage of the state mourning rituals. The news that pierced this was the report that a young woman had died in the custody of Iran's morality police. Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, had been taken into custody because of <bad hijab>. She was visiting relatives in Tehran with her brother when the mo-rality police challenged her about a few strands of hair that were showing from her standard hijab. According to her brother, she was in custody for just two hours before collapsing and being taken to hospital, where she lay in a coma before dying on 16 September. The authorities claimed that she had a heart attack from a pre-existing condition. Her family deny this, and state that her head and body were covered in bruises and signs of being beaten. As an Iranian who has grown up and lived in Britain since the age of nine, I am long accustomed to the horror stories that come out of my birth country. So when protests started in Mahsa's homeland of Kurdistan - a western province in Iran - I shuddered at the possible arrests and violence that may be me-ted out on those taking part, but didn't think more of it. Protests at the abusive treatment of women, minorities and students have become commonplace in the past years and I have become reluctantly accus-tomed to observing passively while the Iranian authorities suppress people's peaceful demonstrations with increasingly violent force. Ethnic Kurds have long experienced discrimination in Kurdistan. Mahsa's real name - Jhina - is Kurdish and as such could not be registered on her birth certificate as only Persian and some Islamic names are lawful. There are also laws against the teaching of the Kurdish language in schools. It so happens that my paternal home-land is the very town that Jhina Amini came from and so when I heard about the protests in Kurdistan, I prayed that my family would be safe. However, in spite of 250 people reportedly being arrested and five killed during two days of protests in Kurdistan, the demonstrations didn't stop. In fact, they spread to the rest of the country, and the Kurdish freedom cry of <Woman Life Freedom> became the dominant chant in what have become the biggest nationwide protests that Iran has seen since the revolution of 1979. As I write this, BBC Monitoring has recorded protests in at least 350 locations in the country over the past 20 days. In images that diasporic Iranians like me have been sharing on social media, we see the protests are led by women, predominantly very young women (Gen Z), who are tearing off their headscarves to wave them triumphantly in the air, to burn them, to joyfully dance as they consign them to bonfires. What started as a protest against the mandatory hijab soon became a demand for freedom. <Woman Life Freedom> is the first time in Iranian history that a chant demands something positive rather than the end to, or the death of, someone or something. The brutal treatment of Mahsa Jhina Amini over <bad hijab> - and now many other young women, including 16-year-old Nika Shakarami, killed in these weeks - was the spark that lit this conflagration of rage. But the real heat of this movement comes from decades of repression and oppression of any viable opposition to the hardline clerical regime, a freefalling economy and the mass corruption and hypocrisy of the ruling elite, which refuses to allow Iranian women some loosening of the mandatory hijab even as their own children stalk the streets of LA clad in revealing outfits and post pictures of parties they hold in luxurious mansions bought with the pilfered riches of our country. The headscarf that is being waved, banshee-like, by Iranian women is, for the people of Iran, no longer anything to do with Islam but a symbol of the oppression that the regime has visited on its own people in the name of religion. This is not a call for the end of Islam, it is a call for the end of the symbols of state power and abuse, a call that even religious Iranians have joined. As my quietly devout Iranian aunties tell me, this regime has taken the symbols of their faith and turned them into a tool for the suppression of half the population. They and women like them are joining the protests alongside the girls who have so courageously whipped off their hijab to face the regime's forces with their hair flowing.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/08/iran-mahsa-amini-women-girls-revolt-hope

The Guardian
8 Oct 2022
Patrick Wintour - Diplomatic editor
<<Are hijab protests 'the beginning of the end' for Iran's regime?
he Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, was holding court to a small group of journalists at the Millennium Hilton in New York on his first visit to the United States since his election in June 2021. At home, protests over the death in police custody of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, were entering their sixth day. At the start of the meeting, a 10-minute film was shown, part patriotic travel brochure and part paen to how the Iranian people <live peacefully together in a new model of democracy>. Given the events in Iran, it seemed like the kind of absurd propaganda only a severely self-deluded regime would screen. Raisi's minders were reluctant to take questions about the protests, but when he agreed, he became fiercely animated about western double standards and spoke so loudly that the words of the mild-mannered translator became hard to discern through the headphones. No final determination had been made into Amini's death, but preliminary evidence showed a stroke or heart failure was the cause, he said. He cited statistics that 81 women had been killed in the UK in a six-month period. <How many times each day in the US are men and women killed every day at the hands of law enforcement personnel?> Two weeks on and it is clear that Raisi had little idea of the forces that were being unleashed inside his country. It is still not clear whether the protests are over, despite mass arrests and scores of deaths. Nor is it clear if the older Iranian leadership believe they are facing an existential threat that requires them to change tack. Nazanin Boniadi, a British-Iranian actor and Amnesty International ambassador, takes the view that something new has emerged on the streets of Iran. <Never in my 14 years working on human rights advocacy have I witnessed such disillu-sionment with, and opposition to, the Islamic Republic regime,> she said. <While Iran has become accustomed to mass protests every decade, neither the student protests of 1999 nor the green move-ment of 2009, or even more recently the November 2019 protests, compare in fervour or magnitude to the current protests.> Others are more cautious. Dr Sanam Vakil, from the Chatham House thinktank, said the protests had revealed a huge divide in attitudes to the theocratic system. <The sheer force, velocity and audacity of this spontaneous movement have left the regime close to losing control,> she said. <But they have a playbook to quash protests that has worked in the past and they are now using that playbook.> Vakil senses Iran is still nervous about the optics of being seen to beat up women and children. The ubiquitous mobile phone and social media act as constraints on the security forces.
Global solidarity
The engagement of the vast diaspora, celebrities and sports stars - inside and outside Iran - also give the protests a different global character. Donya Dadrasan, an Iranian pop star based in Australia with 2.5m Instagram followers, has poured out content about the morality police. Like many others, she has posted footage on TikTok and Instagram of herself cutting her own hair in solidarity with women in Iran.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/08/are-hijab-protests-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-irans-regime

The Guardian | The observer
8 Oct 2022
By Simon Tisdall
<<Iran's brave young women must break their own chains. The west won't help.
In Hong Kong in 2019-20, millions took to the streets to oppose the repressive actions of an authoritarian regime. But ultimately their voices were silenced, their leaders jailed and China stripped away their democratic rights - as western leaders looked on, wringing their hands. In Belarus, nationwide protests erupted when a cruel dictator stole the 2020 election. The UN said hundreds of people were abu-sed, tortured, raped. But the dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, propped up by his loathsome buddy in Moscow, remains truculently in power. In Myanmar, the army launched a coup last year, replacing elected politicians with a military junta. Its boss, General Min Aung Hlaing, stands accused of overseeing genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority - but has got off scot-free so far. It's a pattern that repeats with dismaying frequency around the world. Just look at the Arab spring <revolutions> in Syria and Egypt. The people rise up, the people are crushed - and the western democracies, crying foul, eventually accept the new-old reality.
Is this the fate now awaiting the young women of Iran who have bravely taken the lead in challenging the latest lethal excesses of Tehran's morally bankrupt regime? Like other countries, Iran's 1979 revolution vanquished a tyrant, only to have another take his place.
Yet today's ongoing nationwide protests, defying brutal crackdowns, are unusual in several respects. While most seem to be led by young women and schoolgirls, backed by young men, a wide range of ages, ethnic groups and social classes is represented. The uprising has no leaders, organisation or manifesto other than <Women, life, liberty> - a slogan signalling collective commitment to human rights, free expression and democratic self-determination. Little wonder this vile regime cannot comprehend it. Most strikingly, the women show no fear. They refuse to be cowed (or covered). These vigorous younger generations care nothing for the Islamic Republic's 43-year history of grand designs, broken promises and bloody wars. For them it is corrupt, anachronistic and irrelevant. Nor has the unrest anything to do with <foreign plots> - the regime's hackneyed, catch-all excuse for failure. It has everything to do with high educational attainment, the internet and social media, globalised culture, and the denial of personal and career freedoms that are the accepted norm elsewhere.
Whether or not the mullahs realise it, these courageous young women are Iran's future. No longer can they be silenced, closeted and forcibly isolated from the world. They're connected. They inhabit the era of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. They know it, celebrate it.
After years in gestation and several wrenching false starts, citizen-based politics has arrived in Iran. It's setting an agenda for change. And there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. For the supreme leader, the arch-reactionary Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and for his placeman president, Ebrahim Raisi, the message is plain: give way or <get lost>. Next week or next year, sooner or later, the second Iranian revolution is coming. The wheel is turning anew. And over time, no amount of killings, detentions, censorship and threats, no amount of shaming of young women, no futile efforts to persist with mandatory hijab - that potent symbol of revolt - can stop it. That said, the Shia clerical oligarchy will not willingly embrace this dawning reality. It will resist every which way it can. Its victims, such as the heroic, much-persecuted women's rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, know how viciously the regime clings to its beliefs, prejudices and power. And yet, as Shirin Ebadi, one of Iran's first female judges and 2003 Nobel peace prizewinner, has noted, the battle is not with Islam but with those who exploit and distort it for their own ends. Men like the Islamic Republic's theocratic founding dictator, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. <An interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith,> Ebadi wrote in her 2006 book, Iran Awakening. <It is not religion that binds women, but the selective dictates of those who wish them cloistered.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/08/irans-brave-young-women-must-break-their-own-chains-the-west-wont-help

France 24
6 Oct 2022
By Francois Piccard | Imen Mellaz | Charles Wente | Juliette Laurain
<<The debate:
Iran's youth rise up: Can women's rights movement lead to change?
Call it Act Two of Iran's protest movement. Teenagers and in par-ticular teenage girls are defying Iran's repressive theocracy. Their daring is contagious. Week Three of the movement has seen fewer mass demonstrations than during the initial outrage over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police. Instead, we're seeing more targeted acts of protests, even strikes.
Wednesday's siege of several university campuses serves as a re-minder that the regime has seen off a long list of movements, with activists killed or locked up for years at a time. Five decades into Iran's Islamic revolution, will this time be any different? We ask about accounts of massacres and why this movement resonates so strongly beyond Iran's borders.>>
Read more here:
https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/the-debate/20221006-iran-s-youth-rise-up-can-women-s-rights-movement-lead-to-change
Audio embedded: 43.42 min.

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