Last Wednesday, while Iranian president Ibraham Raisi addressed the United Nations General Assembly, insisting that countries such as Canada and U.S. had human-rights records equivalent to — if not worse than — Iran’s, protests erupted across the Islamic Republic. What sparked the protests was the beating death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, killed by the morality police, who had arrested her for violating the country’s strict requirement that women wear the hijab in public. More than a week later, there is no sign that the unrest is abating, despite an increasingly violent crackdown.
The protests have drawn broad comparisons to the 2009 Green Revolution, in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to decry the obviously fraudulent re-election of then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The 26-year-old philosophy student Neda Agha-Soltan was shot to death by the regime militias, or basij, and became the martyred face of the freedom movement. Unfortunately, despite the protesters’ cries for help, the Obama administration adopted a policy of strategic silence in the hopes of tempting the regime to negotiate a nuclear deal. The authorities then moved in and violently crushed the protests.
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