Back in the early 1990s, I heard Johns Hopkins University Professor (and future best-selling author) Azar Nafisi make the point during a speech in Philadelphia that throughout the Middle East, women were fighting for rights they never had. Iran was different, she observed, because there women were fighting for rights that were taken away from them.

Here, Caroline Sevier highlights their case of two of Iran’s leading feminist dissidents, and how the Iranian government cracked down on their campaign to stop stoning women to death. How reassuring it must be to such women that left-leaning editorialists in the United States argue that the best policy is to ignore them.