Contributor
The German human rights commissioner who rebuffed Iranian female dissidents on Thursday, reportedly views the hijab as a form of emancipation for women.
The Iranian dissident, Masih Alinejad, pulled the plug on a meeting with the federal human rights commissioner, Luise Amtsberg, because Amtsberg did not wish to publicize the substance of the discussion.
The German magazine Stern reported in 2017 that the Green party politician had said she learned the head scarf can be a sign of emancipation, adding “We forget that sometimes.”
Amtsberg wrote her master’s thesis on “Feminism in Islam: Using the example of the Palestinian women’s movement.”
Lawdan Bazargan, a California-based Iranian-American political and human rights activist, told Iran International, “The hijab is an ideology, and like any ideological belief, it is linked to 'interests' and 'power.’ The hijab serves a dual function; it privileges veiled women in Islamic societies while also helping to reproduce the system's inherent patriarchy."
Bazargan, who is currently campaigning to secure the dismissal of Oberlin College’s Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, Iran’s former ambassador to the UN, added, “Ultimately, the hijab humiliates and disempowers women in society. It is shameful for a European woman, born and raised in a democratic country with liberal values, to idolize a symbol that oppresses millions of women, acting like a chain around their necks, suffocating them.”
Alinejad has long campaigned against the hijab. The Islamic Republic of Iran imposed the mandatory hijab on women after the 1979 revolution in 1981.
Iran International reported last week that the clerical regime has impounded the cars of people who violate the rules of the mandatory Hijab. In 2022, after dozens of Iranian women unveiled in public and sent their videos to Alinejad in New York, the clerical regime said women can be sentenced up to 10 years in jail for sending Alinjead the footage.
The outrage over Amtsberg’s attempt to silence the Iranian dissidents in Berlin has shined a new spotlight on the Green party’s overly cordial relationship with the Islamic Republic.
Amtsberg’s Green party has a long tradition of holding public meetings with Iranian regime officials and politicians who have denied the Holocaust, defended the use of stoning for adultery, and engaged in killing Iranians.
In 2019, Germany’s best-selling newspaper, Bild, published a series of news articles and an editorial titled “Shame on the Bundestag” that exposed the then-Green party Bundestag vice president Claudia Roth’s enthusiastic greeting of the former speaker of the Iran’s ersatz parliament, Ali Larijani.
Larijani defended former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust at the 2009 Munich Security Conference.
Roth is currently Germany’s cultural minister and, in 2010, met in Tehran with the former speaker's brother, Mohammad-Javad Larijani, who defended the stoning of people who committed adultery. Mohammad-Javad Larijani served as the head of the Iranian Human Rights Council. A year before Roth’s meeting, he denied the Holocaust at a German foreign ministry-sponsored event in Berlin held close to the Holocaust memorial.
Roth courted Manouchehr Mottaki who, while foreign minister, delivered a key speech at Tehran’s 2006 Holocaust denial conference.
The largely pro-Iran politician, Roth, also high-fived then-Iran ambassador to Germany, Reza Sheikh Attar, at the 2013 Munich Security Conference. Iranian Kurdish dissidents accused Attar of carrying out a massacre of Kurds during his tenure as governor of Kurdistan and West Azerbaijan provinces between 1980-1985.
The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has also faced intense criticism from German opposition politicians and Iranian dissidents for her dovish posture toward Tehran. Baerbock refuses to sanction the IRGC as a terrorist organization. She claims to practice a “feminist foreign policy” but her inaction toward the IRGC—a US-designated terrorist organization dedicated to enforcing the mandatory hijab—has sparked criticism from Alinejad and other Iranian dissidents.
The statement comes after more questions have risen about how the parliament has become a rubber stamp and hardliners dominating the government get their power from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s office. Consequently, questions also arise as to what the constitutional powers of the Supreme Leader are and do elections and elected offices mean anything, when he can dictate his will.
Hardline cleric Morteza Aqa-Tehrani, the chairman of the central council of ultraconservative Paydari Party recently quoted the party's founding father, Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi as having called for the nation's absolute obedience to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Aqa-Tehrani quoted Mesbah as saying, "The absolute rule of the Supreme Leader is not enough as the theory of government under the Islamic Republic. The system also needs absolute obedience of the people to the supreme leader."
The statement effectively would render the legislative system in Iran meaningless. According to the ultraconservative party, Khamenei can make any decision, and the people will have no choice other than obeying what he decrees. What makes Aqa-Tehrani’s statement more dangerous is that his party is poised to gain absolute majority in the March parliamentary elections that are being heavily engineered to give a monopoly of power to hardliners.
Commentator Abbas Abdi writing in Tehran’s reformist daily Etemad on Saturday argued that those who speak about “absolute obedience” to the Supreme Leader, in fact are doing a disservice to him. A modern state cannot be governed on that basis because the world has changed in the past 200 years and now governing a country needs expertise in different fields, he stated. Those who insist on absolute obedience in fact leave the Supreme Leader in a lonely position, vulnerable to all things that can go wrong and make him a target for blame.
Mr. Khamenei has already entered the unenviable position of being seen as responsible for a once rich and promising developing country that is now on the verge of becoming a failed state. Anti-regime protests in recent years have demonstrated that increasingly many people have turned against Khamenei, seeing him as responsible for a failed state and an impediment to a better life.
Iran’s economy, straddled with unsurmountable inefficiencies of nepotism and political control, has little hope of resuming development and progress. Sitting on the world’s second largest natural gas resources, Iran faces domestic shortages, let alone an ability to export.
Crude oil exports, limited by US sanctions, are not even enough to help bridge a 50-percent budget gap. The country needs $160 billion to overhaul and modernize its energy sector, according to oil minister Javad Owji, but its annual crude exports barely reach $22 billion. Iran resembles a football player who has lost track of the ball and no matter how fast he runs, it seems too late to catch up.
Iranians see this hopeless situation as the result of Khamenei’s 34-year rule, and his hardline loyalists resort to more praise and demands of full obedience, while many see his days numbered at the old age of 84.
Recently, former President Hassan Rouhani publicly referred to the inevitable, the death of the leader, and hinted at the need to look forward. This week, a senior cleric revealed that a small committee is looking into appointing a deputy leader. But the day after Khamenei’s eventual passing is what many whisper about. Who would replace him. Will there be a nasty power struggle, or even a “collective leadership” to replace the Supreme Leader? What will the Revolutionary Guard do? Will they push their own candidate, or they will start an internal power struggle?
Abdi referring to “absolute obedience” wrote, “I would like to say that those who make this statement are essentially pursuing their own agendas. By seemingly expressing support for the velayat-e faqih (Supreme Leader), they aim to advance their projects. Lacking intellectual courage and self-sufficiency, they seek to promote their plans through this statement.”