"Her Crime? Defending Women’s Rights in Iran" | NYT

Nasrin Sotoudeh honoured by PEN

Oh boy, about time the New York Times had a look at women's rights in the Middle East.  For too long they've been consumed by the trivial concerns -- yes, trivial, compared with their sisters in the Levant -- of third or fourth wave (I've lost count) feminism in America.
The Times takes up the issue of Iranian brave Iranian Human Rights lawyer in Iran, Nasrin Sotoudeh, in the Editorial, no less.  The nasty mullahs.  Was the Shah really so horrid?  For women, certainly not.  Read "The Stoning of Soraya M" for a truly spine chilling account of what happened to women in Iran, when the Ayatollahs took over in 1979 -- by the way, also setting off the "Islam resurgence" and all the rest of it,  Islamism, jihadism, terrorism, and so on, since then.
/Snip:

In their perverse way, dictatorships know full well they’re doing wrong when they imprison dissidents. They betray this by the absurdity of the accusations they make against their critics, as if trying to conceal the real intent of their persecution. The result, of course, is the opposite — the silenced dissenter emerges as the righteous accuser, the tyrant as crook.
The latest proof of this is the new prison sentence handed down against Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian human rights lawyer in jail since June, on charges of “colluding against the system” and “insulting” the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. She had already been convicted, in absentia, of belonging to a human rights organization and stoking “corruption and prostitution” — an apparent reference to her defense of women arrested on charges of removing the mandatory Muslim head scarf. A few years earlier, Ms. Sotoudeh had been imprisoned for “activities against national security” and “propaganda against the regime.”

Read on