A call from the World Peace Council to the peace movements of the world
Hijab wars in India and Iran: a question of women's autonomy
BRINDA KARAT of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) on why there is no contradiction in supporting Iranian women burning their hijabs – and Karnataka women fighting for their right to wear them
Demonstrators display posters as they attend a protest against the death of Iranian Mahsa Amini in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022.
DR HANA SAADA asks why a war crime against innocent children on this scale does not dominate the world’s coverage of the US-Israeli war on Iran
From the colonial oil plunder of 1909 to the current threat of a regional inferno: Western interference in Iran forms a chain of coups, puppets, and cynical geopolitics centered on oil, says MARC VANDEPITTE
As tensions escalate over Iran, CAROL MOCHAN MSP argues that Britain must finally learn from the disastrous legacy of Iraq and choose diplomacy over another catastrophic conflict
While Wes Streeting claims Britain lacks a growth strategy, his own NHS plans reveal one – turning the health service’s vast troves of patient data into a commercial asset for tech giants, investors and private healthcare firms, says HELEN MERCER
The mass killing of Iranian schoolgirls should have dominated global headlines. Instead it became another example of how civilians — especially women and children — are targeted in war, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
THE images of women in Iran burning their hijabs has prompted the social media trolls of the BJP in India to taunt women who have opposed the Karnataka government’s ban on wearing the hijab to educational institutions. One of them said “show [the photographs] to shameless Indian women who want to cover girls in hijabs”. As usual the trolls have got it wrong.
In Iran the custodial death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman in Tehran, has led to a series of protests. She was arrested because of her “improper hijab” by Iran’s notorious moral police. Witnesses have said she was beaten on the head with sticks several times and died in police custody. Hundreds of women protested and in defiant and brave solidarity actions, made bonfires and threw their hijabs – headscarves – into the fire.
Scores of protesters have been killed. At the funeral of one such martyr, his grieving sister tore off her hijab, cut her hair and put fistfuls of it on the coffin of her brother, in a powerful symbol of protest. Subsequently social media has been flooded with videos of other young women cutting their hair and throwing away their hijabs. Across Iran the police are cracking down on protesters. We stand in full solidarity with the protests by women in Iran. We share their anger and outrage.
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