Miley, Meghan, and Mahsa: on Defining a Scandal
Miley Cyrus is naked. Ellen DeGeneres is mean. Olivia Wilde’s vinaigrette. Janet Jackson has a boob. Tristan and Khloé. #MeToo. Monica Lewinsky. Amber Heard. Meghan Markle. Britney. Diana. Ye.
To anyone having lived anywhere other than Under-a-Rock, all of the above should bring associations of headlines in varying degrees of bold. The above names all bear the unmistakable gloss of scandal lacquer.
Let’s try: Nika Shakarami. Do you recognize this name? Is it glazed in a similar varnish?
Hadis Najafi. Any scandal bells ringing yet?
Jina Mahsa Amini. Anyone?
Chances are, you don’t recognize these names — that the bells of scandal haven’t rung.
Yet these are the names of three women, aged 16 to 23, murdered by their government. They were killed while fighting for their right to free their hair; for an Iran freed from its Islamic Republic; for a country in which women don’t need a man’s approval to travel; for a judicial system where a woman’s worth is equal to — and not half — a man’s; for the right to love who you love without being hanged in public; for a country where parents don’t need to pay for the bullets used to murder their child if the police is to return the body to be buried; for the permission for parents to grieve at their child’s funeral without the presence of police, ensuring nobody says anything critical of the regime; for law enforcement officers that don’t — by order of their Supreme Leader — rape 15-year-old girls before murdering them, making them impure, thereby ensuring they cannot enter Paradise; for the US, UK, and EU not to buy the regime’s oil, financing the tyranny, even if it means higher electricity bills this winter.,, For freedom.
The names of Nika Shakarami, Hadis Najafi, and Jina Mahsa Amini are not merely lacquered in the tint of scandal: they are smeared in oil, dripping in blood — and nowhere to be seen.
That the ideal of universal human rights doesn’t mean much in real life is hardly news: everybody knows that an Iranian girl’s life isn’t worth as much as many others’. What is news, however, is the extent to which the lives of Iranian girls is valued less: Judging by the widespread silence of society at large and the complicity of politicians — of Sweden’s former foreign minister wearing a hijab to meet the regime, of Macron shaking hands with Iran’s president amid burning protests, of the UN including the Islamic Republic in its women’s rights commission — the lives of Iranian girls are not just worth less, but worthless.
By brutality and internet shutdown, the regime is doing its best to scare the people of Iran into silence: to stifle the girls’ pleas for freedom from reaching you. The Islamic Republic is counting on the media not to inform on what is happening, on people not being the voice for the women of Iran, and on their trade partners being willing to pay the cost of human lives for barrels of oil.
Perhaps the true scandal is not to be found in the tabloids’ headlines nor in the bloodbath on the streets of Iran, but in the world’s betrayal of Iran’s women. In your silence.