Gender Apartheid in Iran must be stopped !
SMCCDI (Public Statement)
Oct 8, 2004

Cowering again to intimidations and pressures from the Islamic Republic's assortment of goon groups, Iran's Soccer Federation has decided to prohibit attendance of female fans in the upcoming soccer match between Iran and Germany that is to be held in the Azadi (formerly Aryamehr) stadium. The game is scheduled for October 9, 2004.

This discrimination is a clear indicative of systematic degradation of women and the existence of the state's gender apartheid policy. Nasty elements enmeshed within the fabric of the hated Islamic regime in Iran!

That same reviled policy was also adopted previously for a soccer match between Iran and Ireland. A number of brave Iranian women at that time decided to defy the ban but were brutally beaten at the gates of the stadium.

Iranian women have continually showed their defiance and protested dark irrational prejudice against them at many opportunities, notably by removing their forced Islamic veils at various occasions and sometimes burning them!

The root of this injustice goes back to the Islamic doctrine that women are worth and value half as much as a man in all regards!

This is a travesty. Many of us remember that at a time, not in a too distant past, Iranian women were ministers, pilots, soccer players, nurses, and etc. All of that came to a crashing halt by acid throwing and other disfiguring barbaric methods of the "guardians of Islamic principles" in Iranian streets not too long after the Islamic "revolution."

Those "guardians," as history witnesses, prevailed.

Today, even though girls constitute the majority of students in Iran's higher learning institutions, many courses of study are not an option for them and, they are strongly encouraged, or rather pressured, to take courses in "knitting" and "cooking" and such!

This came about after recent realization of the governing body of the Islamic Republic of the fact that females were an enormous majority throughout Iran's universities.

But a new era has dawned. Majority of Iran's population who have no recollection of Khomeini's revolution or the time before that, are now coming of age and are poised to turn Iran's theocratic system upside-down and dance Pop and Techno on top of its ruined  heaps. Boys and girls hand in hand!

Fools are those who think they can in any way stop or slow that trend. Most foolish one of them is probably Shirin Ebadi, the so-called Noble Peace Prize winner. Although she is a woman and academically trained in law and human rights, she seems to have no regards whatsoever to the plight of her own kind in Iran. For some unexplained reason she keeps trying to convince the world that the Islamic Republic of Iran is reform-able and that its theocratic system is perfectly compatible with democracy. Effectively, She has also been calling on the French government to forgo their constitutional mandate of separation of church and state and abolish their ban on wear Islamic Hijab, which that law also includes other religious clothing apparel, in public schools and institutions.

Pity!

No matter how much Acid is thrown on the faces of Iranian women, and no matter how much they are beaten and disfigured in the name of some absurd backwards ideology, nothing is going to stop the Iranian women from eventually realizing their equal rights and status to men in the free, democratic, and secular Iran of tomorrow.

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