Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal: Killing My Rapist (video)

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Killing My Rapist (video)

Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; Lizzie Dearden (Independent.co.uk); Fox (video interview of mother); Huffington Post (video) UPDATED

Colonial Britain used a divide-and-conquer strategy before leaving mess the world inherited.

Iran used to be a great place, the "Aryanland," the center of a Persian Empire or at least the remnants of it. For all the greatness it achieved, the West has ruined it, first by British intrigue then by U.S. corruption, deposing a leader and installing a dictator friendly to the West. What we as a military-industrial complex-led nation do to Afghanistan with military force and brutality we do to Iran with stealth and subterfuge.

The Cyrus Cylinder, proud past

We gave Iran its secret police, its own version of a CIA, but that is not enough and taunted by Israel we constantly threaten Iran with a militant attack. "Persephone" explains life before the West installed a leader and fomented revolution and a predictable crackdown and dictatorship. This pattern is followed again and again as CIA/MI5 standard operating procedure.

[It is easy to cover this story because if Iran had something good, there would be no news about it to share. It would go uncovered, not widely available, buried in Farsi. But the U.S. mainstream media, an eager advocate of endless war and war profiteering, is all over this injustice and mistreatment of females, while our injustices and oppression of women go hidden by always pointing the finger elsewhere, which serves as a bogus excuse, "At least you don't have it as bad as those women over there." It's not true, of course, because we do have it as bad or worse but in different ways we are not generally aware of.

Tehrangeles rose garden (kcet.org)

Try defending yourself in this country and see what happens: the same highlight reel as Rayhaneh Jabbari, who was 19 at the time of these events (and who has been tortured for seven years in prison while police investigate one of their own, Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, a former employee of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, to absolve him and break the victim, forcing her to change her story or face more prison time, more torture, and despairing of these tactics, death by the state) as you are made the perpetrator rather than any kind of victim. Killing is no way to respond to any crime, even murder, but defending oneself cannot be reserved for police and government officials. In this case, Jabbari's would-be rapist, the man who sexually assaulted her, was a secret policeman, a government insider.

Secret life of young Iranians (klyker.com)

It should not surprise us that Iranians, and the whole world we are told, want to be like us. We want to be like us, even though we are not: We want the freedoms we are told we have when we know we don't have them. We want the rights we don't really enjoy but are told are our rights.

Indo-Scythian queen claimed by Iran: Tomyris

We want the opportunities, free education, medical care, and equality before the courts, Blind Justice, we are promised. Of course, everybody wants that. And smart governments trick the world into thinking they give it, which makes it easier to rule. Very few elite people actually get those things, and usually only for a price, but here we are fighting and dying for it when we are not given it.

We live in a patriarchy; sexism is the norm; we rarely even question the way things are, and the powers-that-be in the media and courts, police and military, spying agencies and banks do everything they can to take this way of being as given, natural, and unalterable or, in any case, as so convenient that, Why would anyone want to upset the cart and change it?]

(Fox) Reyhaneh Jabbari's mother speaks out after her daughter was executed last

weekend for killing her alleged would-be rapist Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi.

VIDEO: Jabbari executed by sexist state (Huff Post): Iranian woman executed on Saturday despite international pleas for clemency left her family a heartbreaking message several months before her death. Reyhaneh Jabbari was hanged in Tehran's Evin prison after spending five years totured on death row for the 2007 murder of an Iranian intelligence agent who sexually assaulted and tried to rape her.

Final message of woman executed in Iran: "Dear mom, don't cry"

Lizzie Dearden (Independent.co.uk, Oct. 27, 2014)

An Iranian inmate peers from behind a wall as a guard walks by at the female section of the infamous Evin jail, 13 June 2006

Jabbari was tortured in Evin prison

Reyhaneh Jabbari said she accepted fate and would have justice in the afterlife.

The final message of a woman [now 26] executed in Iran for killing a man she [then 19] said tried to rape her has been released, telling her mother she would have justice in “the court of God.”

Reyhaneh Jabbari, 26, was hanged on Saturday despite an international campaign for her release by groups including the International Committee Against Executions and Amnesty International over her seven years in prison.

She left her final will in a voice message to her mother, Shole Pakravan, in April, according to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which released an English translation.

Jabbari on trial, Tehran, 12-15-08 after torture

Ms. Jabbari recorded it on the day she learned she would be executed, saying she had “given in” to death.

"Dear Sholeh, don’t cry for what you are hearing," she said. “The world did not love us -- it did not want my fate.

“In the court of God I will charge the inspectors…and all those that out of ignorance or with their lies wronged me and trampled on my rights and didn’t pay heed to the fact that sometimes what appears as reality is different from it.”

Girls' Lena Dunham sexually molested sister

She was sentenced to death by a Tehran court in 2009 for killing Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, a former employee of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence who she said tried to [rape her after he did in fact] sexually abuse her, and the verdict was upheld by Iran’s Supreme Court despite a legal challenge. More