Iran has continued its assault on free speech this week with the jailing of an artist for simply drawing a cartoon disparaging members of parliament. Atena Farghadani, 28, who is a peaceful activist and artist who sought to mock the decision to restrict birth control for women. Rather than respond to such criticism, the ruling Mullahs sent her to jail.
The Revolutionary Guards raided Farghadani’s house, took her personal belongings, blindfolded her, and threw her into jail. Farghadani was charged with “insulting members of parliament through paintings” for drawing the officials as animals. When she was briefly released in November, she was arrested again for alleging discussion her torture and beatings while incarcerated. Before being sent back to jail, Farghadani posted an open letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to her Facebook page that stated “What you call an ‘insult to representatives of the parliament by means of cartoons’ I consider to be an artistic expression of the home of our nation (parliament), which our nation does not deserve! I, therefore, must pay retribution for defending my beloved defenseless people.”
For that, she was thrown into the hell hole known as Evin prison in solitary confinement. The case shows how blasphemy and religious crimes inevitably feed an insatiable appetite to criminalize and control speech of all kinds.
Farghadani stands as inspiring figure for everyone who values free speech. She has stood her grounds despite torture and cruel confinement in one of the most notorious prisons on Earth. It is embarrassing to call oneself a free speech advocate in the face of such unbridled courage. She is the perfect counterfoil to the morally corrupt regime of Iran’s Mullahs. That is precisely why they felt that they had to bury her deep in the confines of Evin.
Source: Washington Post
Thanks. In ancient generations past “liberty” was synonymous with national self-government first and foremost. The notion of “liberty” as equivalent to a legal regime protecting “individual freedoms” is an artifice of the Enlightenment.” Today the meanings have become muddled. Yet they are still two different things, and the one can be had without the other. They are not necessary co-existent.
As Americans we should be concerned with establishing first and foremost, strategic relationships with other nations that establish our security. That is fit and natural. And there is always some propaganda and selling that goes into that. But what I dislike is the phony American moralizing about what women wear or whether they vote, as a post-hoc excuse for various strategic choices like invading and occupying Afghanistan indefinitely.
And we should be very clear that our so-called Allies in the Middle east tend to have national laws and customs informed by Islam just as much as our so-called enemies or rivals like Iran do. Just as our Saudi “ally” is out there beheading people just like their ally Isis, which is supposedly now our enemy, even as it accomplishes the American strategic end of fighting the Assad government, which clearly has a more congenial legal regime of rights for women than either ISIS or the Saudis.
There is no way to fairly judge all the reporting about this and that story coming from overseas without remembering that some countries are American strategic allies and some are not.
@John Smith
Thank you for that quote! He nailed the problem. I was watching Hannity a few weeks ago, and (IIRC) he was talking to an Iranian girl about freedom, and how much she wanted it. He said something like, “you aren’t able to wear short skirts and high heels in your country”. . . and with a confused look she replied, “You think freedom is short skirts and high heels???”
Same thing. We now think freedom is the ability of a mentally ill person like Bruce Jenner to pretend he is a woman. Yeah. Like we are going to really fight and risk our lives for that kind of stuff against any invader.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
If I were an American Congressman I would call for the closing of the UN building in NYC and asking them to move to someplace else. There are too many perps from Iran and Saudi Arabia frequenting the cathouses and spreading diseases.
Beldar – once the UN has moved, NYC can collect on all those parking tickets from the embassies.
Fro Alex. Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Commencement address: “Harvard’s motto is “VERITAS.”….
How short a time ago, relatively, the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but usually with contempt for any possible values in the conquered people’s approach to life. It all seemed an overwhelming success, with no geographic limits. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden the twentieth century brought the clear realization of this society’s fragility.
We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious (and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests). Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?
When the modern Western states were being formed, it was proclaimed as a principle that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence.) Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state.
Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and in such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades.
The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about….So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?
Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.
The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.
This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man—the master of the world—does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society. (There is a multitude of prisoners in our camps who are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state by resorting to means outside the legal framework.)
The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.
Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.
…….
There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.
But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?
How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility?
………….
Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.
Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.
………
It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.
We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.
Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?
If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.
The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but—upward.
John Smith – at no point is the purpose the government to ‘serve the people.’ The purpose of the government, first and foremost, is to survive. To do that, it must protect its population somehow.
. It is embarrassing to call oneself a free speech advocate in the face of such unbridled courage
I could not agree more with Prof Turley which is why I am appalled that many if not most of the posters here are outrageous when they denounce the mullahs since they support such people in the US who advocate and practice the same here. It is like Hitler denouncing Stalin for lack of freedom. While I and many of my cohorts in the anti-Vietnam war movement and the civil rights movement did not have to endure such extremes as this woman, we were victims of REAL repression by the police state that the US was back in the 50s and 60s that those posters SUPPORTED. When some of these folks or their supporters start getting wire tapped, burglarized, physically attacked, thrown in jail, and bombed, THEN they can complain about lack of freedom of speech on the part of Obama. I have already had to experience that at YOUR hands. GET REAL!
randyjet – I am sure that if I got a copy of your FBI file it would be very slender and consider you no threat. 😉
davidm2575
If the principle is free speech, why not send in a seal team for Chelsea manning then?
We aren’t Iran on free speech, but our recent record exhibits a need to use more resources on the people and not killing machines.
Nick
Yeah, I too have been growing increasingly worried about the greatly disturbing convergence of Obama and all Democrats and the Mullahs regarding free speech. It’s a conspiracy, that includes lots and lots of other stuff, practically everything that’s wrong with America.
When you poke the bear periodically you can expect the bear to poke back.
The Barkin Dog Doctrine is based on a premise which is opposite that of the average bear. We take as a fundamental truth that all collections of humans within geographical areas located on planet Earth are not equal and that they are in various stages of so-called “development”. At the bottom of the heap are Pirate Territories. These are geographical areas on land and sea which have no rule of law and indeed have total chaos and only a commitment to being predators. Somalia is an example. Next up the scale are geographical areas with a shadow of government and authority which has some pirate territory within its boundaries, such as Nigeria. Third from the bottom are places which purport to have rules of civility and law but which are predicated on abusing human rights of women, children, outsiders, minority races or religions. Saudi Arabia comes to mind. Mississippi and Alabama before the Civil Rights Act. Fourth are geographical areas which assert equal rights and civil rights but fail. Russia comes to mind. Fifth are geographical areas which try to be good and mostly are good. Most of Western Europe, the U.S., most of South America and Central America.
The Barkin Dog Doctrine holds that you are a fool to believe that Somalia has a respectable government or that it is wise to do anything other than fly over. Nigeria, is a wink and a nod but dont trade or go there. Saudi Arabia is to be trusted to try to control the price of oil in their own interest and to promote notions of idiocy in all things human. Russia is ready to slide back. Some of Europe will fail and some parts of the U.S. are not yet safe for all humans to reside.
America and Europe need to consider barring travel or emigration by those from pirate territories or wacko religious belief territories. We dont need any more Tsarboys to blow up Boston.
Women’s reproductive freedoms are under assault by misogynistic, theocratic, authoritarian societies all around the world. If we don’t want to resemble those theocratic governments, we need to be aware of the misogynists in our own society and recognize the sheer studipity they exude and hate filled ideas they espouse.
Abortion lovers are losing the debate to SCIENCE. The irony is rich. But, they use the same War on Women meme. That worked well in the 2014 election. LOL!
“Atena Farghadani, 28, who is a peaceful activist and artist who sought to mock the decision to restrict birth control for women. Rather than respond to such criticism, the ruling Mullahs sent her to jail.”
Case in point. Let’s not sink to this level here in our own country.
I don’t consider 18 months a long time, although time is relative.
Forcing a woman contemplating an abortion to view an ultrasound is nothing more than cruel and unusual punishment. It’s an unnessessary exercise in authoritarianism. We are going to see the pushback for this excessive authoritarian and theocratic ideology in 2016. I think it will be a long time before we see another Republican president.
Justice, Regarding the faux War on Women and your false flag. It is Dems that do not women the opportunity to see an ultrasound prior to having an abortion. They do not want docs to tell their patient they can get more information, an ultrasound being critical, visual, information. Science has turned the lovers of abortion into anti-Science and anti free speech advocates. Polling shows WOMEN have become more pro life. As viability is now @ 22 weeks and getting lower all the time, science is turning “feminists” loving abortion into pariahs.
*Clarification, it’s not the “control” of women and free speech that is under attack, it’s the freedom of women and the freedom to speak that is under attack, by excessive control and authoritarianism of religious and political extremists.
The control of women and/or free speech is under attack everywhere, due to extremist religious and political beliefs. The ME is just the canary in the coal mine.
Unfortunately I don’t think the desire to control is limited to any one party or individual. The GOP wants to control women and the free flow of information and embraces theocrats while Obama is willing to support anti blasphemy laws. Everyone must oppose these assaults on free speech.
Theocrats are dangerous to humans whether their names are Huckabee or Ali Khamenei.
Just reading today’s posts, there is a disturbing convergence of Obama Democrats and mullah’s vis a vis free speech. And, the more one explores, the more the similarities are appallingly obvious. The common denominator is control. Both these religious fanatics and liberal Dems truly believe they are so correct and righteous in their stances, that they need to control others not so enlightened.
We need to send in a Seal team to free this young lady. It’s not going to happen, but that is my sentiment.