Iran oppression a reminder to all

Foreign Minister Penny Wong was speaking for both sides of politics when she issued an impassioned denunciation last Friday of the Iranian regime’s “brutal oppression” of the protest movement sweeping the country. Her warning to the theocratic state’s odious, terrorist-supporting rulers that their ruthless actions were “unconscionable and unacceptable” in seeking to put down the courageous uprising – led mainly by women and spawned by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the so-called morality police – could not have been more appropriate or timely.

According to human rights groups, upwards of 300 women, men and children have been killed by the regime since Amini, a member of Iran’s discriminated-against Kurdish minority, was arrested in Tehran on September 13 on the fatuous pretext that she was improperly dressed. Many hundreds of protesters have been injured or arrested in what is the biggest challenge the ruling ayatollahs have faced in years. The horrifying death of Amini after her arrest by the absurd “morality police” guardians of the Tehran asylum because, they claimed, some of her hair was visible under the hijab, or headscarf, all Iranian women are obliged to wear has echoed across Iran and much of the civilised world. Last weekend major protests were held in the capitals of many countries in support of Iran’s courageous women and men.

Amini fell into a coma shortly after collapsing at a detention centre for those who deviate even slightly from the Iranian ayatollahs’ unforgiving interpretation of sharia law. She died three days later. Photos of her in hospital showed her intubated, haemorrhaging blood from an ear and with badly bruised eyes, indicating she suffered serious head injuries. A statement by Acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada al-Nashif recounted reports that Amini was beaten on the head with a morality police truncheon and her head banged against the side of a police vehicle. With no credibility, authorities in Tehran claimed she died of natural causes.

There is nothing new in the ayatollahs’ monstrous behaviour in defiance of just about every accepted standard of human rights conduct across the world. But just as their barbaric oppression led to Senator Wong’s condemnation, so should it be a reminder to her of the vital importance of Israel to the civilised world’s response to the Tehran regime and its ambitions to become a nuclear power.