Why “Jîna”: Erasure of Kurdish Women and Their Politics from the Uprisings in Iran

The future of Iran could be changed forever by the protests in September 2022 sparked by the death in police custody of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini, a Kurdish woman from the city of Saqez who was arrested for wearing her hijab “improperly.” 

The protests have generated an inspiring and newfound solidarity among Iranians of all ethnic backgrounds, as well as promising internationalist feminist solidarity. However, as two Kurdish women, we have been deeply disappointed to see Jîna’s Kurdish background routinely ignored by mainstream media and among allies in diasporic solidarity rallies and in expressions of international solidarity. 

In particular, we focus on three types of erasures we see even among progressive and feminist circles. The first relates to the ways people use or don’t use the name “Jîna” and the broader significance of such choices. Second, we draw attention to a patterned failure in acknowledging the origins of the slogan “Woman, Life Freedom,” which was developed by the Kurdish women’s freedom movement affiliated with the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK) against colonial, patriarchal states and societies. The third points to a wider dismissal of the significance of Kurdish struggles and demands both inside Iran and beyond it.  

Dismissing Jîna’s Kurdish identity, downplaying the systematic and structural oppression of ethnic minorities, and ignoring the origins of the now popularized chant, “Women, Life, Freedom,” risks fueling rifts, distrust, and resentment among Kurdish populations. To start, overlooking the likely relationship of Jîna’s Kurdishness to the fatal violence she was subjected to, reveals deeper patterns of violence that Kurds have experienced in modern Iran. In short, Jîna’s Kurdishness is critical to understand marginalization in Iran and the broader Middle East and a feminist movement that is simultaneously anti-colonial and anti-imperial.

https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44560

 

Labour rights legacy of the FIFA World Cup

On 18 December 2022, the Men’s World Cup football final will be held at Qatar’s Lusail Stadium. It will mark the end of a journey that started in December 2010 when Qatar was awarded the tournament hosting rights.  

18 December is also International Migrants Day, a day set aside to honour migrant workers for their contributions and sacrifice. It is also Qatar’s National Day.

Over the past 12 years, millions of migrant workers have toiled to make the 2022 World Cup possible, building key infrastructure, including the stadiums in Qatar. However, these workers have always been at the margins, and the authorities have been less than responsive to their abusive work conditions. 

Qatar’s Labour Minister recently rejected proposals for a remedy fund for abuses faced by migrant workers, including uncompensated deaths, further highlighting the lack of recognition for the people who perform the vast majority of the country’s labour. FIFA, football’s governing body, has not made a decision.  

https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/labour-rights-legacy-of-the-fifa-world-cup/

 

L’attentat de Taksim ouvre la voie à une frappe turque contre les Kurdes

C’est l’ultime mise à exécution d’une menace turque qui plane depuis mai dernier. Une semaine après l’attentat de la rue d’Istiklal, à Istanbul, qui a fait 6 morts et 81 blessés, la Turquie a lancé dans la nuit de samedi à dimanche un raid aérien contre des régions kurdes de Syrie et du nord de l’Irak, dans une opération baptisée « Griffe-épée ». « L’heure des comptes a sonné ! Les traîtres devront rendre des comptes pour leurs attaques perfides », a écrit dimanche le ministre turc de la Défense sur son compte Twitter pour annoncer l’offensive, montrant la photo d’un avion militaire qui décolle, sans donner plus de précisions sur le lieu. Cette attaque a été menée « conformément aux droits de légitime défense découlant de l’article 51 de la Charte des Nations unies, afin d’éliminer les attaques terroristes dans le nord de l’Irak et de la Syrie, d’assurer la sécurité des frontières et d’éliminer le terrorisme à sa source », a précisé un communiqué du ministère. Une opération militaire ordonnée par le président Recep Tayyip Erdogan, juste avant qu’il ne s’envole pour Doha, où s’est déroulée hier la cérémonie d’ouverture de la Coupe du monde qatarie.

https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1318804/lattentat-de-taksim-ouvre-la-voie-a-une-frappe-turque-contre-les-kurdes.html

 

Human rights groups warn of impending massacre in Kurdish city in western Iran

Kurdish rights groups on Sunday warned of an impending massacre in the Kurdish city of Mahabad in western Iran as a large number of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) units attacked the city with armored vehicles on Saturday night, hunting down activists that have defied the regime.

Videos from the city on Saturday showed thousands of mostly young men barricading the streets of the city preparing to confront the IRGC and its militia, the Basij. The IRGC and the Basij attacked protesters across the Kurdish areas of western Iran (Rojhelat), killing at least 26 protesters including children during four days of unrest.

Hengaw Organization for Human Rights reported loud explosions being heard in several Kurdish cities on Saturday night, with no information released on the cause.  

https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iran/20112022

 

The Iranian regime is racing toward the abyss

What future is there for a regime that kills its youth? The question keeps coming up, as blood has been flowing in Iran for more than two months now. The regime knows how to do repression. No Iranian man or woman doubts its determination to crush the voices that challenge it. But the tactic of fear no longer seems effective, so powerful does the current wave of anger seem.

The death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in Tehran on September 16, after she was arrested by the morality police for wearing the mandatory headscarf in a way that was deemed inappropriate, has topped a groundswell of resentment that has been building for decades – the resentment of an urban youth deprived of a horizon in a closed country, as well as that of mistreated ethnic minorities, be they Kurds or Baluchis.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2022/11/19/the-iranian-regime-is-racing-toward-the-abyss_6004881_23.html

 

Two Weeks in Tehran

Five weeks​ into the protests that erupted across Iran in response to the killing of Mahsa Amini, the floundering Iranian authorities thought it would be a good idea to put up a massive poster in central Tehran depicting dozens of eminent Iranian women as supporters of the mandatory wearing of the hijab. Photographs of academics, writers, directors, artists, actors and athletes were shown in a collage with the slogan ‘Women of Our Land’ which was plastered on the billboard the regime reserves for its most urgent public messaging, a massive structure towering over Valiasr Square. The display included such unlikely figures as the novelist Simin Daneshvar, who wore the hijab only after the revolution made it compulsory, depicted patriarchal oppression in her fiction, and is on record saying that she wished ‘the world was run by women’.

Within hours, several women demanded their images be removed. The existence of a photograph showing them with a headscarf did not mean they were pious or even that they respected the government; it simply meant they had observed the law. Parvaneh Kazemi, who has climbed Everest, posted on Instagram that she was angry ‘the name and image of us women are used only for abuse.’ The actor Fatemeh Motamed-Arya uploaded a furious video. She appeared bareheaded, and said that she was the mother of Mahsa Amini and Sarina Esmailzadeh, a teenager killed in the protests: ‘I am a mother of all the children who were killed in this land, not a woman in the land of murders.’ The son of another actor who was included in the collage pointed out that his mother had barely been tolerated by the clerical authorities when she was alive. A screenwriter noted on Instagram that one woman on the poster, the photojournalist Nooshin Jafari, was serving a prison sentence for ‘insulting state sanctities’. Overnight, the billboard vanished. It reflected, as the reformist journalist Abbas Abdi observed on Twitter, the ruling system’s ‘contradictory and blocked sensibility’, its wish to co-opt such women and its wish to impose morality policing at the same time.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n21/azadeh-moaveni/diary

 

The generals are the supremacists of the past. Ben Gvir is the supremacist of now

The meteoric rise of Kahanist MK Itamar Ben Gvir could serve as material for endless sociological studies on the intersection of religiosity, ethnicity, nationalism, and political persuasion in Israel.

That Ben Gvir went from a marginal political figure to one of the most popular — and dangerous — leaders in Israeli politics in the span of just a few years should force us to take a long, hard look at how we got here. But more importantly, we should be asking how Ben Gvirism, with its bloody promise of violence against Palestinians and leftist Israelis, beat out the erstwhile heroes of Israeli society: Israeli army generals, as represented by former IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz’s National Unity Party.In a state that is militaristic to the core, where students are taught to worship the military from the day they are born, one could have expected Gantz’s party, which also includes former army head Gadi Eizenkot (and previously included another, Moshe Ya’alon), to be a resounding success. And yet, as of Thursday evening, with less than 5 percent of ballots left to count, the National Unity Party has won only 12 Knesset seats, as opposed to the Religious Zionist party — the union of far-right parties, including Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit slate — which will likely take home between 14-15 seats. The fact that Ben Gvir, who never served a day in the Israeli army, defeated two giants of the Israeli army, is indicative of larger shifts taking place in the country.

https://www.972mag.com/ben-gvir-jewish-supremacy-israeli-generals/

 

The real escalation is the destruction of Palestinian space

The frenetic elections that take place with Italian frequency stands in contrast to the stability of Israeli policy in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem). By that, I mean the policy that, ever since the occupation began in 1967, has been breaking up Palestinian territory into as many small enclaves as possible, each surrounded and disconnected from each other by as many Jewish-only settlement blocs as possible. These blocs are expanding and are increasingly being connected to Israel by a network of roads that is upgraded frequently.

The shredding of Palestinian space is the first and most important escalation, a permanent one written in advance into all government plans. Every Palestinian witnesses it and experiences it personally. Israeli Jews ignore it, out of elective ignorance, indifference and because they profit from it.

This is the mother of all escalations, avout which every diplomat from the European Union or the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem receives regular reports. But in the mouths of their bosses at these nations’ foreign ministries, it is translated into cliches such as “we support Israel’s right to defend itself.” Diplomatic cynicism is also escalating.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-10-03/ty-article-opinion/.premium/the-real-escalation-is-the-destruction-of-palestinian-space/00000183-991c-d6d7-ab8b-999e42a40000

 

The OPEC+ oil cut and the lessons of imperial overreach

What should we make of the spat between the United States and Saudi Arabia, following last week’s announcement of a sharp cut in oil production by the Russian- and Saudi-headed cartel OPEC+? Shocked analysts and officials in the United States and Europe called the Saudi move a betrayal and a hostile act against the Western allies mired in the Ukraine war. Many see this as a personal humiliation for President Joe Biden, with Riyadh siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine — even after Biden fist-bumped with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at a meeting in Jeddah, in a complete reversal of his campaign promise to make the Saudis “the pariah that they are.” American officials are now considering a series of retaliatory measures, including stopping arms sales and even withdrawing all 3,000 U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia (and the 2,000 U.S. soldiers in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, another OPEC+ member; Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the UAE, had a friendly meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week).

As reports emerge of Saudi officials apparently ignoring U.S. warnings not to go ahead with the oil production cut, I can’t help but think of the lessons of history. A much longer time frame and wider context may be necessary to fully analyze this situation and accurately capture what it is all about. I’ve chronicled the modern Middle East and its links with the United States for the past 54 years, including two decades during which I also wrote books on archaeology and the Roman Empire in the region. With that much history in mind, the immediate issues here are no doubt important, evolving according to many factors beyond oil prices: Ukraine, the upcoming U.S. elections in November, Arab worries about Iran, and the roles of Russia and China in the Middle East. But they may not be the best frame in which to appreciate these furies.

https://agenceglobal.com/2022/10/17/rami-g-khouri-the-opec-oil-cut-and-the-lessons-of-imperial-overreach/

 

When terrorizing is intentional

The website of the Home Front Command says that an earthquake or a missile attack can cause a panic attack, fainting or even a heart attack. That is, even without being injured physically, fear and terror can have clear physical manifestations.But in the eyes of the Israel Defense Forces, there is no connection between the death of Rayan Suleiman, 7, from cardiac arrest, and the eager, armed soldiers who raided his home in the village of Tequa. “[N]o evidence was found regarding Rayan’s fall or of the physical damage he suffered as a result of the IDF activity,” the IDF Spokesman’s Unit said by way of summarizing the IDF investigation. According to the army, only physical injury can be related to the death of Palestinians. And according to Israelis, there is no connection between the unlimited, proven ability of soldiers to do evil and the dread that a Palestinian child feels at the mere sight of them.

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2022-10-10/ty-article-opinion/.premium/when-terrorizing-is-intentional/00000183-c37a-d8cc-afc7-fffe57f60000