Ea regime that no longer exists cannot build a nuclear bomb. Nor can it discard any. And it cannot destroy Israel as it has threatened since 1979. An “Israel remaining time clock” has even been set up in Tehran for this purpose. She is counting the days until the year 2040, when the country will be destroyed at the latest. Until then, a factory in Khomein will continue to produce Israel flags, only to burn them in public.
Some might think it’s a quirk, this Israel annihilation stunt that the mullahs keep pulling out of a hat. But when the regime fires on an imaginary Mossad base in the autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, as it did in March, one wonders if people are still very close. It should be clear: everything is to be expected from criminals.
It is often said that the mullah regime is showing its true colors. But that’s not true. The mullah regime has shown its true colors for decades. You just didn’t want to see it, as you never like to see violence. But everything was familiar: the construction cranes from which homosexuals are hung; the prisons where rape is practiced; the children who were sent out to clear mines in the Iran-Iraq war with a plastic key around their necks (for paradise) and who wrapped themselves in blankets so that their body parts were still together after death. The only people who are now showing their true colors are the people on the streets. Who, despite the danger of being arrested or even killed, call for freedom and demand the fall of the regime.
A regime that no longer exists cannot issue death sentences. It cannot carry out death sentences. And no longer murder his opponents abroad, like in 1992 the singer Fereydun Farrochzad in Bonn or the Kurdish politicians in exile in the Berlin restaurant Mykonos.
Doctors treating injured protesters are arrested
You can’t just overthrow a regime like that. And there is no consensus as to whether it is a strength or a weakness that this protest movement, this revolution, does not have a leader who could very quickly be imprisoned or killed. And what comes after that? Is it perhaps precisely the polyphonic call for freedom that paves the way to democracy, in which what, how and where to must be continuously negotiated? Democracy is known to be a work in progress.
According to human rights organizations, more than 300 people have been murdered and more than 14,000 arrested since the protests began. Injured people can hardly dare to go to the hospital because the police are already waiting there. They also arrest doctors treating the injured. 227 out of 290 members of parliament have called for the death penalty for the demonstrators. The first death sentences have already been pronounced. For example, the Kurdish rapper Saman Yasin was sentenced to death after weeks of torture.
Again there is speculation: are they serious about the “death penalty for all”? Or is it only threatened and an example made of a few? That’s cynical – it’s about human lives, every death is one too many. People like to show solidarity with the courageous Iranian women. In recent years, the stories of strong women who somehow live their lives despite the adversities of the misogynist system have often been told and heard (what else can they do?).
People are hanged on construction cranes
That may all be true. But you also calm down with all these nice stories. A few German cultural workers and writers are sent to Tehran and this is called change through rapprochement. They then report enthusiastically about the so-called other side of the country, which undoubtedly exists. But nobody wants to know anything about the violence. Nothing about the jails, the construction cranes, the floggings.
Olaf Scholz’s meager tweets speak a similar language. “It’s horrible that #Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Tehran,” he tweeted in September, as if she had just passed out. And in October: “It dismays me that people who are peacefully demonstrating are dying in the protests in Iran” – as if they had been struck by lightning and not by live ammunition from the regime’s henchmen.
Of course, naming it correctly doesn’t stop violence. It’s about something else. Namely, the question of how to relate to her. If she’s the toad you swallow to keep doing business. Whether one simply waits until the violence – as always when the Internet is switched off often enough and public interest wanes – only occurs in the appeals of Amnesty and Co. Or whether to make violence a parameter of your own Iran policy. Then the regime loses all legitimacy. A regime that no longer exists can no longer torture and murder. And every day that this regime continues to torture and murder is one too many.
