Supporters of Iran’s opposition have posted hundreds of photos online of men in women’s clothing to mock what they say was a government attempt to discredit a student leader by photographing him in a head scarf and woman’s robe.
Majid Tavakoli was arrested in last week’s large student-led protests after he gave a speech urging students to reject “tyranny,” a call greeted by chants of “Death to the dictator.”
Pro-government media said he put on women’s clothing in an attempt to escape authorities around his campus but was caught.
PHOTO: EPA
The Fars news agency, which is close to the elite Revolutionary Guard military force, published photos of Tavakoli wearing a black chador, the all-covering dress worn by devout Muslim women, and a blue head scarf around his unshaven, downcast face.
Iran’s opposition fired back over the past week by inundating Web sites such as Facebook with pictures of men wearing headscarves and chadors.
Tavakoli’s supporters accused authorities of forcing him into women’s clothing and photographing him in an attempt to humiliate the activist and discredit the opposition.
Tavakoli is a member of the largest student organization advocating greater social and political freedoms in Iran and is a student at Tehran’s Amir Kabir University, the site of one of the Dec. 7 protests the drew tens of thousands out on campuses and city squares around the country.
Students have been at the core of the pro-reform movement, which has accused authorities of rigging Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s June re-election.
In the Web campaigns calling for Tavakoli’s release, male supporters donned Islamic-style women’s dress in hundreds of whimsical self-portraits. Many of them were bearded and smirking. Others held up V-for-victory signs and wore the green color that has become the opposition’s emblem.
Some of the photos were clumsily altered to underscore opposition claims that the pictures of Tavakoli might have been digitally manipulated.
The Fars report quoted a pro-government student activist as saying that Tavakoli tried to flee in women’s clothing and that his actions were a “permanent stain on the illegal student movement.”
“He was always introduced as a brave guy, but this move proved his lack of power to resist and avoid paying the price for his own ideas,” the activist, Abbas Ensani, was quoted as saying.
Tavakoli has been arrested twice before. He was jailed for 15 months in 2007 and last year on a conviction of insulting Islam in a student newsletter.
He and two other students put on trial in that case told the court that the newsletter containing insults against an Islamic saint had been fabricated by hardline students and attributed to reformist students in effort to defame them.
Meanwhile, authorities have arrested several people accused of destroying photos of Khomeini and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at demonstrations on university campuses last week, state media reported yesterday.
Tehran’s prosecutor promised to show “no mercy” to those responsible, but the news reports carrying his remarks gave no details on those arrested.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
In front of a secluded temple in southwestern China, Duan Ruru skillfully executes a series of chops and strikes, practicing kung fu techniques she has spent a decade mastering. Chinese martial arts have long been considered a male-dominated sphere, but a cohort of Generation Z women like Duan is challenging that assumption and generating publicity for their particular school of kung fu. “Since I was little, I’ve had a love for martial arts... I thought that girls learning martial arts was super swaggy,” Duan, 23, said. The ancient Emei school where she trains in the mountains of China’s Sichuan Province
DISASTROUS VISIT: The talks in Saudi Arabia come after an altercation at the White House that led to the Ukrainian president leaving without signing a minerals deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was due to arrive in Saudi Arabia yesterday, a day ahead of crucial talks between Ukrainian and US officials on ending the war with Russia. Highly anticipated negotiations today on resolving the three-year conflict would see US and Ukrainian officials meet for the first time since Zelenskiy’s disastrous White House visit last month. Zelenskiy yesterday said that he would meet Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the nation’s de facto leader, after which his team “will stay for a meeting on Tuesday with the American team.” At the talks in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, US
RSS