Don’t Believe Everything You Hear About Iran

Iran is a terrible place, at least its government is. That view is dominant in the West, and Iranians living in the West are in the forefront of those promoting it. One of those is Lisa Daftari, the daughter of Iranian immigrants or more properly Iranian exiles. Last month she sat down with her fellow American Candace Owens to excoriate her ancestral home.

A while ago, Candace was a rising star on the American conservative scene, and is now well established. Her main contribution has been to trounce liberals and educate other blacks to a simple reality, namely that there are more important issues in the modern world than obsessing over race, and, for feminists, sex.

Lisa Daftari is cut from the same cloth, but like so many who oppose Iran’s theocracy, she goes too far. The Owens-Daftari interview can be found on the PraegerU website as well as YouTube. When you watch it, bear in mind that its rhetoric and errors are typical of those who lobby for régime change in Iran, and even for many who don’t, like Donald Trump.

Herein, the viewer will learn that Harvey Weinstein was convicted of rape. In the court of public opinion, for sure, but not in January 2020.

A young woman named Reyhaneh was hanged in Iran for bringing a case against a man who allegedly raped her. No, no, no!

Coverage of this case by the Western media was extremely biased, but even that could not disguise the facts. Reyhaneh Jabbari was still a teenager when she met Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi. In the West, even those generally in favour of capital punishment for murder are not enthusiastic about executing teenagers, but Jabbari had due process and then some; she was behind bars for seven years before her execution, including appealing all the way to the Supreme Court. The victim had offered her employment but was said to have sexually abused her. So she stabbed him in the back two days after buying the murder weapon specifically for that purpose. Unlike in the West where the toxic Cyntoia Brown and cold-blooded killer Sally Challen are lauded as victims, Iranian justice assumes women have agency for their bad acts.

Iranian justice is harsh but fair, which brings us to Daftari’s claim that a woman’s life is valued half that of a man, because in 2006 it executed a 24 year old sexual predator who had been preying on his victims in “women-only areas”.

Indeed, in the first half of 2019, no fewer than 13 men were sentenced to death for rape, although death sentences are sometimes commuted. It should be pointed out that rape in Iran means rape, not some of the rubbish we are fed in the West about consent.

Still on the subject of women, Daftari cannot but help indulge in hijab hysteria. This subject has probably generated the flow of more mendacious ink than any other where Iran or Islam are concerned. Islamic dress codes designate that women cover their heads in public. We have dress codes in the West but they are seldom alluded to  as such. A man who walks down the street bare-chested may draw odd looks, a woman who does the same may be arrested, even in high summer. Iran and Islam have different standards; that does not make them “oppressive”.

And still on the subject of women, it doesn’t take much surfing to find an impressive list of Iranian women scientists, doctors, even engineers. Women’s education in Iran lacks for nothing. Could the average American name even one female engineer? In Iranian universities, women study mathematics, chemistry, physics…not lesbian dance theory.

Lisa Daftari does not mention the vexed subject of what is alluded to pejoratively as gender apartheid, but the benefits of this are obvious: it protects women from the likes of the aforementioned Harvey Weinstein, and it kills dead any suggestion of a #MeToo Movement with all the resulting false allegations and witch-hunts of innocent men by demented hags and feminist man-haters.

Finally, Daftari takes a swipe at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the charismatic traffic engineer who served two terms as President. She criticises him for handing out money in the street, but not for the oft’ repeated lie that he threatened to wipe Israel off the map.

When he was in office, Ahmadinejad offered us an olive branch. In return, we spat in his face. When he gave a speech at New York’s Columbia University, he was not only met with protests but was insulted by the institution’s president, Lee Bollinger.

Although Donald Trump says there will be no war with Iran, he is continuing to exert pressure on it, like other Western leaders failing to see the irony of the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons in anger branding Iran a threat to world peace. Sadly, Lisa Daftari and countless others are in broad agreement.