Is This Iran's Bull Connor Moment?

The Wall Street Journal reports that the protests in Iran, which first started in response to the death of a woman detained by "morality" "police" have been hardier than earlier periods of unrest, which were prompted by such lesser government outrages as election fraud or economic hardship.

This makes sense, in part for reasons touched on by the piece:

Image by Matt Hrkac, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

Mass protests in the streets of big cities -- dispersed by the authorities with force -- have given way to sporadic but frequent and widespread demonstrations involving women removing their headscarves. It is a type of everyday resistance that is difficult for authorities to stop.

The spontaneous, unpredictable nature of the movement creates a form of whack-a-mole for security forces who are already stretched thin in Tehran and beyond, while images of pro-government toughs using force against unveiled schoolgirls is amplifying public anger.

The hijab is central to the Islamic Republic's raison d'être. It is the most visible symbol of adherence to its ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, in which women's dignity must be protected by modest clothing. And it is a political tool to control half of the population in the public sphere. [bold added]

It is true that there is no way to effectively force half of a nation's population to comply with something so arbitrary and stupid as wearing a costume if that half of the population is not largely on board with said costume, and if the attempts to force compliance -- inherently brutal -- keep getting broadcast to a populace that evaluates the attempts as brutal and cowardly rather than what the transgressors had coming to them.

It is this latter part that the article leaves to the reader to figure out that will be key to whether this moment in Iranian history is truly different from the rest: This regime called its own moral legitimacy into question by the act that set off the protests.

And, by its own lights, it has to keep calling its moral legitimacy into question.

The regime now daily faces the following choice, which its own arbitrary dogma makes into an existential crisis: Continue to enforce this rule -- which allegedly pleases the imaginary friend of the Ayatollahs and so must be enforced, according to them -- and continue acting like the cowardly brutes they are in full view of a rightly angered nation and risk being overthrown; Or back off the hijab rule -- and risk having many other silly rules fall like dominoes one by one as people are freed to question them and inevitably find them wanting.

A seminal point in America's own civil rights movement came when the white supremacist government official Bull Connor unleashed police dogs on children participating in civil rights protests. Those scenes rightly appalled the nation and the world, and became an image of the evil of segregation that exactly no decent person could un-see.

The Ayatollahs basically get to keep making such images, step aside, or be overthrown. Life will be hard for Iranians in the short term, but the now starkly obvious "alternative" to continuing their civil disobedience or revolting is to let this regime get away with such atrocities, in the full knowledge of what they are willing to do to people on the most inane pretext.

Suffering this regime is as immoral and impractical as negotiating with a terrorist: They will make good on their threats one way or the other, regardless of what one does or says.

May Mahsa Amini's death be the spark that lights the fire of Iranian freedom.

-- CAV