To wonder why the mainstream media is not reporting the massive anti-regime protests in Iran?

[supernaturalmilkshake]

There are currently massive anti-Islamic regime protests all over Iran by civilians, many of them chanting for the return of the Shah.

These protestors are incredibly brave, many of them have been killed, shot or taken away by the regime police.

The protests, some of them hundreds of thousands strong, all over Iran have been widely reported and documented by exiled Iranians on places like Twitter/X but the mainstream news has been strangely silent, especially the BBC that would normally have non-stop, headline reporting if this was about happening anywhere else.

AIBU to hope the regime falls and that the Iranians finally taste freedom after 47 years (and that the BBC should be reporting on this)?

Yes, the Guardian has reported a lot, and those others.

What I find weird is people who damn the MSM as a whole forget we have a goodly number of right-wing papers too (DM, Express, Telegraph, Times etc). So when they complain about MSM, they implicitly mean 'left wing MSM'.

It frustrates me as we do have serious media issues but sometimes it strikes me that people who used to only read left wing media feel there is a 'lack of MSM reporting' when they then start on other news sources after being alerted to an issue, like trans issues eg. When actually the issue is not a 'MSM lack of reporting' but a lack of reporting on an issue from papers from one side of the political spectrum, which happens on both sides.

The solution is of course to read papers from both sides. Ideally everyone would report on everything, but this isn't an ideal world.

You mean re Aisha allegedly being nine when the marriage was consummated?

Muhammad was clearly far from the ideal person Muslims want him to be, but Aisha being nine has always seemed dubious to me.

All his (many 🙄) other wives were adults, his first wife was older. Paedophiles tend to show a preference for a particular age group, even if they also have an adult spouse for whatever reason. I disagree with a lot of apologetics for Muhammad but on the issue of Aisha's age I do think the argument that it was later exaggerated for theological reasons has weight.

Looking at what happened once the shooting more or less stopped most of what Hamas put out was lies. Mind, a terrorist group feeds on collateral damage as it enhances their own image as the 'good guys'.

That hasn't always been true. Jews like Maimonides lived peacefully in the Spanish Nasrid empire, one was even the vizier.

The Ottomans did make Christians and Jews live as dhimmis, but they lived in peace generally until the terrible events of WW1.

The Mughals were sometimes horrible to Hindus & Sikhs (Aurangazeb for one) but others were tolerant.

The real issue are the Salafi/Wahhabi/Deobandi fundamentalists who sprung up in the 18th century & caused today's problems.

Of course it was lies! Hamas are pure evil..

I cannot fathom why western feminists aren't supporting Iranian women. It may be because veiling is 'cultural' and western feminists have a bad record on anything so labelled e.g. FGM. It may also be because Iranian women do not seem oppressed in the right way - there is some support for Afghan women but not much there, either. Strange.

BBC Persian is really good.

When did the shooting more or less stop? 14 Gazans including 5 kids killed today. Hey ho.

Didn't a lot of Western feminists oppose FGM from early on? I wasn't aware many defended it on those grounds of culture?

The latter. Thank you for your thoughtfulness.

I also grew up listening to the BBC. I barely recognise it nowadays.

I know. But for some reason some people still believe genocide happened in Gaza. It didn't, it happened on 7th Oct 23 - and that was dismissed by many western feminists as 'okay' or at least understandable because it was resistance. I think if you put such a scenario in a novel it would be considered unbelievable - because it is.

It's possible to criticise the Netanyahu government's war tactics, at least partially and still affirm that what happened on Oct 7 was genocidal barbarity.

I agree that genocide was not committed against the Palestinians though. Words have meanings, and if it gets used for every terrible civilian-heavy conflict with questionable ethics at several points, then Hiroshima & Dresden would be genocides too.

No. Consumation of a marriage once a girl reached puberty was normal at that time in the Middle East and was not considered improper (bear in mind that the age of consent in the UK was 12 until as recently as the 1880s). It is that he raped the widow of a man he had executed after defeating him in battle. That's what I object to.

Some did, along the lines that it was women who carried FGM out and it was part of their culture - a bit 'if women do it it's ok'ism, I think.

No-one is being bombed, hopefully. Why were the Gazans killed? Did they by any chance breach the ceasefire? And if Hamas reported it I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.

I wish the Iranians success. Not so sure about re-establishing the Peacock Throne though.

This is however the kind of context good, serious journalism should be giving. If all the news can do is tell us something is happening somewhere, we might as well just get it on Twitter or some other internet platform. Where institutions like the BBC earned their credibility was giving the background in a neutral way that allowed the viewer to make their own informed assessments of what was happening. Rather than the current approach of withholding information they think might lead people to make assessments they don't approve of.

Are the BBC just too clueless and not aware themselves, even their Middle East experts? Is it, as a pp said, about supporting people they see as supporters of Palestine, or not supporting people they see as anti-Islam? Is it about not wanting to reveal the shit Venezuela gets up to?

It was indeed vile what some 'Western feminists' said about Oct 7. I don't know what's happened : don't women realise male-led 'anticolonial struggles' often tend to be terroristic and misogynistic?

On a much less bad level, it's like left wing women who sympathised with the IRA. Who would have enforced the misogynistic harsh Catholic norms on N. Ireland if they'd won.

Some left wing Jewish women (usually not very religious but still close to Judaism culturally) in the US esp seem to have suicidal empathy on this. I used to read US lesbian magazines & several have recently gone crazy not just on trans issues but on Israel. Criticise Likud, fine. But I've read articles, in such magazines (with several Jewish women on the editorial board), arguing that Oct 7 rapes & murders didn't happen or were not that severe. In the comments, the people speaking up were non Jewish women, some Jewish women who couldn't understand what was happening with the editors & some Arab & Muslim women who had escaped from theocratic fundamentalist regimes and were astonished at what was being written.

Yes, I would criticise Netanyahu. At the very least he did not protect the kibbutz ajacent to Gaza effectively. Also, he was not interested in what happened to women that day until it became useful to him. I would criticise some of the government's war tactics too, but am aware that fighting an enemy that hides among civilians is very difficult.

Ofc that would justify the Magdalene Laundries and much other misogyny. Incredible....

I agree. I also think the Nova festival should have been warned of the danger of the area more.

I agree re civilians.. it's horribly hard. Wars like Vietnam, WW2 & even the US Plains Indians wars show this problem is not unique to the Gaza war...

I don't think the Magdelen laundries would be accepted by feminists because they would not see it as 'cultural' but oppressive Catholicism. Cultural double-standards,😡 I am afraid.

No one is denying how brutal the Iranian government is, or how brave the women resisting it are. That is a criticism of an authoritarian regime, not proof that an entire religion or all Muslim societies think the same way.

We have seen similar things happen under other major religions when belief is tied to state power. Large parts of Europe lived under Christian rule where women had few rights, sexuality was controlled, and dissent was punished. Most people today would not say that this is what all Christianity is.

Billions of Muslims live ordinary lives, raise families, work, disagree with each other, and do not believe rape is acceptable or that women should be covered from head to toe. Focusing only on the worst examples ignores that reality.

Harm to women appears wherever power goes unchecked, religious or not. It is possible to strongly oppose theocracies while still avoiding sweeping claims about millions of people who do not live under them.

I didn't know that about the widow- terrible.

Re age of consent : I know it was low in Victorian times but it was vanishingly rare for kids to be married at that age, and usually not with a huge age gap if it did happen. They goes back to medieval times. Cases like Margaret Beaufort consummated at 12 and giving birth to Henry VII at 13 were widely condemned. Not so much due to consent, sadly, as to the fact that they knew consummation and birth at that age were physically very damaging.