LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Mahsa Amini

As we speak, there is a movement for civil rights, led by women, going on in a country I called home for the first 10 years of my life.

Most of you know me as the indefatigable community volunteer who has served on school boards, the park board, the design review board, the task force on homeless and twice chairing the PPCC. But I am also an Iranian-American woman, and I am watching events across the globe with bated breath.

Like many of my fellow Persian women, I hang on every word that makes its way across the world—from a battened down Iran where internet connectivity is shut and people are censored from sending or receiving news to and from the outside world.

Every morning, I wake to a flurry of new videos, however short and muffled, from my homeland where regular people have taken to the streets to protest a woeful lack of civil rights and personal freedoms that have left them in a chokehold for more than 40 years.

Forty-something years ago, I was a 9 year old fleeing Iran with my parents. We boarded a plane bound for Charles de Gaulle airport where we thought we’d wait out the riots which had overtaken the streets of Tehran just before the secular Shah—with global allies—was ousted from power. No one believed then that this revolution, spawned by religious zealots and ideologues, would succeed. But it did.

Fast forward to the present day where a generation of young people who’ve never experienced anything but Islamic Iran are protesting in the streets for basic civil rights—on the heels of the brutal beating of a young woman in custody for the unforgivable sin of showing a lock of hair. For that, she lost her life. Struck so violently that she suffered a skull fracture and brain hemorrhage which rendered her comatose, she died days later while still in custody.

The shot that spawned the protests was a still image by a photographer (now under arrest) of the parents’ embrace outside her stark hospital room, when they had realized they would lose their young daughter in that dank hospital on that day, without having had a chance to say goodbye.

Her name was Mahsa Amini.

She was killed for the crime of being female. For being 22 and not in line with the defunct ideology that governs Iran. For being resistant to the IRI. For being a girl. For being a woman. For being defenseless in their custody. Hers was the tragedy that brought women into the streets in droves to protest their lack of personal freedoms.

Today, the generation that was born after the Islamic Revolution is in the streets demanding their own revolution. Around the world, sister protests have sprung spontaneously in over 150 cities in support of Iranian women. Right here in Pacific Palisades, there was a protest in support of Iranian women on Sunday.

#FreeIran #MahsaAmini—these are the global hashtags that are giving voice to the protesters and amplifying their call for basic civil rights.

I ask you to please join us—join your Iranian-American friends and neighbors, colleagues and co-workers to amplify the voice of the protesters and help them keep the world’s attention on this epic struggle for civil rights.

“Women’s rights are human rights,” as Hillary Clinton famously said in 1995 at the UN fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. Nowhere is that truth more on display than in Iran right now.

You can help bring lasting change by talking about this protest movement and posting on your social media. The global attention brings the kind of scrutiny that can save lives, where there would otherwise be callous impunity.

Maryam Zar