Iran Bans Women from Certain Universities and Degrees

Story from The Telegraph (co.uk) -- originally reported on August 20:

Anger as Iran bans women from universities

Female students in Iran have been barred from more than 70 university degree courses in an officially-approved act of sex-discrimination which critics say is aimed at defeating the fight for equal women's rights.

By Robert Tait

3:17PM BST 20 Aug 2012

In a move that has prompted a demand for a UN investigation byIran's most celebrated human rights campaigner, the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, 36 universities have announced that 77 BA and BSc courses in the coming academic year will be "single gender" and effectively exclusive to men.

It follows years in which Iranian women students have outperformed men, a trend at odds with the traditional male-dominated outlook of the country's religious leaders. Women outnumbered men by three to two in passing this year's university entrance exam.

Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates.

Under the new policy, women undergraduates will be excluded from a broad range of studies in some of the country's leading institutions, including English literature, English translation, hotel management, archaeology, nuclear physics, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial engineering and business management.

The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.

Writing to Ban Ki Moon, the UN secretary general, and Navi Pillay, the high commissioner for human rights, Mrs Ebadi, a human rights lawyer exiled in the UK, said the real agenda was to reduce the proportion of female students to below 50% – from around 65% at present – thereby weakening the Iranian feminist movement in its campaign against discriminatory Islamic laws.

"[It] is part of the recent policy of the Islamic Republic, which tries to return women to the private domain inside the home as it cannot tolerate their passionate presence in the public arena," says the letter, which was also sent to Ahmad Shaheed, the UN's special rapporteur for human rights in Iran. "The aim is that women will give up their opposition and demands for their own rights."

The new policy has also been criticised by Iranian parliamentarians, who summoned the deputy science and higher education minister to explain.

However, the science and higher education minister, Kamran Daneshjoo, dismissed the controversy, saying that 90% of degrees remain open to both sexes and that single-gender courses were needed to create "balance".

Iran has highest ratio of female to male undergraduates in the world, according to UNESCO. Female students have become prominent in traditionally male-dominated courses like applied physics and some engineering disciplines.

Sociologists have credited women's growing academic success to the increased willingness of religiously-conservative families to send their daughters to university after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The relative decline in the male student population has been attributed to the desire of young Iranian men to "get rich quick" without going to university.

Iranian Woman Condemned to Death by Stoning Allegedly Confesses on TV

Yeah, right.  Well, I doubt anyone anywhere else in the world except inside Iran will believe that was actually the condemned woman confessing to assisting with a murder, etc. on live television.  I believe the woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, is already dead and the security forces who actually run the country put a ringer in her place.  To conceal their crime, the authorities (1) pixilated the t.v. image of the woman's face and (2) did a voice over so the audience did not actually hear her voice.  Thus, relatives, friends and her attorneys who have worked very closely with this victim of the Iranian "justice" system cannot positively identify that it was - or was not - her, except perhaps by body gestures.  Those, and voice, cannot be faked for long, no matter how good an actress someone may be.

Here is the article from the telegraph.co.uk
Iran stoning woman 'to be executed after confessing to murder' on state TV
An Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning could be hanged imminently after she apparently confessed to adultery in an interview aired on state television, her lawyer has said.

Published: 1:14PM BST 12 Aug 2010

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani appeared to confess to being an accomplice to her husband’s murder and criticised her lawyer for publicising her case, saying it had brought shame on her family.

But her lawyer said she had been tortured before the interview was recorded in a prison in Tabriz.
“She was severely beaten up and tortured until she accepted to appear in front of camera,” Houtan Kian told The Guardian.

The lawyer, whose location was not clear, said he feared Iranian authorities would act quickly to carry out the death sentence. Her punishment was reportedly commuted to hanging after an international outcry against her sentencing to death by stoning last month.

The International Committee Against Stoning, a human rights campaign group, called the TV interview “toxic propaganda”. Miss Ashtiani had previously denied the adultery accusations.

With her face blurred and her words voiced over to translate them into Farsi from local dialect, it was not immediately possible to independently verify the identity of the woman in the film, which was broadcast in Iran at 8.30pm on Wednesday.

In the interview, the woman describes how she had struck up a relationship with her husband’s cousin.

“He told me: ‘Let’s kill your husband’. I totally could not believe that my husband would be killed. I thought he was joking,” Miss Ashtiani appears to say. “Later, I found out that killing was his profession.

“He came (to our house) and brought all the stuff. He brought electrical devices, plus wire and gloves. Later, he killed my husband by connecting him to the electricity,” she says.

The head of the judiciary of Iran's East Azerbaijan province told the television programme that Miss Ashtiani had injected an anaesthetic into her husband.

“After the husband went unconscious, the real murderer killed the victim by connecting electricity to his neck,” he said.

It was not clear whether the cousin had been arrested.

Miss Ashtiani, a mother of two, has already received 99 lashes for having an illicit relationship with two men. The stoning sentence has been suspended pending a judicial review but could still be carried out, an Iranian judiciary official has said.

Murder, adultery, rape, armed robbery, apostasy and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under Iran’s Islamic law, enforced since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Mohammad Mostafaei, a lawyer for Miss Ashtiani who fled to Europe after the verdict, told Reuters in an interview earlier this week that Miss Ashtiani, who was convicted of “adultery while being married”, would likely be spared stoning thanks to international pressure.

Iranian authorities have issued a warrant for Mr Mostafaei’s arrest and held his wife in jail for two weeks in an attempt to get him to return to Iran, he said.

The show’s host said Western media had given the case so much publicity in the hope of pressuring Iran to release three Americans who have been in prison for more than a year after being arrested near the Iraqi border where, their families say, they were hiking.

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The Iranian regime keeps managing to deliver the same message over and over: those in charge are incredibly inept dildo-heads. But they control the Iranian media, so they control the message inside their country, and there will always be mindless followers who drink the coolaide and go along.  It really must irk those in control, though, knowing that the rest of the world is laughing at them and holds them in utter contempt and derision.  If it did not bother them, they would not waste their time staging such an obviously fake confession or engage in such juvenile theatrics that fools prhaps 10% of the population inside Iran.  Such behavior smacks of insecurity and desperation. 

Syria, please do us a favor - drop a small H-bomb on the Iranian fearless leaders during prayer session some Friday, thanks. 

Scientific Islam: Iran Fundies Say Promiscuous Women Cause Earthquakes...

Darlings!  Writing this evening from Sin City USA - fabulous Las Vegas!  I'm wiling away some time before my dinner plans later this evening.  The weather is like Milwaukee's, LOL!  Honestly, Isis swears, it was in the 80s yesterday, and so I heard the weather people on local television lamenting earlier today :)

Now tell me - how can a woman be promiscuous unless a man is there to take advantage?  Evidently, under the fundamentalist view of Islam, men of faith are soooooo weak they just cannot help themselves when it comes to an alluring woman whispering sweet nothings in their ear.  Poor dudes.  So easily led by their - er, nether parts.  It's amazing any men have survived at all - except they seem to be exempt from the punishment for performing the sin of fornication. It's the women who bear the brunt - they are stoned to death.

I'll bet a lot of those Islamic fundy dudes are haunted, too, by the spirits of the innocent women they have caused to be put to death.... No wonder Islamic fundies are scared to death of women.  So scared, in fact, they cover them from head to foot in burkas and chadras and etc. and those wicked floosies STILL manage to seduce unsuspecting Muslim dudes and be promiscuous.  It's a miracle, I tell ya.  Maybe the Pope should investigate.

Oh - this is a real hoot - the article is from The Salt Lake City Tribune.   Mormon jokes, anyone?  LOL!

Iranian cleric says promiscuous women cause earthquakes
The Associated Press
Updated: 04/21/2010 01:47:17 PM MDT

Beirut » A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

Iran is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric's unusual explanation for why the earth shakes follows a prediction by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate.

"Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which [consequently] increases earthquakes," Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media.

Women in the Islamic Republic are required by law to cover from head to toe, but many, especially the young, ignore some of the more strict codes and wear tight coats and scarves pulled back that show much of the hair.

"What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?" Sedighi asked during a prayer sermon Friday. "There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes."  [Dude, how about getting rid of unsafe buildings and rebuilding them with all those billions of oil revenue the Islamic Republic is supposedly earning - oh, sorry, forgot - that is being funneled into Swiss accounts of the top 200,000 or so in the Republican Guard...]

Seismologists have warned for at least two decades that it is likely the sprawling capital will be struck by a catastrophic quake in the near future.

Some experts have even suggested Iran should move its capital to a less seismically active location. Tehran straddles scores of fault lines, including one more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) long, though it has not suffered a major quake since 1830.

In 2003, a powerful earthquake hit the southern city of Bam, killing 31,000 people -- about a quarter of that city's population -- and destroying its ancient mud-built citadel.

"A divine authority told me to tell the people to make a general repentance. Why? Because calamities threaten us," said Sedighi, Tehran's acting Friday prayer leader.

Referring to the violence that followed last June's disputed presidential election, he said, "The political earthquake that occurred was a reaction to some of the actions (that took place). And now, if a natural earthquake hits Tehran, no one will be able to confront such a calamity but God's power, only God's power. ... So let's not disappoint God."

The Iranian government and its security forces have been locked in a bloody battle with a large opposition movement that accuses Ahmadinejad of winning last year's vote by fraud.

Ahmadinejad made his quake prediction two weeks ago but said he could not give an exact date. He acknowledged that he could not order all of Tehran's 12 million people to evacuate. "But provisions have to be made. ... At least 5 million should leave Tehran so it is less crowded," the president said.

Minister of Welfare and Social Security Sadeq Mahsooli said prayers and pleas for forgiveness were the best "formulas to repel earthquakes."

"We cannot invent a system that prevents earthquakes, but God has created this system and that is to avoid sins, to pray, to seek forgiveness, pay alms and self-sacrifice," Mahsooli said.

Illegitimate Iranian Regime Seizes Nobel Peace Medal

An AP report from Yahoo News Iran seizes rights lawyer's Nobel Peace medal By NASSER KARIMI and IAN MacDOUGALL, Associated Press Writers Nasser Karimi And Ian Macdougall, Associated Press Writers – 48 mins ago TEHRAN, Iran – Iranian authorities confiscated Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi's medal, the human rights lawyer said Thursday, in a sign of the increasingly drastic steps Tehran is taking against any dissent. In Norway, where the peace prize is awarded, the government said the confiscation of the gold medal was a shocking first in the history of the 108-year-old prize. Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts in promoting democracy. She has long faced harassment from Iranian authorities for her activities — including threats against her relatives and a raid on her office last year in which files were confiscated. The seizure of her prize is an expression of the Iranian government's harsh approach to anyone it considers an opponent — particularly since the massive street protests triggered by hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed June 12 re-election. Acting on orders from Tehran's Revolutionary Court, authorities took the peace prize medal about three weeks ago from a safe-deposit box in Iran, Ebadi said in a phone interview from London. They also seized her Legion of Honor and a ring awarded to her by a German association of journalists, she said. Authorities froze the bank accounts of her and her husband and demanded $410,000 in taxes that they claimed were owed on the $1.3 million she was awarded. Ebadi said, however, that such prizes are exempt from tax under Iranian law. She said the government also appears intent on trying to confiscate her home. Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to be awarded the peace prize and the first female judge in Iran, said she would not be intimidated and that her absence from the country since June did not mean she felt exiled. "Nobody is able to send me to exile from my home country," she said. "I have received many threatening messages. ... They said they would detain me if I returned, or that they would make the environment unsafe for me wherever I am. "But my activities are legal and nobody can ban me from my legal activities." Ebadi has criticized the Iranian government's crackdown on demonstrations by those claiming the June vote was stolen from a pro-reform candidate through massive fraud. Ebadi left the country a day before the vote to attend a conference in Spain and has not returned since. In the days after the vote, she urged the international community to reject the outcome and called for a new election monitored by the United Nations. During the past months, hundreds of pro-reform activists have been arrested, and a mass trial has sentenced dozens to prison terms. Authorities also went after Ebadi's human rights center in Iran. "After the election all my colleagues in the center were either detained or banned from traveling abroad," Ebadi said. Calls to Iranian judiciary officials were not returned Thursday. Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere called the move "shocking" and said it was "the first time a Nobel Peace Prize has been confiscated by national authorities." The Norwegian Foreign Ministry summoned Iran's charge d'affaires in Norway Wednesday to protest the confiscation, spokeswoman Ragnhild Imerslund said. The Foreign Ministry also "expressed grave concern" about Ebadi's husband, who it said was arrested in Tehran and "severely beaten" earlier this fall, after which his pension and bank account were frozen. Ebadi said her husband, Javad Tavassolian, and her brother and sister have been threatened many times by authorities pushing them to persuade her to end her human rights campaigning. Ebadi has represented opponents of Iran's regime before but not in the mass trial that started in August of more than 100 prominent pro-reform figures and activists. They are accused of plotting to overthrow the cleric-led regime during the postelection turmoil. The Iranian Embassy in Norway refrained from giving a comment. The Norwegian Nobel Committee's permanent secretary, Geir Lundestad, said the move was "unheard of" and "unacceptable." He told The Associated Press that the committee was planning to send a letter of protest to Iranian authorities before the end of the week. Ebadi said she planned to return to Iran when the time is right. "I will return whenever it is useful for my country," she said. "Right now I am busy with my activities against violations of human rights in Iran and my international jobs." ___ MacDougall reported from Oslo, Norway.

Iran Typical Treatment of Female Prisoner

The current dictators who run Iran call themselves a "theocratic" nation under God's law. HA! I hope Michelle Obama reads this article. Report from Associated Press. Woman's case reflects prisoners' treatment in Iran By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI, Associated Press Writer Scheherezade Faramarzi, Associated Press Writer – 48 mins ago BEIRUT – The interrogator politely apologized for grilling the prisoner about her role in the mass protests over Iran's disputed presidential election. Then the prisoner was made to sit facing a wall in the courtyard of Iran's Evin Prison, blindfolded, handcuffed and covered in an all-enveloping chador for four and a half hours under the blazing sun. "America is our enemy," the interrogator told her. "Why are you so naive and can't see this? It's exploiting the situation here and wants to ransack the country. They don't have your interest at heart. The ordeal of Nazy, a 29-year-old university student who worked with the campaign of defeated presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, gives a rare glimpse of what is happening to detained protesters. Nazy spoke to The Associated Press by telephone from Tehran after her release on the condition that only her first name be used, to protect herself and her family. Thousands have been arrested since incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner, despite cries of fraud. The opposition claims detainees were savagely raped by their jailers and at least 69 people were killed, including some from beatings in prison. The account from Nazy, who is known in reformist circles, could not be independently backed up. But former prisoners and human rights groups have noted that such treatment of prisoners — a mix of intimidation and persuasion known as white torture — is widespread, and that ordinary people along with well-known opposition politicians have been subjected to it. "This case is one of thousands that take place in Iran," said Mohammad Javad Akbarein, an analyst who was himself jailed in 2001. "The majority of prisoners experience white torture. But it's worrisome when people become complacent when prisoners are not subjected to black torture and forget that their rights, dignity and honor are trampled on." June 20 was a tense Saturday, the day after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared the presidential vote would stand and warned opposition leaders to end street protests or be responsible for bloodshed. "We knew that from that day on anyone who comes into the street may have to pay a high price for it," said Nazy. Nazy was on her way to buy a book in Tehran's downtown Enqelab Street and planned to attend a demonstration that afternoon at 4. Before leaving home, she stuffed a bunch of white wristbands that said "change" into her backpack along with a folded poster she had prepared for the afternoon demonstration. White is the color of Karroubi's supporters. At noon, Nazy had just climbed out of the car in front of the bookshop when a man in a white vest, blue shirt and white sneakers twisted her arm and slapped handcuffs on her. He pushed her forward and ordered her to walk a few yards in front of him in the busy street. No sooner had she started walking that two clean-shaven young men in tight blue jeans and wearing green wristbands_ the color of the other defeated reformist candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi — caught up with her. "Don't make any noise; when you reach the narrow street we will help you escape," one of them told her. But when she reached the street that led to the "Protective Police," the men pushed her inside the gate. They had duped her. She walked into a huge courtyard packed with disciplinary police officers and with vans and jeeps. Nazy saw five or six men beaten as they were led into the detention center. Nazy herself was hit a couple of times on her back, led into a basement and interrogated. A female guard pulled out a poster from Nazy's bag. "Ha, instead of saying 'In the Name of God,' she's written 'In the Name of Democracy' on the poster," the guard mocked Nazy. "I'll show you what democracy really is." Another guard came in and challenged Nazy for being a member of the 'One Million Signature' campaign — a group pressing for changes in Iran's laws on women. "Why don't you live your life quietly?" she said. "Do you really consider yourself a woman? We are women who work to bring bread to the table, just like normal people. You ought to do the same and work. You call collecting signatures work?" She said Nazy's family was looking all over town for her and added, "Why don't you use your brain a little?" Nazy said she was working for the woman's rights. "Can't you find a better way to fight for our rights?" the officer asked her. By 4 p.m. the number of detainees — mostly men picked up at the protest sites — had swelled to more than 100. Nazy and two other women waited for several hours in a van while more female demonstrators were brought in. It was dark by the time the van, which seated 12, was filled with 19 women plus two female and one male officers. They sat three to a seat, blindfolded, their hands tied to the chairs. Every time they said a word, they were smacked in the head. At one point, the male officer threw six heavy bottles full of water on their heads. Nazy slightly lifted her blindfold and watched guards hit around 60 men — mostly young — in the head with batons. Blood streamed down their faces and soaked their shirts. The women were driven to the Vozara Monkerat (Moral Police), a temporary jailhouse for prostitutes and drug addicts. The officers dumped them inside the green metal gates of the building and left. No one at the Monkerat knew why the 19 women were there, who had brought them, what their offenses were. They shoved every five of them into a 3 by 2 meter (10 by 6 feet) carpeted room where they couldn't even stretch their legs. The rooms were dark, with no windows. By the time dawn broke, the women were screaming. A young mother was wailing. She had left her three-year-old child in the house alone to shop at the corner store when she was arrested. After 15 hours, they were allowed to use the toilet, and only once. Just before midnight, the women were escorted up the stairs into a room with a big library. They were given forms to fill: reason for their detention. The middle-aged interrogator — in a short-sleeved white shirt and white pants and a golden chain around his neck — did not look like a typical officer of the regime. Nor did his assistant, a young man also clean-shaven and wearing chains. A few minutes later, a young, thin man wearing a suit walked in. "Do you realize your crime is much heavier than others?" the new man asked Nazy. "Because you are with the ("One Million Signature') campaign." "I don't even know why I have been arrested," she replied. He wrote at the bottom of the paper: "to be released on billion rial (about $100,000) bail." He told her to sign the paper so she could go home that night. Her charge was: disruption of law and order, action against national security, destruction of public property, participation in illegal gathering. She said did not accept any of the charges. "Then you will stay right here," he said. "Put on her handcuffs and blindfold and take her downstairs," he told the guard. Nazy was terrified. She didn't want to stay there alone, and was worried about her family. "If I sign it means I accept the charges?" she asked the man. He said the charges would remain whether she signed or not. She was afraid that if she accepted the charges, they would slap a prison sentence on her. "Don't sign. Stay here until you die," the man threatened her. The young assistant tried to persuade her to sign. "Will I then go home tonight?" she asked him. "Yes. Don't you see you are signing bail?" he assured her. The moment she signed, the interrogator said: "Put on her handcuffs and blindfold and take her to Evin." "But you said I will be going home tonight!" Nazy said. "Who do you think you are that I have to answer to you? Take her to Evin!" the man snapped. Rest of article.