#azadeh moaveni

[theblackestofsuns]

Adams Carvalho's illustration for Azadeh Moaveni's piece on young women in Iran in this week's New Yorker magazine.

[septembriseur]

Sorry if this is a dumb question. Do you think it’s fair to assume any/all calls about “terrorism” to be red flag imperialist framings? Like, anyone called a terrorist by the us/uk etc can be assumed to be a desperate and angry person protesting the horrors imposed on them? Maybe “any/all” is too generalizing? I’m struggling to make sense of this place and its politics! I first started paying attention as a teenager when Mike brown was killed and I feel like each few years another layer of lies gets pulled back lmao. My instinct is to go find another book to read but there’s literally endless books to read about endless atrocities and I have no money

Well, for starters, on the internet almost all books are free. Definitely jot that down.

There are specific excellent articles and books that have been written about the idea of "the terrorist." Depending on your ability to plow through academic jargon, they may or may not be interesting. Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages is definitely one of the best-known. Sunaina Maira's article "'Good' and 'Bad' Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms" is good. You might be interested in Lauren Wilcox's Bodies of Violence or Purnima Bose's Intervention Narratives. I would also recommend Azadeh Moaveni's Guest House for Young Widows, which is about so-called "jihadi brides."

I think that the way the term "terrorist" is mobilized by officials (in other words, who gets identified as a terrorist and who doesn't) is inconsistent and often reflects elite capitalist hegemonies. Actually, another important book to read in order to gain insight into this inconsistency is probably Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.

However, I would say that what this inconsistency means is that the term "terrorist" actually just doesn't provide you with any useful information about the person who is being identified in that way. You have to do the research to understand who they are and what the moral judgement of their actions ought to be.

[spookyteeths]

"What They Did to Our Women: Azadeh Moaveni on sexual violence in wartime," London Review of Books, May 9, 2024. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n09/azadeh-moaveni/what-they-did-to-our-women

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Before Hillary Clinton, There Was Rosalynn Carter by Azadeh Moaveni

By Azadeh Moaveni She was the most politically active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. Why have her efforts been so overlooked? Published: November 21, 2023 at 05:03AM from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/QbSAd9W via IFTTT

[thefree-online]

The Protests Inside Iran’s Girls’ Schools

From the start, women were at the center of the demonstrations that swept Iran last year. Schoolgirls emerged as an unexpected source of defiant energy. By Azadeh Moaveni One morning this past winter, the students at a girls’ high school in Tehran were told that education officials would arrive that week to inspect their classrooms and […]The Protests Inside Iran’s Girls’ Schools

[readingaway]

Knowing you I'm gonna guess you're looking for nonfiction so what I can recommend is: Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni (bit old, pub. 2005 but informative about Iran at the time), Guest House for Young Widows also by Moaveni...

edit: I've read a lot less nonfiction about people and events in west asia; Egypt and Iran have been on my list of countries I try to find books from/ about but so far I haven't gotten to the region between them. Stuff I haven't read that is on my list:

The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History

The Sacking of Fallujah: a People's History

Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran

Four Years in the Mountains of Kurdistan (if I'm going to include Armenian histories then I should include The Hundred Year Walk)

Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

Anyone have any recs for books or documentaries about the Middle East? The history, current events, anything. Hit me.

[intpatypical]

There were many things a young woman could do with rage.

Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

[a-mountain-girl]

"Buoyed by my thoughts during the afternoon's ride, I was more willing to believe in the possibility of change; not in the simple, facile way I had imagined before - that a heroic president would work miracles overnight - but a longer process, unpredictable, but made possible by the fact that the regime had cracks, and that social momentum would one day broaden them."

- Azadeh Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad (136)

[kindledspiritsbooks]

January Highlight

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

In the Dream House is an experimental and wildly creative memoir that recounts Machado’s experience of an abusive same-sex relationship. Frustrated by the absence of any story like hers from the literary canon, Machado has sought to insert herself into the archive by telling each chapter of her story through the lens of a different genre, ranging from stoner comedy to erotica to choose your own adventure. It pushes the boundaries of what I thought a memoir could be and was utterly gripping from start to finish.

[manalou2]

7 Must-Read Books on Isis Brides

7 Must-Read Books on Isis Brides #fiction #terrorism #Isis #Jihadi

[skbooklist]

Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS, by Azadeh Moaveni

“Many of these women were trying, in a twisted way, to achieve dignity and freedom through an embrace of a politics that ended up violating both.”

[dragontatoes]

October last year, I read the biography Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran, about a correspondent reporting on the election and administration of  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and I felt the first real fear for the US election.

Azadeh Moaveni arrived in Iran in the midst of the 2005 election to find a young generation run ragged by rampant inflation, poor work opportunities, crumbling infrastructure, and housing crises. Simultaneously, they were unenthusiastic about the electorates and didn’t find identity with them. It was expected by the author and her friends that either a moderate or a reformist candidate would win. Instead:

“I had researched Ahmadinejad’s tenure as mayor. He was an unabashed religious conservative, and his work as mayor showed a disturbing tendency to inflict his own hard-line values on a more progressive population. [...] We had all been wrong. Desperately, fatally, irretrievably wrong. The election had mattered after all, and so had voting. A fundamentalist former mayor with no record of leadership at the national level, whose major efforts as mayor of Tehran were to turn the capital’s squares into cemeteries and segregate the elevators in government buildings, had become president of Iran.”

It was suspected that votes had been tampered with, both in this election and in his reelection in 2009. His first act in office was appointing a cabinet...

“Of the twenty-one nominees he presented to parliament, several lacked any experience in government whatsoever, others were personal friends from the university where he had taught, and two had been implicated by human rights groups in political killings.”

Life went on as it does after he was inaugurated, but small changes began to take place. Dress codes were more strictly enforced. Moaveni was regularly monitored and stalked by government agents, and received threats when attempting to write controversial pieces. After a year or so, satellite dishes went into hiding, lest they were dismantled by the police, and Moaveni found that the internet had blocked too many websites or search terms to properly do her work or raise a family.

“In the eighteen months since he took office, the president had managed to weaken Iran’s frail economy, provoke U.N. Security Council sanctions, elicit the threat of American military attack, alienate members of his own party (who broke off and started a front against him), offend the ayatollahs of Qom, and trigger the first serious student protest since 1999.”

This was a glimpse into a nightmare as I read. Then I started living it. It’s all playing note-for-note this year. Our white house dicktater (not a typo), is as totalitarian as the nations he banned travel to/from earlier this year. Look into the book, it’s a good read, and pay attention. What’s coming next has already been written.

[wazafam]

By BY AZADEH MOAVENI AND SUSSAN TAHMASEBI from Opinion in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/opinion/sunday/iran-sanctions-women.html?partner=IFTTT The decimation of the economy since the U.S. left the nuclear deal is crippling the people who have been working for reform. How Sanctions Hurt Iranian Women New York Times

[luminalunii97]

Can I be happy for 5 minutes without the regime's lobbyists fuckin it up?!!! apparently not! I watched the Time video yesterday and then went to Instagram to see a lot of posts like this. I realized I haven't read the article which unlike the video was filled with misinformation. Halfway through it takes a wild turn into lying. I knew I shouldn't have trusted Time. Seriously, you almost did it but then you didn't.

This is the nth time a misleading or misinformative article is published in western Media. This is how the regime manipulated west for so long. I remember years ago, when Iranian feminists tried to talk about all the sexist misogynistic ways of the islamic republic, people like Azadeh Moaveni were there to shut them up with sophistry and fallacy. Claiming wild lies like "it's our culture". Misogyny is no one's culture. It's a cancer. And when women try to fight it you should stand with them not against them.

This is Hoda Katebi, a NIAC member. She has posed as such a good poor Muslim woman of color in west for so long. No one dared to criticize her because they'd get an islamophobe label fast if they challenged her. Look how unashamedly she lies here. How she defends the mandatory hijab and undermine the violence Iranian women deal with everyday in Iran. She's wearing clothes that are NOT considered a proper hijab in Iran. Back then the hijab rule was if not more, as strict as today. You've seen Mahsa Amini clothes when she was arrested. Her style was more modest that what Hoda is wearing here and is claiming "not tempting for lashing". But even if she wasn't unabashedly lying, that's not the fucking point. If only a certain group of women are safe in Iran, aka hijabi women, it's discrimination and IT'S NOT OK.

People like Hoda and Azadeh have tried to show a mellow image of the regime for years in west. Showing pictures of women with loose hijab to west to say "see this is how women dress in Iran and no one bothers them". While in reality even if some women dressed like that, they were doing something illegal, and were in danger of getting arrested and punished. I hope you've seen the morality police brutality videos that ended up getting so out of hand it caused a young woman's death. In reality I had to check "Gershad" app on my phone everytime I wanted to leave my house even though my clothes have always been a lot more modest that what Hoda has shown in her pictures of Iran. (Gershad is an app that was developed by people for people. It's a map where you can report anywhere you see a morality police car so that others can avoid them. It wasn't always 100% accurate, but it helped!)

In another blood boiling bullshiting by her, she suggested the way to help iran is to disband sanctions and "don't worry because NIAC is on it"! Because that makes sense! How can we stop a regime that's murdering women and children and violates every human rights ever?! By giving them financial and political power!!!!! So that they can violate human rights better and with less worry!

Farnaz Fassihi is another NIAC member who tried to convince USA to lift the sanctions by writing that notoriously misleading "out of reach dreams" article in new york times. And I just realized her co-writer, Vivian Yee was the journalist who wrote the other misleading article about morality police getting abolished.

In case you don't know what NIAC is, it stands for National Iranian American Council. It's a council that unofficially aids the islamic republic regime to push their propaganda in USA and west. Their number one priority is to fight anything that could lead to a regime change. Therefore they try their best to convince west that Iranians are only protesting for reform. Meanwhile we're screaming revolution here.

NIAC influence needs to be restricted in US so that Iranian people and activists can raise their voices. But we've seen the opposite of that happening. They get invited to various interviews and conferences and they have journalists in famous publications like new york times. Please share the word to help stop their reign.

Ps, most iranians are pro sanctions at the moment at least because we're trying to break the regime financially, therefore the calls for national strikes. Anyone with a little common sense would understand that sanctions help the cause now. Other than that, sanctions sound sinister because they've made people poor. But almost all of them directly targets IRGC, the terrorist organization that kills people in iran and in middle east, while using their share of profits in almost every industry in Iran. They're killing people with rubble bullets! Do you think with lifting sanctions they'd use money, power and nuclear energy for humanitarian causes?!