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Iranian Regime Presses Harder Human Rights Crackdowns

March 28, 2016 by admin

Iranian Regime Presses Harder Human Rights Crackdowns

Iranian Regime Presses Harder Human Rights Crackdowns

While Christians celebrated Easter this weekend with prayers and hopes for peace, love and redemption, the Iranian regime stood alone in its wide ranging efforts to crackdown on human rights, stir up confrontation and foment strife around the world.

In spite of promises made by regime officials such as Hassan Rouhani and loyal supporters such as the National Iranian American Council that Iran was a model of moderation and accommodation for religious and ethnic minorities, the opposite has been the case as the regime showed little tolerance for anyone outside of its own narrow ideology that fuels an extremist fervor.

Take for example the plight of Christian converts in Iran who risk prison or death by secretly worshipping as Christians in Iran’s house church movement. According to watchdog groups, the number of Christians in Iran worshipping in secret has surpassed one million people.

The London-based Pars Theological Center is training at least 200 Iranian Christians to become the next generation of Iran’s church leaders, the Christian Post reported.

The persecution of Christians has persisted in Iran since the 1979 rise of the country’s theocratic government — with Christians facing the threat of death, lashing and torture. About 100 Christians currently remain imprisoned under Rouhani’s rule.

In 2010, top mullah Ali Khamenei said the country’s underground house churches “threaten the Islamic faith and deceive young Muslims.”

Sources describe Iranian house churches as consisting only of about four to five members — due to the threat of detection — and that they are forced to their place of gathering every time they meet.

“If they want to sing, they have to sing very quietly or not sing at all,” the source told the Post.

While Iran has released high-profile Christian pastors from captivity — most notably Iranian American Saeed Abedini — other Christian ministers still languish in the country’s prisons.

Regime punishment and torture of religious minorities has included brutal treatment of Sunni Muslims and those who follow the Baha’i faith, in which details of torture inflicted upon twelve Baha’is by interrogators three years ago at Amir Abad prison and detention centers in Iran’s Golestan Province—and the Iranian Judiciary’s complete lack of any response to the formal letter of complaint that was sent in 2012 by the victims of that torture to the head of the Judiciary of Golestan Province, were recently revealed in the media.

Twelve Baha’i citizens described harrowing instances of torture by their interrogators at the Amir Abad Prison, in the city of Gorgan, and other unnamed detention centers in Golestan province, northeast of Tehran.

“On the first day of his interrogation, Mr. Behnam Hassani’s wrist was tied very tightly with a rope and attached to a metal ring. The ring was raised to a nail above his head such that only his toes could touch the ground. He was in so much pain that he started to scream and shout,” said the letter.

“Then they brought him down and dragged him into a room and beat him. They pressed a pen between his fingers and hit him behind the head and on his mouth… Then they kept him under the rain for several hours on a cold night,” continued the letter.

These twelve Baha’is were among the 24 Baha’is (the other 12 were arrested in February and March 2013, also in Golestan Province), who recently received long prison sentences in January 2016.

Meanwhile, Ellie Silverman reporting for McClatchy News Service, detailed some of the brutal treatment regime prisoners received and how many were threatened before being released not to reveal any details of their mistreatment.

“A detailed picture of life inside Evin can be put together from interviews with former prisoners” Silverman writes. “Solitary confinement was one aspect they all had in common. All were blindfolded whenever they were taken from their cells, according to the Canadian, American and Iranian prisoners who spoke about their experiences,” Silverman continues.

“Another key aspect: Each prisoner was assigned to one principal interrogator who exercised authority over virtually every aspect of a prisoner’s life and served as that prisoner’s only contact with the outside world,” she added.

The former prisoners all recounted a difficult time adjusting to normal life after their release, including nightmares, flashbacks and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress. The prisoners released in January likely are enduring a similar adjustment period, said J. Wesley Boyd, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

The scars and pain inflicted by the regime’s mistreatment of prisoners lingers long after their confinement ends and serves as a warning to others of what could happen to any other dissidents who dare oppose the mullahs.

The regime’s attacks and systemic marginalization of Sunni Muslims is also another example of how widespread the regime’s human rights crackdown is and how it is not limited to those outside of the Islamic faith.

According to Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, president of the International American Council writing in Huffington Post, Iran’s Sunni are the largest minority in the country. Some of the discrimination that the Sunnis have suffered, according the UN report, are that the Sunni communities in Iran “have long complained that Iranian authorities do not appoint or employ them in high ranking government positions such as cabinet-level ministers or governors. They have also raised concerns regarding reported restrictions on the construction of Sunni mosques in Shia-majority areas, including the capital Tehran, and the execution or imminent execution of Sunni activists the government alleges were involved in terrorist-related activities.”

The regime’s abuses are aimed at virtually anyone not subscribing to its own extremist view of Islam and serves to remind us that the claims made by the Iran lobby about the regime’s moderate intentions are simply a smokescreen to hide the brutality it metes out on a daily basis.

By Michael Tomlinson

Filed Under: Blog, News Tagged With: Baha'is, Featured, Iran, Iran Human rights, Moderate Mullahs

Iran Lobby Silent as Religious Persecution Rises

June 3, 2015 by admin

Christian Persecution (1)There are certain truisms in life. Not paying your taxes will get you into trouble. Eating high fat foods makes you gain weight and the paid lobbying machine for the Iran regime will always remain silent when it comes to the mistreatment of those living in Iran.

That was on display the other as Fox News reported that “Iran’s revolutionary court imposed harsh prison sentences on 18 Christian converts for charges including evangelism, propaganda against the regime, and creating house churches to practice their faith.”

The sentences totaled almost 24 years, but the lack of transparency in the regime’s infamous judicial system did not reveal how the sentences were dished out to each person. In addition to prison time, each defendant was barred from organizing home church meetings and given a two-year ban from leaving Iran.

The Christians, many of whom were arrested in 2013, were sentenced in accordance with Article 500 of the Islamic Penal Code, a vague law used as a catch-all criminal statute to penalize threats to Iran’s clerical rulers. According to the law, “Anyone who engages in any type of propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran or in support of opposition groups and associations, shall be sentenced to three months to one year of imprisonment.”

It’s a code that has been used widely against religious minority as well as political dissidents as a quick means of throwing them in prison before deciding on more serious charges such as espionage, treason or heresy.

The persecution doesn’t stop with Christians as Iran’s mullahs have also targeted Sunni Muslim sects and other religious minorities such as Baha’is for harassment. The number of Christians in Iran is estimated at between 200,000 and 500,000, out of an overall population of nearly 78 million.

Although the Islamic Republic’s constitution guarantees on paper that Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism are protected religions, the application of mullah’s constitution relegates the members of the minority religions to second class citizens.

Against that backdrop was testimony given on Capitol Hill yesterday by the families of Americans being held hostage in Iran, including Saeed Abedini, a Christian pastor imprisoned by the regime’s revolutionary court.

The family of Amir Hekmati, an Iranian-American Marine, taken prisoner in 2011, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that he has been subjected to brutal torture both physical and psychological. “Amir’s feet were beaten with cables. His kidneys were shocked with a Taser. He was drugged by his interrogators, who then forced him to suffer through withdrawal. Amir was also kept in solitary confinement for months on end and held in a cell so small for the first year of his imprisonment that he could not fully extend his legs. He was allowed to walk outside his cell once a week,” said Sarah Hekmati, Amir’s sister.

Amir was also kept incommunicado for years. His jailers took advantage of this and falsely told him his mother had been killed in a car accident in a cruel example of the regime’s treatment of its prisoners.

Yet throughout all this mistreatment, Trita Parsi and other advocates for the regime have barely uttered a word of protest, even while Parsi hob nobs with Iranian delegates in Swiss hotel hallways and lounges. Their silence, while deafening, is not unexpected since the brutal treatment of Iranian-Americans could prove troublesome to the end goals of bailing out the Iran regime with a nuclear agreement that lifts all economic sanctions immediately.

It is unfortunate that this Iranian hostage crisis appears to have no end in sight.

By Laura Carnahan

Filed Under: Blog, National Iranian-American Council Tagged With: Baha'is, Human Rights, Iran, Iran Lobby, Iran Talks, Trita Parsi

National Iranian-American Council (NIAC)

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  • Survey
  • Lobbying
  • Iranians for International Cooperation
  • Defamation Lawsuit
  • People’s Mojahedin
  • Trita Parsi Biography
  • Parsi/Namazi Lobbying Plan
  • Parsi Links to Namazi & Iranian Regime
  • Namazi, NIAC Ringleader
  • Collaborating with Iran’s Ambassador

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