Dozens of protests occurred across Iran just over the last week, yet garnered next to no coverage in mainstream western journalism outlets. The movement began - or, many would argue, began again - last September following the killing of Mahsa Amini, arrested for refusing to wear the mandatory head-covering for women. The sustained protest movement has proved more robust and irrepressible than several previous rounds of civil unrest in Iran, dating back to 2009. Journalists have elected to reduce their reporting on the protests, which now barely register in the Western consciousness, if at all, as a result. After all, Iranians aren't Palestinians, whose hundred-year campaign to deny Jews sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland, affecting far fewer people than the Iran situation, deserves sustained, permanent attention in Western headlines.
"We know, we're not Palestinians, whose suffering actually matters," acknowledged Siraj Ganejad, 24, as he evaded blows from a Basij militia thug. "But we have to fight our fight even if Joe Biden wants to support the dictator Khamenei and allow him to threaten the world with nuclear weapons. We accepted our third-rate victim status long ago. We will never be invited to address the UN wearing a sidearm, as Arafat was."
"I wouldn't expect organizations such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International to pay us more than token attention," explained Masih Shirazi, as she was tackled by four enforcement personnel and bundled into a van, bleeding and battered, for the crime of waling around in public without the compulsory hijab. "Sure, we'll make it as a footnote, or part of a statistic in some aggregate report, but not with the bombast or brouhaha that those NGOs can always muster for Israel. Their funding sources and activists aren't interested in the depredations of Iran's leaders, because Iran's leaders aren't Jews. We know we'll always be a footnote to the real struggle, which is of course Justice for Palestine."
A spokesman for The New York Times responded to an inquiry on the subject with surprise that the protests are still happening in Iran.
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