If they rebel, get out the poison
Maryam Afshang at the BBC three days ago:
Almost 700 girls have been poisoned by toxic gas in Iran since November, in what many believe is a deliberate attempt to force their schools to shut.
No girls have died, but dozens have suffered respiratory problems, nausea, dizziness and fatigue.
“It became evident that some people wanted all schools, especially girls’ schools, to be closed down,” the deputy health minister said on Sunday.
Then he took it back. I wonder if we can guess why.
The first poisoning took place on 30 November, when 18 students from the Nour Technical School in the religious city of Qom were taken to hospital. Since then, more than 10 girls’ schools have been targeted in the surrounding province.
At least 194 girls are reported to have been poisoned in the past week at four schools in the city of Borujerd, in the western province of Lorestan. The poisoned girls have reported the smell of tangerine or rotten fish before falling ill.
And on Tuesday another 37 students were poisoned at the Khayyam Girls’ School in Pardis, near the capital Tehran.
Maybe they should try identifying as boys. Might help.
The poisonings have notably been concentrated in Qom, a city that is home to important Shia Muslim shrines and the religious leadership that forms the backbone of the Islamic Republic.
Like Rome, or Jerusalem, or Mecca, or Salt Lake City, or Ayodhya. Holy cities are dangerous places.
Since September, the clerical establishment has been challenged by the mass protests that erupted after the death in custody of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who was detained by morality police for allegedly failing to wear her headscarf “properly”.
This of course is because women are all whores, who will defile the holy population by spreading their legs for thousands of men. They must be shrouded head to foot to prevent this whorish leg-spreading so that the men will be confident they’re not raising other dudes’ children.
Some Iranians have speculated that if the schoolgirls are being poisoned as “payback” for their role in the unrest. Social media was flooded with videos showing schoolgirls ripping off their headscarves and chanting anti-establishment slogans.
Others have speculated that the poisonings are the work of hardliners who want to “copy” the Taliban in Afghanistan and the militant Islamist group Boko Haram in Nigeria by terrorising parents to stop sending their girls to school.
Well it’s the same thing really. Ferocious, punitive control of girls and women, and ferocious, punitive response when the control fails to silence them.
Those poor girls! What is the UN doing about it? Anything? The government isn’t going to act, because they’ve less power than the religious zealots.
That is what true oppression looks like; those well-to-do narcissistic men LARPing as porn stars have no idea.
I have been to Iran, and have enormous respect for the Iranian people. I have found them to be most dignified and scrupulously honest in their economic dealings. But whenever the subject of Iran under the dominion of the Islamic clerics comes up, I always think of what might have been.
Until 1953, Iran was a democracy, led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. But Iran is seriously rich in oil, and his government, which wanted to nationalise it, was overthrown in a coup aided by the American CIA and Britain’s MI6, which installed the reactionary Pahlevi Dynasty led by the Shah. That lasted until 1979, when a popular uprising installed the antidemocratic theocracy of the clerics, which has a priority of developing nuclear weapons; mostly for future use against Israel.
The people who seek power in representative democracies, such as the US and the UK are commonly not themselves democrats. They do not want the popular will to prevail, but rather their own. (Especially demagogues like Trump.)
Omar: Sometimes the popular will can be scary and need to be limited. More people vote for a trump i. 2020 than 2016. The religious maniacs in Pakistan are scary in their numbers
A quick googling finds:
‘Bromobenzyl cyanide is a type of tear gas that has been said smells like sour/citrus fruit.’
‘Phosphine is a colourless gas with rotten fish smell and is highly poisonous. In pure state, phosphine is non-flammable but in impure state becomes flammable owing to the presence of impurities like P2H4 or P4 vapours.’
Tear gasses are usually delivered as smoke from burning ‘grenades.’ No idea how phosphine attacks are carried out.