If you would like to see what hypocrisy at its worst looks like, look no further than Iran. As previously reported on this blog, Tehran is notorious for supporting terrorism – including some of the forces wreaking havoc on Syria on behalf of Bashar Assad – with a little help from drug rings.
At home, meanwhile, Iran is running a brutal campaign against all drug offenders, including juveniles who are sentenced to jail and even to death. Now, Iran has reached new heights of hypocrisy – continuing to run drug rings in tandem with Hezbollah, Latin American cartels, and other nefarious groups, while at the same time reportedly wiping out an entire Iranian village over drug-related offenses.
According to a recent statement by Iran’s vice-president for women and family affairs Shahindokht Molaverdi, Iran hanged “every single man” in a village in the Sistan and Baluchestan province for drug trafficking. Molaverdi revealed the shocking news while attempting to praise Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s social policies during an interview with the Mehr news agency, which caused outrage among rights groups. In the interview, Molaverdi stated that Iran needed to “act against” the men of the village to prevent crime, lauding Rouhani’s administration for reinstating “support programs” for the children of the executed.
In other words, under the guise of “justice,” Iran is killing off men in one of its most impoverished and restive regions, which is home to persecuted religious and ethnic minorities – a key smuggling point for Afghan narcotics where drug addiction runs rampant – in order to “protect” the villagers from crime. In Iran’s eyes, there’s nothing wrong with Iran and its terrorist proxies benefiting from the drug trade, but when poor men get involved in the drug trade to support their families, they can be executed without trial. And the orphans? They are raised not by their fathers, but by government “programs” meant to “develop” them – while their province continues to stagnate.
In December, graphic footage surfaced of a Sunni village in the same region being bulldozed to the ground by the Iranian regime – this time over claims it had been illegally built. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) interpreted the “inhumane act” as “the latest in a series of repressive measures” to “marginalize” Iran’s Sunnis. Is the recent execution of the villagers yet another abhorrent example of the underlying sectarianism of “moderate” Iran? We hope major news outlets, and not just rights groups, will investigate further.
Filed under: Human Rights, Iranian Politics, Media Coverage
