‘Clerics get lost’ Girls express their anger
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‘Teargas and clubs’ Crackdowns on rallies
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THE IRANIAN PRESIDENT, EBRAHIM RAISI, was holding court to a small group of journalists at the Millennium Hilton in New York on his first visit to the US since his election in June 2021. At home, protests over the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, were heading for their sixth day.
At the start of the meeting, a short film was shown, part patriotic travel brochure and part paean to how the Iranian people “live peacefully together in a new model of democracy”. Given events in Iran, it seemed the kind of absurd propaganda only a self-deluded regime would screen.
Raisi’s minders were reluctant to take questions about the protests, but when he agreed, he became fiercely animated about western double standards and spoke so loudly that the words of the mild-mannered translator became hard to discern through the headphones. No final determination had been made into Amini’s death, but preliminary evidence showed a stroke or heart failure was the cause, he said. He cited statistics reported in the Guardian asserting 81
