Twitpic Update: Twittering Today’s Iconic Images of the Spirit of Freedom in Iran

At Twitpic you can find a photo being billed on the proprietary site as iconic depiction of today’s protest in Tehran, green banner unfurled in the streets filled with a largely male crowd.

In the vast people’s outpouring of the Iranian revolt, wonder why you can see an injured girl attended by a male, a woman mixed in with male crowds, or a woman standing alone in defiance, among the  throngs  of  mainly men — but few groups of women among thousands (maybe more) of men who have taken to the streets in protest? See photos in Twitter, Tweetdeck post below, and these additional images:

Iranian women’s peaceful activist actions have, in recent months before the election, been fragmented by mullah-militarist men roughing them up and jailing them with a release condition that they be isolated from each other and no longer able to assemble.  It’s not being widely reported, but google Delaram Ali, Iranian Women’s Movement, One Million Signatures Campaign, Delara Darabi and Shirin Ebadi … and you may get the story.

Under the oppression directed against Iranian women by Ahmadenijad sympathizers, the women who are activists may believe this current uprising is their last chance — but because they cannot organize to tell us, and because Ahmadenijad is curtailing news from Iran, we receive no direct appeal from them.  Meanwhile, men are largely carrying most of the green banners without aid of women who have inspired the call to freedom in Iran over the past three decades.

The unreported story of today’s revolt is that Iranian freedom-loving women have been attempting — marching in the streets, singing and chanting slogans, organizing for freedom — for over thirty years to join with Iranian men to bring about social respect for individualism in community of the type most Americans take for granted. In those earlier years American feminist Kate Millett went to Iran and, before the Iranian government expelled her, gathered compelling material and with old-media (paper) photographic help from Sophie Keir wrote a book about Iran.

If the best of Kate Millett’s books weren’t currently out of print (no big surprise in a big-oil global mass-media world also run on the backs of women), we’d better understand political Islam (as compared to reformist efforts) and the dominator politics of what’s happening today in Iran.  Twitter and related apps provide excellent technology for showing what’s now (at least when a government doesn’t block tech egress) — but if we depart from the collective wisdom of where we’ve been, even a Twitpic won’t show the way to where we’re going.

Elephants (Neither Whores Nor Submissives)

Elephants, we now know, are naturally an intelligent and matri-focused species of mother-and-grandmother-led clans who honor kinship ties, value elder males as role models for young males, and have  resonant emotions.   (By man’s increasing,  unwelcome and unnatural intrusions into their lives, some elephants are beginning to act out in violence, in parallels to gang violence and shooting deaths by human beings who are still mainly men with some women starting to victimize first instead of being a victim.)

When traumatized by man’s dominance and violence,  an elephant’s  body memories can combine as physical and psychological forces leading to that elephant’s death.  Dawn Adrian Adams, Ph.D., describes this scientific reality on behalf of elephants at What the Elephant Never Forgot.

What nobody seems to have asked is whether elephants trained in captivity can learn to revel in their “inner submissive” as the pathway to a subordinated peace in a male-dominant and violent world as some women can.

With the emotional similarities researchers are finding between elephant beings and human beings, as the conscious beings who have words (and blogs) we ought no longer let the question of women’s psychological entrainment to subordination be hidden — behind violent male-dominant cultures that spawned the mainstream man-made male-God religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) and the man-made political  philosophies (Hinduism, Buddhism, Atheism, Socialism, Communism, Capitalism) that by their action and symbolism elevate  men over other conscious life forms — whether it’s elephants or women whose lives are being diminished.

[Compare  photo of elephants with photo of woman’s body from the website of a truly creepy website pitched to wives of the submissive type, and I’m not going to link to the site because it is so very sick — but if this titillates you in even the slightest degree then consider how damaged you have been by the longest war and its eroticization of dominance and submission, something we and not elephants have words for, something particularly the women among human beings and elephants suffer and die for, in the longest war.

Some women in some parts of the world keep bravely taking action.  The women (and some men) who are enlightened elephant researchers are bravely taking their stand for TRANS-SPECIES

CONSCIOUSNESS  against man-made dominance — and some women take up the cause for other women.  For example:

In speaking against Islamic religion’s women-only veil (headgear symbolic of male dominance of women) and physically violent male Islamic means to keep women in line with what men want —  so she could speak for giving women a better option of respect and personhood in their own right — Fadela Amara founded “Ni putes ni soumises” (Neither Whores Nor Submissives). This is also the title of her book which won the “Prix du Livre Politique” of the French national assembly.

Where Islamic culture reigns (as in French immigrant neighborhoods), a male punishment against girls who rebel is the so-called “tournante” – gang rape. Samira Bellil was the first to describe this phenomena in her book Dans l’enfer des tournantes (translated, in gang-rape hell).  Three male gangs had raped Bellil  before she found the courage — after caring treatment perhaps analogous to what Dawn Adrian Adams, Ph.D. might provide an elephant —  to tell her story. Samira Bellil participated in “Ni putes ni soumises” until she died at age 31 of stomach cancer.  (Here her obituary from the Guardian–UK.)

Considering the proximity of her stomach to the bodily site of three gang rapes by men against this young woman, would we connect the physical  trauma as PTSD to the physical sickness and then her death?  If she were an elephant, we would.

Obama’s mankind, the sons of God … and to every man “a female”

Even if men of different male-dominant “God” faiths make peace among themselves, the longest war by the language here depicted is slated to continue against womankind — men’s rules, men’s game, every man to have “a female” on men’s terms.   It’s  not a world any self-respecting woman ought to accept.  Why aren’t feminists calling Obama on this?  He’s better looking than Bush, but, hey, he’s sounding as much like a misogynist behind the smile as his presidential predecessor.

[Excerpts on this blog for social commentary; note the Islamic head-scarved woman and ask yourself who in her or his right mind would choose  always to wear a cumbersome head-scarf in public if not for the cultural rules and social pressures Islamic men have imposed.]

AP – U.S. President Barack Obama, centre, tours the Sultan Hassan Mosque in Cairo, Thursday, June 4, 2009, …

• Play Video Barack Obama Video:Obama Asks For ‘New Beginning’ With Muslim World CBS 2 / KCAL 9 Los Angeles
• Play Video Barack Obama Video:Locals React To Obama’s Muslim Speech CBS 2 / KCAL 9 Los Angeles
• Play Video Barack Obama Video:Change They Can Believe In? FOX News

By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer Rachel Zoll, Ap Religion Writer – 1 hr 31 mins ago

NEW YORK – President Barack Obama showed respect for Islam by quoting from the Quran in his speech Thursday but did so in a way meant to resonate with Christians and Jews as well….

“The Holy Quran tells us, ‘Mankind, we have created you male and a female. And we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another,'” Obama said in the Cairo address. “The Talmud tells us, ‘The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.’ The Holy Bible tells us, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.'”

Whatever men may say, the God described has never been about peace but piece.  Goddess help us all.