In the throes of Khashoggimania, the mediia can’t be bothered to care about stories like these.
The family of Kavous Seyed Emami, a prominent environmentalist and professor at Tehran’s Imam Sadegh University, broke the horrific news on February 10 that he had died under suspicious circumstances while in detention. Iranian authorities claimed he had committed suicide.
Only a few weeks earlier, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence arm had arrested Seyed Emami, an Iranian-Canadian citizen, and seven other environmental activists from the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, a local nonprofit organization that works to conserve and protect endangered species in Iran.
In February, authorities also briefly arrested the deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment, Kaveh Madani, who had returned from the U.K. to help with the country’s water management problems. He decided not to return from a trip abroad after authorities threatened him with arrest again.
The left claims to care about environmentalists. Yet the media is curiously uninterested. And the response is far below the mania that still surrounds Khashoggimania.
Nine months after a group of environmentalists were imprisoned in Iran without any evidence of wrongdoing and denied due process—and after the death of one them in state custody—five of them have been charged with a serious national security crime.
“Instead of investigating the death in state custody of Kavous Seyed-Emami, Iranian authorities have spent the past nine months cooking up cases against his colleagues,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI).
Aghasi told CHRI he doesn’t understand why the original charge was changed.
“We are dealing with a very strange accusation,” said Aghasi. “I completely object to this charge,” he added.
Corruption on earth is an extremely serious charge in the Iranian penal code that pertains to national security. The maximum penalty for this charge is death.
“Previously, the authorities were accusing [the detainees of] cooperation with foreign governments and agencies, so I don’t know how that has now changed to ‘corruption on earth,” he said.
A properly Islamic charge.
The media claims to be care about environmentalists. It claims to care about women. And a hundred other groups. But ultimately the media only cares about supporting Islamists.
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