The phrase ‘stunning and brave’ has lost much of its power, at least in the West, through both overuse and by inappropriate use. Where once this phrase and these words would have been applied sparingly to those who had achieved the sort of things that would earn them a Victoria Cross or who suffered the slings and arrows of social opprobrium to bring about universal suffrage, now it’s used for just about anything. Now the phrase ‘stunning and brave’ is used to describe stuff like a middle aged television presenter who dumps his wife for another man or a person who ‘bravely’ acquiesces to what ever is the current fashionable social cause. The overuse and misuse of this phrase has devalued it to the point where it has become a form of words that is an object of mockery by those who criticise the direction of modern society.

But there are still individuals, groups and causes for which the term stunning and brave really does need to be applied. One very good example of that would be the women who are currently protesting the legalised misogyny of the Iranian religious government.

The protests stem from an incident where an Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, aged 22, died in extremely suspicious circumstances in Iranian police custody. Ms Amini had been taken into custody by the police outside of a Tehran railway station because she had defied the state’s religious oppression by showing her hair. When questioned by the police Ms Amini stood firm and refused to abide by the demands of the police to cover her hair and for this she was carted off to a police station where she mysteriously died. The Iranian authorities told Ms Amini’s family that she had died of a heart attack but the family claim that there were no medical grounds to justify that as she had been very healthy before her encounter with the police.

Witnesses to the incident claim that they saw Ms Amini being beaten up in the back of a police van and, as Joanna Williams writing over at Spiked said, this treatment of Ms Amini has sparked off protests across Iran, despite the undoubted risks and dangers inherent in protesting against an authoritarian government. Ms Williams said:

Street protests have raged since Amini’s death was announced on Friday. Brave, bold and angry women have defied police orders and removed their hijabs in public. Women have been filmed dancing in the streets, their hair flailing in the wind. Others have started impromptu bonfires to burn their veils. Some women have not only removed the veil, but have also cut their hair short. All around, crowds chant ‘Death to the dictator!’ and ‘Woman! Life! Freedom!’.

Bearing in mind what these women along with the other anti-government protestors face for speaking up, a cost that can include death at the hands of the regime, this is a group of people for which the term stunning and brave really should be applied. These women are not taking a stand in order to attract attention to themselves or, as happens in the West, to virtue signal, they are standing up against a regime that since the revolution there has been one of complete and total misogyny. Women are forced by law, not by chosen religious custom, to don the hijab and keep their arms covered and are treated quite plainly as second class citizens.

Ms Williams said that the protests are becoming increasingly violent with the violence quite obviously coming from the security forces. She said that police have fired live rounds into crowds of women and the death toll so far from violence meted out by the police is now at six but I believe that it could probably be higher and may rise much higher.

In response to these protests in Iran Ms Williams said that the woke Left of the West, who turned out in their tens of thousands to protest the death in the USA of the criminal George Floyd, has been suspiciously silent. The woke Left that sets itself up as the arbiters of cultural and social morality have not held big rallies or spoken out about what the Iranian government is doing to women probably because it doesn’t fit with their narrative of ‘Islam = good, the West = bad’. I recall a time when the Left would have been full on to hold rallies and make statements of support for the brave Iranian women, but today that Left is dead and gone, eaten up by identity politics and a sneering hatred of the populace, even when that populace, as in the case of the women of Iran, really are fighting for their lives. The women of Iran have been let down, both by their government who should have treated woman as human beings of equal worth to men and by those in the Western Left who stay silent when they should be speaking up.