Derek O'Sullivan

n 2004, a journalist named Asieh Amini came across a story from a small town in northern Iran. A 16-year-old girl named Atefeh Sahaaleh had been publicly hanged. The official charge: "acts incompatible with chastity." The reality, which Amini uncovered through careful, dangerous investigation: Atefeh had been repeatedly raped by a neighbor and other men beginning when she was nine years old. She had been neglected by her family and paid to keep silent — money she used simply to survive. At 13, Iran's morality police arrested her. A judge sentenced her to one hundred lashes. Under Iranian law, a woman could be sentenced to lashings three times — the fourth offense carried the death penalty. She was 16 when they hanged her. Amini wrote the story. Her newspaper refused to publish it. Another paper refused as well. A women's publication finally agreed to run an edited version. She kept going. Born in 1973 in the Mazandaran province of northern Iran — one of four sisters who spent their childhood painting, reading, and playing outdoors — Amini had built her career as a journalist through the brief flowering of press freedom following President Khatami's election in 1997, editing a women's affairs newspaper called Zan until hardline clerics shut it down in 1999. She had known the Iranian state's capacity for silencing voices. She had not yet known the full depth of what it was capable of doing to girls. After Atefeh, she knew. Case after case began reaching her. Leyla — a 19-year-old with diminished mental capacity, herself a victim of child rape, facing execution. The judge in her case told Amini plainly that Leyla was a threat to family life because of her "sexual availability." Amini enlisted human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr, published Leyla's story, drew international attention, and helped get her out of prison and into the care of a women's organization in Tehran. One life at a time. One story at a time. Against a legal system that had no interest in being exposed. In 2006, Amini discovered that despite a government moratorium on stoning — a directive issued in 2002 that carried no binding legal force — a man and woman had been stoned to death in Mashhad for adultery. The judge claimed he answered only to Sharia law. The Ministry of Justice denied the stoning had happened. State media attacked Amini's credibility. That October, Amini and Sadr co-founded the Stop Stoning Forever (SSF) campaign — systematically documenting stonings occurring across Iran and sharing their findings through colleagues abroad who could publish without fear of arrest. The state took notice. In March 2007, Amini was among 33 women arrested during a silent sit-in at a Tehran courthouse. During interrogation she realized — with the specific clarity of someone who had been investigating surveillance — that the police had been investigating her for some time. She was released after five days. Her phones, she was certain, were tapped. Her movements tracked. She kept reporting. The sustained pressure of the work eventually took its physical toll — stress-induced symptoms that included headaches, vision problems, and muscle paralysis forced her to step back briefly while her partners reorganized the campaign from outside Iran. She recovered. She continued. In 2009, following the disputed reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Amini was among the demonstrators beaten in the protests that swept Iran. She continued reporting — under pseudonyms, in the chaos. Then came the warning: police were questioning prisoners about her. She needed to leave. She had been invited to a poetry festival in Sweden. She took her daughter Ava and she went. They did not come back. Amini settled eventually in Norway, supported by the International Cities of Refuge Network — a program that protects writers facing state persecution. From exile, she continued her advocacy, published two books of Norwegian-language poetry, and kept doing what she had always done: making sure that the stories of girls and women the Iranian state wanted silenced were heard by the world instead. She was awarded the Human Rights Watch Hellmann/Hammett Award in 2009 — the same year she fled. The Oxfam Novib/PEN Award in 2012. The Ord i Grenseland prize in 2014. Asieh Amini picked up a pen in a country that punished women for existing outside the law's narrow definitions — and she used it, at enormous personal cost, to push against every wall that pen could reach. The girl from Mazandaran who dreamed of becoming a painter and writer became something rarer and harder: A witness who refused to look away. And a voice that — no matter how many times the state tried to silence it — kept finding new ways to be heard.

Israel is now more dangerous than Nazi germany was. A deep ideological hatred of all around them with a desire to seize lands. Fully armed by the West and with legal impunity. Nuclear armed and a total religious supremacist outlook. The most dangerous entity to ever exist.

If the US and Israel don't change their current course, then eventually America is going to turn on Israel. It is written into the dynamic and is inevitable without some form of introspection.

Jews don’t celebrate death - we sanctify life. Whatever your view on the death penalty, breaking open champagne to celebrate a law that takes life is fundamentally anti-Jewish. Many already understand this. Others will, in time. One day we will look back at Ben Gvir’s tenure and feel ashamed that we allowed something so corrosive into the sanctuary of power in Israel.

VIDEO | Israeli National Security Minister Ben Gvir, outside the Knesset chamber, celebrates the passing of the death penalty law for Palestinian detainees, describing it as historic and saying, “Soon we will count them one by one.”

United Nations (UN) report states that Hamas committed sexual violence, including rape, gang rape, and sexualized torture of women during the terror attacks on 7th October 2023 in Israel. Hamas terrorists also raped corpses (dead bodies).

Here's our detailed investigation into the deadly strike on the Iranian town of Lamerd on the first day of the conflict, which munitions experts say was likely carried out with state-of-the-art US missiles.

We do not know the origin of the projectile. We have launched an investigation to determine all of the circumstances.

Breaking | UNIFIL peacekeeper soldier was killed and several others injure in Adshit al-Qusayr, south Lebanon, after Israeli artillery shelling bombed one of their positions in the village.

When the leader of racist party calls a Jewish journalist - me - ‘parasitic’ simply for reporting that his Jewish family are scared by the direction his ‘Zionism is racism’ party is going in. This is the true face of the nasty Greens.

“A toddler in Gaza released from Israeli custody has been returned to his family with suspected torture wounds.” Read that again.

🚨BREAKING Red Cross has CONFIRMED that the Palestinian toddler (the one the media claimed was tortured by the IDF) - was healthy and happy at the time he was handed over to the Red Cross. All the Pro-Palestinian movement does is lie.