What the Death of Neda Agha-Soltan Means

The video linked below shows the death of an inno­cent, 26-year-old, Iran­ian woman who was shot in the heart by a mem­ber of the Basij mili­tia dur­ing the recent protests in Tehran. If you have already watched the video, see it one more time. If you have never seen the video, watch it now.

It is bloody. It is grue­some. It is noth­ing like the fake vio­lence that you see in the movies. It is real.

As a for­mer jour­nal­ist, I have always been a pro­po­nent that the news media should never cen­sor itself, even when show­ing images of peo­ple dying. The truth is the truth. And the truth is fre­quently ugly.

Of course, many respectable jour­nal­ists would argue the oppo­site. One, they argue, does not need to see a death to know that it occurred. They are cor­rect, but there is more to my point than believ­ing that peo­ple should be aware of a basic fact.

There are two ways to become aware of truth: 1.) log­i­cally and men­tally; and 2.) emo­tion­ally and heart-felt. Sim­ply know­ing that a per­son died sat­is­fies the first con­di­tion but not the sec­ond. One must expe­ri­ence the sec­ond to com­pre­hend fully the mean­ing of an event. The reader or viewer must know and feel that the death occurred to under­stand the sig­nif­i­cance. This video reveals the depth of the deprav­ity of the auto­cratic regime in Iran, and the only way to under­stand that fact is to feel it.

Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, stud­ied phi­los­o­phy and took under­ground music lessons in a coun­try where women are banned from singing in pub­lic. She was engaged. Neda loved to travel and had hoped to study tourism and then lead groups of Iran­ian tourists abroad. She had two sib­lings. Pro­files on Neda and her life and here and here. If my read­ers know of more infor­ma­tion about her, please post links in the comments.

Mean­while, the Iran­ian regime — through a state-run media out­let rely­ing on an “unnamed source” — is insist­ing that the Basij did not shoot her and that the inci­dent had been planned. I spit in the faces of Aya­tol­lah Ali Khamenei and Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadinejad.

Neda’s death is about more than the mur­der of one per­son. As Elana Sztok­man observes:

It took the tragic killing of Neda Soltan in Iran for the world to real­ize that the lives — and deaths — of women are at the cen­ter of the strug­gle for human rights against reli­gious extremism.

The astound­ing protests tak­ing place in Iran over the past week, since the fraud­u­lent vic­tory of Islamic extrem­ist Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad over Mir Hos­sein Mousavi, is really a story about women…

Geral­dine Brooks, in her out­stand­ing book Nine Parts of Desire about women and Islam, demon­strates unequiv­o­cally that rad­i­cal Islam’s fight against the world hinges on the role of women. The more their woman are cov­ered, the more reli­gious men claim to be (ahem, sounds famil­iar). What we are really watch­ing in Iran is women tak­ing to the streets, under the unof­fi­cial lead­er­ship of a woman, to chal­lenge the dark, bar­baric rule of rad­i­cal Islam…

It is quite telling that the new hero of this move­ment is a hero­ine — shot while watch­ing from the side. The video of Neda Soltan hor­rif­i­cally bleed­ing out and dying is not the only ele­ment of the story to get people’s atten­tion. Also “before” and “after” pho­tos of her — that is, before and after she was forced into reli­gious sub­servience by Islamic law — are quite shock­ing, a trans­for­ma­tion from free woman to impris­oned chat­tel. These pho­tos tell the real story about what is going on in Iran. I hope the world cares enough to help bring about real change.

No gov­ern­ment — auto­cratic, demo­c­ra­tic, or oth­er­wise — can with­stand the oppo­si­tion of women who are col­lec­tively united. Women hold the true power because they are the bear­ers of life and the rais­ers of chil­dren. They are the future. Men are the present.

Imag­ine that all of human­ity has died as a result of some cat­a­clysm. The only sur­vivors are a small group of ten on a remote island. If there is one woman and nine men, then the future does not bode well for the human race. She can only have one child every nine months. But if there are nine women and one man, the group can pro­duce nine chil­dren every nine months. Every indi­vid­ual woman is the poten­tial for lim­it­less life. Why do you think that the crew of the Titanic gave spaces on lifeboats to women and chil­dren first? Men are more expendable.

Soci­eties have always under­stood this fact, and this explains why tra­di­tional cul­tures have always assigned more pro­tec­tions to women — mod­est dress, more-severe pun­ish­ments for female infi­delity, the dou­ble stan­dard regard­ing men and women who have casual sex, and so on. If a woman is “dam­aged” by con­tract­ing a sexually-transmitted dis­ease, being raped, or some­thing sim­i­lar, then that is much more harm­ful to the human race than if a man does the same.

What many West­ern­ers do not real­ize is that these stan­dards in the Mid­dle East and else­where are not meant to degrade women — it is to pro­tect them (and many women in these soci­eties, like reli­gious Jews, under­stand, appre­ci­ate, and wel­come the dif­fer­ences). Of course, these restric­tions can be taken to extremes — and, sadly, they fre­quently are — but the inten­tion of the restric­tions, when taken mod­er­ately, is not what peo­ple in the United States and Europe believe.

Women are more valu­able to soci­ety than men. Women have more power. And this is why the Iran­ian regime fears the cur­rent protests — for the first time, there is the active par­tic­i­pa­tion of mil­lions of women. But by over­re­act­ing and killing Neda (among many other men and women), they will have only inspired mil­lions more to fight against the gov­ern­ment. Iran­ian men will not like see­ing the country’s women being treated in this manner.

If the Iran­ian peo­ple are able to over­throw the Islamic theoc­racy and estab­lish a demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment — as I hope they will — than the Basij mem­ber who killed Neda might have just caused the down­fall of the regime all by him­self. And then she will not have died in vain.