Nazis in shining armor

The cover story on the NY Post yesterday managed to depict Iran simultaneously as a backwards, pre-modern, barbaric theocracy, and a hypermodern, totalitarian, police state. Rather impressive.

The headline was "MEDIEVAL," the subhead "IRAN'S VICIOUS DRESSTAPO HITS UNVEILED GALS WITH BARBARIC 'BANISHMENT'," (I'm thinking that's the first time anyone has ever used "dresstapo" "barbaric" and "gals" in the same sentence) and the story continued like this:

"Women who refuse to wear a veil and otherwise adhere to the strict Islamic dress code will be banished from the capital for up to five years, authorities threatened yesterday after launching a new coverup campaign. The frightening warning comes as police are carrying out their toughest crackdown in 20 years on young women who do not abide by Islamic law, which requires them to cover their face and hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothing to conceal their figures."

I'm always conflicted about reporting like this. The story itself seems to have been written by a legit Associated Press reporter, who (hopefully) is more restrained than the Post's headline writer. And the developments are revolting:

"Prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi told an Iranian newspaper that if the current punishments are not effective in preventing women from showing some skin, those who repeatedly violate the law could be expelled from Tehran for five years. 'Those women who appear in public like decadent models endanger the security and dignity of young men,' Mortazavi said, according to Reuters."

I'm not sure how skimpy clothes "endanger the security" of young men, unless these women are also packing heat. And why it is a woman's job to ensure the "dignity" of men isn't clear. It seems hard to be dignified if you can't achieve it without someone else's help.

Now, if you read the article itself, you get the impression that the social relations in Iran are actually quite complex; the author quotes a number of people dissatisfied with the government, and obviously, the government's need to pass such a law suggests the level of noncompliance. So, it's not the reporting itself that's the problem. The problem is that anything that criticizes Iran is immediately vaccuumed up into the pro-war roomba that is the NY Post, which uses these kinds of stories to suggest that Iran is simultaneously a totaliarian threat to the US (staffed by the "Dresstapo") and so backwards ("medieval" and "barbaric") that it cannot but be helped by an invasion from a presumably progressive and forward-looking US.

Also, the use of the word medieval here is kind of interesting--after all, presumably what that's referring to is the attitude of the Church in medieval Europe? Because the lands of Islam were relatively progressive at the time, IIRC.