MANDA ZAND ERVIN, Founder and Director of the Alliance of Iranian Women is today’s very honored guest. We will be talking about Iran, the beautiful history of Iran, the ruling Women-Gods, the plight of women in Iran under Sharia law, and her new book, “The Ladies’ Secret Society: History of the Courageous Women of Iran.“
During the Iranian Islamic revolution, Manda witnessed the execution of many innocent people, including her high school principal who was murdered because she was a woman and the secretary of education. She witnessed the human rights of the Iranian people, especially the women, taken away from them. She witnessed her homeland leaving the twentieth century to turn backward and she witnessed the effect.
Manda came to the United States as a political refugee on June 17th, 1980, became a citizen three years later and began her fight for human rights in Iran. She is the founder and president of the Alliance of Iranian Women a group which has deep connections within the Iranian diaspora and within Iran.
As the head of the Alliance of Iranian Women, Manda Ervin works to bring the West’s attention to the plight of Iranian women under Islamic Sharia laws. She almost single-handedly gathered the support to pass a 2003 U.S. Senate Resolution on the human rights of the women of Iran. In 2005 Manda was invited to speak at the UN conference on the family in Islamic societies.
Manda is an analyst and writer, published by many online political magazines, like the Hudson Institute, American Thinker, and Family Security Matters, National Review and others. She speaks on TV and radio programs, nationally and internationally, including CNN, BBC, Radio France, VOA, Radio Liberty.
Her book reveals, in print for the first time, the long history of struggle against clerical domination that Iranian women have been engaged in for centuries. Rooted in the proud history of ancient Iran, where Mother-Gods were once worshipped, the Ladies’ Secret Society, an organization founded in the early decades of the 20th Century, was both the inheritor of this proud history, and the progenitor of the contemporary women’s rights campaign in the Iran of today. Zand Ervin relates the stories, and records the accomplishments, of generations of individual women activists, who fought like lionesses for every scrap of freedom they gained, only to see all their hard-won rights destroyed with the coming of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution. During the Islamic revolution, Zand Ervin witnessed the execution of many innocent people, including her high school principal, who was executed simply because she was a woman, and the Secretary of Education. She offers heartbreaking and compelling eyewitness testimonies of strong and emancipated women who were brutally pushed backwards to living under a crude, medieval society, and who have fought back, under sometimes impossible odds, and continue fighting today. Manda Zand Ervin’s History of Iran, the Iran that has been imprisoned behind a veil offers an insight and context to news of terrorism and the dangers caused by the misogynistic clerical regime ruling Iran which continues to dominate headlines.
Today’s show was engineered by Maddy Bogner of Radio Kingston, http://www.radiokingston.org.
We heard music from our fave, Shana Falana, http://www.shanafalana.com/
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