You can learn a lot about @HRW's Ken Roth from a single tweet

From Ken Roth:

The Shah was wrong to ban the hijab. Iran's current government is equally wrong to require it, as Iranian women are now saying. https://t.co/EEn29HDbCf pic.twitter.com/M3zA55IAvm

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) February 4, 2018

Where to begin?

Roth feels that he can only publicly support Iranian women fighting compulsory hijab after saying that the Shah was just as wrong to ban it. The issue cannot stand on its own; it has to be contextualized to say that, hey, secular people can be just as bad as Islamists.

As other tweeters pointed out, the Shah didn't ban the hijab - Reza Shah did in 1936 and the last Shah of Iran (who is the person that "the Shah" invariably refers to) dropped that ban.

Roth hasn't said a word about compulsory hijab since the Ayatollah Khomeini mandated it in 1979. Only now, after Iranian women are bravely walking bareheaded, does Roth feel comfortable enough to take a position that he otherwise would fear would sound too "Islamophobic."

And suddenly Roth seems to care about religious freedom to wear the hijab if one wants. But ask him if Jews should have the religious freedom to visit their holiest sites unmolested and ...crickets.

This is Ken Roth in a nutshell - hypocritical, not interested in facts, and not leading the fight for human rights but pretending to support them only after the real brave women of Iran make the issue safe for him.

Because the main rule of HRW isn't human rights - it is to avoid upsetting the Muslims, and only then to tentatively ask for human rights from the Islamists once he can make sure that his message is watered down to their standards.

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