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Source: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-the-butcher-joins-the-bench-irans-grim-joke-at-the-un/
Iran's Grim Joke at the UN
(Times of Israel) Catherine Perez-Shakdam - The Islamic Republic of Iran has been nominated to a UN committee that will help shape policy on women's rights, human rights, disarmament and terrorism prevention. Iran is a country where a young woman, Mahsa Amini, can be beaten to death for the crime of insufficient hair concealment, where schoolgirls are poisoned for daring to remove headscarves, where the "morality police" patrol the streets as if they were animal control and half the population a species to be managed. This is the state now invited to contribute to the global conversation on gender equality. It is a bit like asking Jack the Ripper to sit on the board of a women's shelter. On human rights: The Islamic Republic has turned the abuse of its citizens into a system of government. Torture is not an aberration but a technique. Trials are not hearings but theater. Journalists, lawyers, artists and students are jailed, flogged, disappeared. Minorities - Kurds, Baluchis, Baha'is, Jews - are treated as internal enemies. On disarmament: Iran's record is one long love letter to the proliferation of things that go bang, shipping weapons through every smuggling lane from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. On terrorism prevention: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has spent decades recruiting, training and funding militias whose sole raison d'etre is to terrorize. The regime's fingerprints are on bombings in Buenos Aires, plots in Europe, rockets on Riyadh, and drones on tankers. Someone must begin the slow, necessary work of re-civilizing our institutions - of re-establishing the quaint idea that those who legislate on human rights should not be in the business of trampling them, that those who shape policy on women's rights should not be beating women unconscious in police vans, that those who sit on terrorism committees should not be up to their elbows in explosives and martyrdom videos. In the meantime, the least we can do is refuse to applaud. The writer is an associate scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.