Iran has banned a weightlifter from sports for life and dissolved a sports committee after the athlete greeted an Israeli counterpart on a podium.
Mostafa Rajaei, a veteran weightlifter, finished second in his category in the 2023 World Master Weightlifting Championships in Poland and stood on a podium with an Iranian flag wrapped around him on Saturday.
On anther step of the podium stood Maksim Svirsky from Israel, who finished third.
The two athletes shook hands and took a picture together, which led to the Iran Weightlifting Federation banning Rajaei from all sports for life due to what it called an “unforgivable” transgression.
the Iranian government? the one killing citizens who speak out against it or women who don’t wear a headscarf?
Truly, the most dastardly invention of the Iranian government was killing people who oppose it. No government before or since, especially not in the West, has steeped to such lows.
Me, a murderer? Like nobody’s ever killed before! Your honor, the defense rests.
Some governments are more willing to resort to violent repression against their domestic enemies than others, though.
e.g., places like Iran, Saudi are quicker to do so than most, even for internal enemies of equivalent threat to the state itself.
For instance:, during the Jina Ahmini protests over 300 were killed in only a month.
All states and all governments use violence or the threat of it to uphold their rule, but some are more reliant on violence versus other methods of control than others…
Plus some are more willing to use violence in foreign policy vs domestic policy.
Over the last decade, police in America have killed at least between 950 and 1250 people a year.
The actual numbers are probably higher because police don’t report all the people they kill, so statisticians are limited to searching news stories that contain the relevant data.
The US had in excess of a thousand killings by cops that were officially reported that year as well (likely more that were unreported, and I have at least some evidence for my claim).
US pigs killed nearly 1100 people in 2022 and we’re not even getting into all the social murder committed by our for profit medical and housing industries. I can’t believe I’m seeing this whitewashing of American government malfeasance from a Hexbear user.
I wasn’t referring to the US as one of the ‘less murder-y’ ones because it is a settler-colonial state. Though those killed by law enforcement in Iran are still considerably higher, e.g., during the Jina Ahmini protests over 300 were killed in only a month. This is even if you count literally every US police murder as part of a campaign of political repression, of which plenty were but certainly not all.
I don’t know why you thought I was as I didn’t even remotely begin to say it?
IDK how anyone-whether Hexbear or not-can possibly deny the fact that different governments rely on coercion to differing extents to maintain control.
Well you edited your original response right after seeing this but your original comment talked about how the US only killed 18 people last year but these foreign countries in the middle east were more violent and killed hundreds, and how, even if you include police brutality this still “stands true.”
It’s hard for me to include your exact words since you took steps to obscure them but I think if you’re honest with yourself you can admit you were downplaying the violence committed by the US on its populace relative to Iran.