Thousands of young women in Iran are currently protesting against the compulsory headscarf and fighting for their rights. On the Austrian public broadcaster ORF’s news programme ZiB1, however, a correspondent wearing a headscarf appeared in the middle of this protest movement – and a political debate ensued.
The footage of the courageous women’s protest in Iran is going around the world – and the videos of police violence against the demonstrators are shocking. At least 76 people have been killed, said the director of the Oslo-based human rights organisation Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, citing video footage and death certificates.
Despite hundreds of arrests and threats made by the government, the protests are not abating: In several Iranian cities, women were seen taking off their veils and setting them on fire or symbolically cutting their hair. Riot police beat demonstrators with batons.
In this situation, the ORF newsroom let the editor Katharina Wagner in Tehran broadcast live – wearing a headscarf. Many viewers were astonished: In a TV report about the protests against the headscarf, against the radical mullahs, of all things, the ORF employee is acting like a “model Iranian”? Presumably this was a condition imposed by the Iranian regime, which the ORF accepted for this report.
A heated debate immediately started on the social media channels. And Harald Vilimsky, the Freedom Party MEP, added fuel to the fire: “Van der Bellen likes it,” he wrote on Twitter, alluding to the Green Federal President’s headscarf slogan.
Van der Bellen famously caused irritation with this saying: “We will have to ask all women to wear a headscarf – out of solidarity.”In view of the massive protests by courageous women in Iran, this sentence is not really appropriate.
There has not yet been an official statement from the ORF management or the ZiB1 editors-in-chief on the strange headscarf appearance.
https://exxpress.at/waehrend-protest-orf-ueberrascht-zib-seher-mit-kopftuch-korrespondentin/