WP:

About two weeks ago, I received a gruesome death threat from Hamid Reza Ahmadabadi, one of the more prominent figures of the Basij — Iran’s much-dreaded paramilitary arm. In his message, he said I’d be butchered because I had been insulting the sanctity of Iran’s revolutionary and Islamic values. He warned that one of his agents in the United States would cut out my tongue and slash my breasts before killing me. I was to be “slaughtered” in the same manner that former opposition leaders had been murdered abroad in the 1990s.

In a later interview with the BBC Persian service, he reiterated the same threats, making references to the assassination of Shahpour Bakhtiar, the shah’s last prime minister, and Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a dissident artist who was murdered in Germany.

My crime was that I had dared to challenge Iran’s onerous compulsory hijab laws. Since 1979, it has been illegal for women not to cover their head. Four years ago, I started a campaign, My Stealthy Freedom, asking women in Iran to post photos of themselves in public without their head scarves. We wanted women to have the freedom to choose how they were covered. Last May, we started a new movement, called White Wednesdays, in which women filmed themselves walking in public without a hijab. We chose white as the color of resistance. Since last December, more and more women are challenging this discriminatory law, risking arrest, jail or worse. Twenty-nine women were arrested. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,chose to denounce the campaign on International Women’s Day.

When they failed to persuade me to wear a hijab, the officials’ next action was to try to physically push me out of the interests section. As I resisted their efforts, one of the staff ordered his colleague to call the U.S. Secret Service. I thought it was ironic that officials of Iran — a country that organizes yearly celebrations of the 1979 taking of American hostages, where pro-regime crowds chant “Death to America” and label the United States as the “Great Satan” — were now calling on the U.S. Secret Service to help them against a woman who had refused to cover her hair.

That’s when it dawned on me. As far as Iran is concerned, the biggest threat comes not from the United States, but from unveiled women like me.

Go to link