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Iranian politician (born 1960)

Masoumeh Ebtekar (Persian: معصومه ابتکار; born 21 September 1960) is an Iranian politician. A Reformist, she headed the country's Department of Environment from 1997 to 2005 and again from 2013 to 2017, after which she served as the Vice President for Women and Family Affairs from 2017 to 2021. Her appointment to the Cabinet of Iran in 1997 marked her as the institution's third female member overall and the first female member since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. She is currently a full-time professor in the Immunology Department of the School of Medical Sciences at Tarbiat Modares University in the city of Tehran.

During the Iran hostage crisis, which began in November 1979 and ended in January 1981, Ebtekar was the spokesperson for the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line. Variously nicknamed "Mary" and "Sister Mary" by the American media, which also took note of her broadcasts in American English, she and her colleagues occupied the Embassy of the United States in Tehran, where they held American citizens in captivity for 444 days with the approval of Ruhollah Khomeini, who had recently seized power as the Supreme Leader of Iran. The hostage crisis triggered ongoing hostilities between Iran and the United States. However, despite her views, Ebtekar's oldest son Eissa Hashemi has been residing in the United States since the early 2010s, prompting criticism from opponents of the Islamic Republic government.

Between 2007 and 2013, Ebtekar was part of the Islamic City Council of Tehran. In 1998, she joined the Islamic Iran Participation Front, which was banned in 2010, and has since been affiliated with the Union of Islamic Iran People Party.

Early life and education

Ebtekar was born in Tehran as Masoumeh Niloufar Ebtekar in a middle-class family. Her first name translates to "Innocent Water Lily" in English.^[8

Since the death of twenty-two-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022, three days after she fell into a coma and died in police custody, Iran’s regime keeps ramping up its efforts to maintain order and rein in its people. 

Last October, Ramtin Fatehi joined pro-democracy demonstrations in Germany. He wanted to be the voice of his father, uncle, and aunt who had all gone missing for ten days in Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s northwestern Kurdistan province. By the time Ramtin had taken to the streets in Berlin, the regime’s security services had already murdered his father back home.

Roya Heshmati comes from Sanandaj. On January 6, the thirty-four-year-old activist who lives in Tehran was arrested after a photograph of her was posted on social media. “Roya Heshmati encouraged permissiveness [by appearing] disgracefully in busy public places in Tehran,” according to the court. Roya was walking down a popular street in the capital when a photo, snapped at a distance from behind, showed her in a modest black skirt, flat shoes, and a red blouse. Failure to wear a head scarf was her offense. Roya was sentenced to seventy-four lashes. 

Last month on January 23, Mohammad Ghobadlou, a twenty-three-year-old protester with a mental disability, was hanged. On the same day, Farhad Salimi was executed. He came from Iran’s Kurdish Sunni minority and had pleaded for a retrial without torture-tainted “confessions.” Ethnic minorities in Iran are disproportionately targeted for executions.

Not that other minorities are spared. The Iranian regime is estimated to have executed between four thousand and six thousand gay and lesbian citizens since the Islamic Republic’s founding in 1979. Nor is deviation or dissent of any sort tolerated. Mohammed Nourizad, a filmmaker calling for political change, has been locked up now for half a dozen years. Recently, he denounced corruption in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, where he’s being held. For that, he was just handed fi

In this episode of DISINFORMATION WARS, host Ilan Berman speaks with Col. Peter Garretson, AFPC Senior Fellow in Defense Studies and former chief futurist for the U.S. Air Force, regarding China’s recent strides forward in space internet, and what it might mean for the unfolding “great power competition” between Washington and Beijing.  

BIO:

Peter Garretson is a Senior Fellow in Defense Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council and a strategy consultant who focuses on space and defense. He is the coauthor of Scramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space and the host of AFPC's Space Strategy Podcast.
Prior to joining AFPC, Col. Garretson spent over a decade as a transformational strategist for the Department of the Air Force, where he served as a strategy and policy advisor for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, as Division Chief of Irregular Warfare Strategy Plans and Policy, and as the Chief of the Future Technology Branch of Air Force Strategic Planning. As an instructor of Joint Warfare at Air University, he laid critical foundations for the future of American and allied spacepower, initiating the Schriever Scholars (America's premier program to develop space strategists), the Space Horizons Task Force (America's think tank for space), and developing the rationale for a U.S. Space Force.  He taught courses in war theory, joint planning, and national security implications of artificial intelligence.

MATERIALS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE:

— Richard M. Harrison and Peter Garretson, The Next Space Race: A Blueprint for American Primacy (Praeger Security International, 2023), https://www.amazon.com/Next-Space-Race-Blueprint-International/dp/1440880808/ref=sr_1_1?crid=UFE24YXJ64RY&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.U5jc8fFfd3tUDF3jfbDynL9Nuq9BLl_DkRXTRmNuvtM76WLNhBJZaoe0LEhH22OR8D_kBygP0ixcMFkPOGTkc1oBimuINW2JB20AeEYleaWJNzMgO-S-zrz2EEtnDy1NnoxVCNxzUTBDnCNN0Peg2OjrzjVZtN3LlliApM3LuFnUTGrhiRdcBHp