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Sextape scandal reveals the ‘double life’ of Iran’s
ultra-conservative authorities
Social networks in Iran have been flooded with compromising footage featuring several known ultra-conservative officials engaging in homosexual activities. While homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran, the Iranian regime has attempted to deny the videos and cover up the scandals. We spoke to a former religious authority who says authorities are trying to “save face” by refuting the wave of videos.
Issued on: 02/08/2023 - 17:04, 6 min
Text by: Alijani Ershad
Social networks in Iran have been flooded with compromising footage featuring several known ultra-conservative officials engaging in homosexual activities. © Observers
Homosexuality is illegal in Iran, and punishable by imprisonment, abuse, fines, or execution.
On July 18, a video showing Reza Seghati, the director general of the office of the Ministry of Culture in Gilan province in northern Iran, engaging in sexual activities emerged on Telegram on a channel called “Gilan News”.
The footage shows him having intercourse with another man. It appears that Seghati is not aware of the camera’s presence in the room.
The offices of the Ministry of Culture in each province are responsible for issuing permits for any kind of cultural or artistic production. In reality, these offices are responsible for censoring these creations and ensuring they align with Islamic values and Sharia law.
Reza Seghati is known for being a hardline conservative and for his efforts to increase restrictions on women’s social freedoms, including tightening mandatory headscarf regulations. For instance, he spearheaded the “Neighbourhood hijab and virtue chastity” watchdog campaign in Gilan province to help enforce headscarf laws.
It's easy to demand women be virtuous when men are attracted to each other rather than women. This story lends credence to my belief that Islamic men despise women.
The homosexual video of him triggered an outcry on Iranian social media, as people online accused him of hypocrisy. Although he has been called a “champion of Islamic values and the Islamic family” by Gilan province conservatives for his extremist beliefs, these videos allege that he is leading a double life.
According to Iranian media, Seghati was “replaced” as director general without any explanation. Seven other men were arrested in connection with this affair, but Seghati himself has not faced any legal action in the wake of the video’s publication.
The scandal has reached the highest echelons of the Islamic regime in Tehran. According to Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, it was mentioned in Iran's National Security Council.
However, it appears that the regime is not prosecuting Seghati for his actions, but is actively seeking the person who recorded, leaked and shared these videos. Mojtaba Zolnouri, Deputy Speaker of the Parliament of the Islamic Republic, said, “The crime of those who released these videos is greater than the fornicators’”.
Of course, hypocrisy, even when criminal, is OK as long as no one tells the truth about it.
Reza Seghati has not commented on the video.
Several days after the video was released, the person behind the “Gilan News” channel on Telegram, who first posted these videos, claimed that he was threatened with death and that his family members were arrested in Iran for several hours.
But the headaches of the Islamic Republic regime did not end there. More sex tapes were on the way.
On July 21, videos of Mohammad Safari, a fundamentalist and member of the Anzali Municipal Council, also a town in the Gilan province, surfaced on social media. In the video, he is seen smoking opium and masturbating while looking at his mobile phone.
Explicit video calls between two Mullahs
Then, hot on the heels of the previous scandals, an alleged explicit video call between two Mullahs (an honorific title for clergymen or a mosque leader) surfaced on social media on July 30.
One of these mollahs is said to be Mahdi Haghshenas, the former deputy of the Office for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Gilan Province, the other man in the video is allegedly his brother-in-law (the husband of his wife’s sister), also a Mullah. While many Iranian media outlets abroad have confirmed the authenticity of the videos, FRANCE 24 was unable to independently confirm this.
The Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Iran is one of the main agencies used by the Islamic regime in Tehran to impose Sharia law on the Iranian people. Haghshenas is known for his extreme views on Sharia law, his restrictions on social freedom, his hostility to science and his opposition to all vaccines.
Javad Akbarein is an Iranian intellectual living in Paris. He used to be a Mullah and studied at well-known religious schools in Iran's Qom. He says these sex tapes are just the "tip of the iceberg".
I think the current situation is the result of four decades of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s policies. They have created a religious cult. They have endowed this cult with money, power and prerogatives and given it power throughout the country. It is normal that people who want to benefit from the exclusive privileges of this cult join it, even if their actual lifestyle contradicts the values of this cult and they have to lead a double life.
On the other hand, I can also say that most of them have never seen or touched a woman before marriage. Women are taboo, women mean sin to them. With this strong pressure on any kind of relationship with women – forbidding even the thought of women – relationships with other men are easier because there is no surveillance or pressure on male friendships. These relationships are rooted in the small friendship groups among these extremists who trust each other and believe that no one would find out.
And what we are now seeing in a series of videos is just the tip of the iceberg. We don't have statistics on sexual activity in the mosques or religious schools and it’s much harder for journalists or activists to investigate in countries like Iran or Iraq because these are dictatorships.
‘People are angry about this hypocrisy, not about the sexuality of these people’
I know these people, I studied for years in the religious schools in Qom in Iran, and I can confirm that every year there are many such cases in these religious schools, which are reported to the dean of the school. What they do is ignore it and hide it, sometimes one or both people involved are dismissed. However, if the police or anyone else finds out about this kind of sexual relationship, it means prison, torture and even possible execution, according to Sharia law.
Iranians are actually angry about this hypocrisy, not about the sexuality of these people. These people claim to be virtuous and holy. They have imposed the strict rules of Sharia on people; they have imposed the hijab on women. If Iran were not a theocracy and if they were not representatives of this religious dictatorship, we would not be talking about them, because it is a relationship between two consenting adults.
Therefore, the Islamic Republic tries to cover up or deny these leaks in order to save the face of its religious structure and its soldiers.
But I think the important point lies elsewhere. When a society is angry, it goes after the people who are responsible for its anger, who are the source of its hatred, that is, against the Mullahs and Islamists, using all the means at its disposal.
Iranians have nothing but mobile phones and social media at their disposal, and that is what is happening. People are using these tools to monitor and trap these people. And I’m sure this is just the beginning, more and more videos like this will be recorded and released.
This is not the first time that prominent representatives of the Islamic Republic have been implicated in sex scandals. In 2016, Saeed Toosi, an internationally known Quran reciter, was accused of raping underage male trainees.
Although numerous witnesses and victims turned to the media, Saeed Toosi was not convicted in court. He is known as the favourite reciter of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
German media self-censors about foreign origins of 5 ‘Germans’ arrested
for rape of young girl in Mallorca, and this trend will only get worse
by John Cody, Remix News, July 17, 2023:
…While Spanish news outlet Ultima Hora reported that the 21- to 23-year-old suspects were of Turkish origin, much of the Spanish press was fixated on the “German” aspect of the crime, which the men allegedly filmed on their smartphones. Even the German press was quick to claim the men were Germans with no context, with Welt, one of the most popular conservative papers in the country, running the headline “Five German vacationers on Mallorca have to be remanded in custody.” At no point in the piece does Welt mention the migration background of the suspects. The same story was told throughout the international press, with Associated Press, Deutsche Welle, and the Daily Mail making no mention of the men’s migration background.
Every single media outlet in Germany that covered the story, save one, the newspaper Bild, described the five rapists as “Germans” or “German vacationers.” The international media, including AP, Deutsche Welle, and the Daily Mail, did the same – referring to the rapists only as “Germans” and remaining silent about all five being Muslim and Turkish in origin.
What the media, the police, and the government just don't get is that hiding these things contributes more than anything else to the rise of Islamophobia. Far Right groups see the destruction Muslims are creating in society and those who should be doing something about it are hiding it, as if in collusion with the cultural suicide.
Bild newspaper was perhaps the only major German newspaper to note that the men all had a migration background, but Bild is one of the rare publications in Germany that consistently publishes such information when it is made available by the police.
The issue of migrant men, or those with a migration background, being portrayed simply as “Germans” when it comes to crime has been a theme over recent years, but we should expect this trend to continue and only get worse. The reason why is that the German government is quickly naturalizing hundreds of thousands of migrants, and as Remix News has reported in the past, once these foreigners obtain German citizenship, they are simply referred to as “Germans” in the crime statistics. Germany makes no distinction based on race or ethnicity in its own crime statistics and only divides the data between Germans and foreigners.
That is why when the five German citizens with a migration background allegedly raped the young girl in Spain, the global media and the German domestic media could loudly trumpet that Germans had participated in a gang rape.
When every German and international media outlet, save Bild, deliberately hides the Muslim identity of the five men accused of rape in Spain by describing them only as “Germans,” this means they have chosen to self-censor in order to protect Muslims from a growing popular anger. They don’t want the German people to become aware of the extent of Muslim crime. Once these Muslim Turks became citizens, they were then to be referred to in official communiques only as “Germans” in crime data; the government refuses to publish statistical breakdowns as to religion, race, and ethnicity of German citizens charged with crimes. Thus does the German – and much of the international — media protect Muslims, and misinform native Germans as to the true extent of Muslim criminality in Germany. This has led to a world of woe.
Another important bit of information kept from the German public concerns welfare recipients. Muslim migrants who obtain citizenship are from then on referred to only as “Germans”; their religion and ethnicity are no longer provided to the public. If they receive welfare benefits, they are counted as “Germans.” Even so, the number of “German” recipients of welfare benefits has halved since 2010, while the number of foreign nationals receiving social assistance payments has doubled, government data has revealed. If the recipients of welfare benefit who are naturalized German citizens but of Muslim background were to be counted as “foreign nationals” rather than as Germans, the disparity in those numbers would be even larger, and more disturbing. The number of Germans by birth receiving welfare benefits would become much smaller; the number of “foreign nationals” receiving such benefits would be even larger.
Germany: Cost of foreign welfare payments soars to €15.4 billion a year
as foreign recipients double since 2010
by Thomas Brooke, Remix News, July 27, 2023:
The number of German recipients of welfare benefits has halved since 2010, while the number of foreign nationals receiving social assistance payments has doubled, government data has revealed.
The data emerged from a response by Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs Anette Kramme to a request made by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) MP René Springer.
It revealed that the number of German recipients of the citizens’ allowance had almost halved from 5.2 million in 2020 to 2.9 million as of February 2023. In contrast, foreign recipients of social benefits had doubled from 1.3 million people in 2010 to 2.6 million currently.
With spikes in the number of recipients experienced during the 2015 migrant crisis and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, it means the German taxpayer is paying around €15.4 billion each year in social benefits for foreign recipients, a 122 percent increase over the €6.9 billion reported in 2010.
The foreigners – 86% of migrants seeking asylum in Germany are Muslims – are costing German taxpayers astronomical sums, and these amounts are on a steep upward curve. In 2010 benefits for those foreigners cost 6.9 billion euros; now they have more than doubled, to 15.4 billion euros, and the expectation is that they will double again, to 30 billion euros, not in 13 years, but by 2030.
This disaster can only be avoided if the Alternative für Deutschland can be voted in, possibly at the head of a coalition, and then takes the necessary measures that so far the other political parties refuse even to discuss. This means putting an end to Muslim immigration and expelling to their countries of origin any Muslim migrants found guilty of a crime. A policy of offering one-time financial inducements to encourage Muslims to leave Germany should also be considered. A few thousand euros given to every Muslim immigrant, whether citizen or not, who agrees to leave the country, will cost the German government far less than the welfare benefits now being provided, year after year, to Muslim economic migrants.
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