Concerns mount about young Iranian rapper jailed for singing

“I can’t breathe” said the rapper who is being compared to George Floyd

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL
Updated: MAY 30, 2021 18:12
The Iranian flag waves in front of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters, before the beginning of a board of governors meeting, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Vienna, Austria, March 1, 2021. (photo credit: REUTERS/LISI NIESNER/FILE PHOTO)
The Iranian flag waves in front of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters, before the beginning of a board of governors meeting, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Vienna, Austria, March 1, 2021.
(photo credit: REUTERS/LISI NIESNER/FILE PHOTO)
The imprisonment of 18-year-old Iranian Sara, who is being held incommunicado because she sings as a rapper, has stoked new worries about her condition.
“This poor female rapper from Iran still remains in detention,” women’s campaigner and journalist Masih Alinejad tweeted Friday. “Because her rap music uses rebellious words, neither her family nor domestic news outlets are supportive of her. She’s alone. Help us raise her voice and be her voice,”

 
Alinejad posted a video in which Sara says during her arrest: “I can’t breathe.”

Sara was “brutally arrested in the city of Borazjan,” Alinejad wrote. “Her crime? She dared to sing in a country where singing is forbidden for women. Her close friend told me: ‘No one knows where she’s detained. We are all worried.’”
Sheina Vojoudi, an Iranian dissident who fled the Islamic Republic of Iran due to repression, told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday: “People are comparing her to George Floyd, for whom the regime was grieving for a long time due to its anti-American intentions to make a cruel face of America. The backward clerics in Iran are against the women and oppose the beautiful nature of women.”
“According to them [clerics], women are the reason why men are tempted into committing sins, whether with their beautiful voices or with their beautiful bodies or faces, and I think they’re also offending men with their primitive thoughts because they see them without a sense of humanity,” she said. “In fact, they are against beauty and love.”

 
In a third tweet on Saturday, Alinejad wrote: “I call on rappers worldwide to raise awareness about the brutal arrest of [the] 18-year-old female Iranian rapper. As this cartoon explains her plight in one sentence: ‘I can’t breathe.”’

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The Post could not locate the last name of Sara in Persian, but her artistic name is Solkws.


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