March 20, 2016
A loudmouthed Majlis deputy has caused a stir with a video in which he says women should not be allowed to sit in the Majlis.
Nader Ghazipur, a member of the Azeri minority, had just been re-elected to another term in the Majlis from Urumiyeh when he was videotaped denouncing the whole idea of women in parliament and telling crude stories filled with sexual innuendo—not to mention boasting of murdering Iraqi soldiers who surrendered to him during the war.
Ghazipur’s outburst was first reported in the Tehran daily Qanun. Ghazipur denied making any such remarks. But then the videotape appeared and Ghazipur was portrayed as a liar, not just a loudmouth.
Some people, especially women’s groups, are calling on the Majlis to refuse to seat Ghazipur. The Majlis must vote to accept each elected deputy before they can be seated in the chamber.
Deputy Fatemeh Rahbar, a Principleist member of the Majlis has announced that some of the nine female deputies in the outgoing Majlis and some of their male colleagues have joined together to file complaints about Ghazipur with Iran’s prosecutor general and the Majlis Presiding Board requesting action against Ghazipur.
In the video, Ghazipur is seen giving what appears to be a victory speech just after winning re-election last month.
“I am a representative of the nation, not the representative of a few bullies,” he shouts. “I am not a servant of officials. I don’t carry their bags, and I don’t flatter them! You gave me 200,000 votes in two hours because you want to sharpen me to strike officials!
Then, he launched into an odd anecdote. “Once they were circumcising a little boy, and on the other side a little girl was crying. She was asked why, and she said, ‘Because I know they are sharpening it for me!’ We did not get this country so easily as to send any jackal or kid or jackass to the Majlis. The Majlis is not a place for jackasses! Parliament is no place for women. It belongs to men. Do you want to send women there so that they would do it to them and you lose your honor?”
After the video surfaced, Ghazipur said he had not been referring to any of the female deputies in the Majlis or to the two women who ran against him last month. He didn’t say whom he was referring to when he denounced “women.”
Ghazipur continued to offer up ethnic and sexual slurs in the video. Speaking in Azeri Turkish, he related an alleged incident involving himself and Ghodratollah Alijani, the Majlis deputy from Qazvin, in the men’s room at the Majlis. In Iran, many cities are represented by stereotypes, and the stereotype for Qazvin is that it is a city of homosexuals.
“He is a Qazvini,” Ghazipur said. “Everybody in the Majlis is afraid of him. He told a deputy from our town who happened to be short ‘Let me take you so you can be my guest for the night.’ One day, I was someplace and asked were the shaikh was. They said he was in the bathroom, so I went into the lavatory and saw that he had washed every surface, and had covered them with paper towels because he is a cleanliness freak.
“When he bent for his ablution, I fingered him. Then he fainted and fell to the floor. When I opened the door, 20 people were standing there because of the noise we had made. I said, ‘The shaikh had set an ambush but he was ambushed himself!’ For a week, he did not appear in the Majlis. After a week, when he saw me, he shouted and other representatives gathered around him. He showed them a bruise on his torso and told them, ‘Look what this bastard has done to me. See how purple it is.’ And I said, ‘Show them the other place!’”
Ghazipur ended by telling the point of his anecdote: “The Majlis is not a place for pansies. Send men to the Majlis. Even if they don’t do anything, they won’t do that other thing!”
Ghazipur kept up his diatribe. “Don’t surrender the Majlis to kids. Don’t give it to the pansies! Don’t give it to somebody who cannot control his own body. I have an [Azeri] accent and I am proud of it. What have those who speak Persian done up to now?”
Some members of the Azeri minority were particularly offended. Using the hashtag “I am a Turk but I am not Ghazipur,” a number of Azeris criticized him sharply.
Zahra Bahramnejad, spokeswoman for the vice president for women’s and family affairs, wants Ghazipur kept out of the Majlis. “Mr. Ghazipur’s credentials must be rejected,” she told the news website Rouydad 24. “When he offends half the population of Iran, he must expect an answer, and the answer is rejecting his credentials.”
The Women’s Society of Islamic Iran in Urumiyeh, the city that just re-elected him, also called for Ghazipur’s credentials to be rejected. “The statements by this deputy give direct and flagrant offense to women,” the society said.
Even Mehdi Qoreishi, Urumiyeh’s Friday Prayers leader, spoke up. “For myself and the people, I must complain against candidates who have institutionalized rudeness and disrespect in their speech,” he said in a sermon. “This is a holy place, so I apologize for saying this, but I must state the truth. Their behavior is wrong and God does not approve of it. Sometimes you should not even talk about certain things. Rudeness is not worthy of an Islamic society.”
Alijani, the mocked deputy from Qazvin, filed a complaint over Ghazipur’s anecdote about him. “These were false and undignified words, and a complaint has been submitted to judicial authorities so that such characters will not show off with lies and offensive words, which go against Islamic principles,” Alijani said. “The authorities must act.”
The Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) later reported that Ghazipur had apologized to Alijani. “I have always had great respect for him,” Ghazipur was quoted as saying about the man he ridiculed as a pansy. “I am proud to say that he is a good friend, and is respected by all representatives. In the heat of the elections, I told a joke for laughs, but unfortunately this joke was taken seriously in a bad way. I express my regrets and I hope that the misunderstanding will go away.”
He also apologized to the women of Urumiyeh in a Telegram message. “I apologize for my statements, which annoyed the women of Urumiyeh, because in no way was I talking about them,” he wrote. “But there are ladies in the Majlis whose situation has not worked to their benefit.”
Ghazipur, 57, has a master’s degree in governmental affairs. In the 1980s, he worked on Ali Khamenehi’s presidential campaign, and has twice been appointed governor of towns in West Azerbaijan.
He has military experience as well. In 1983, during the Iran-Iraq War, he was appointed commander of an artillery battalion. In his controversial speech, he said, “I wanted 12 volunteers for an operation. Twenty-two men volunteered. I chose 12 who were from Azerbaijan, and we 13 set out on the road toward Basra. We came across 600 or 700 [Iraqis]. They all surrendered. And we killed them all.”