It’s hard for a conservative regime to defend itself as “protecting” women and “motherly virtue” when you beat up and arrest women peacefully demonstrating for news about their disappeared children. That’s why these “mourning mothers” and Iran’s women’s rights movement has authorities so terrified.

The women’s rights movement has always raised a dangerous specter for the authoritarian Iranian regime. To admit that women have equal rights would be to reject their conservative, traditional interpretation of Islam for a more modern approach that would severely rock the status quo in the other aspects of society that protesters have agitated against.

Haleh Esfandiari — scholar, grandmother, and women’s rights activist — said that, a few years ago, authorities didn’t know how to deal with woman protesters. “Now the gloves are off,” she relates to Abu Dhabi’s The National. But the more seriously Iranian…

Earlier this month, news broke that Mohammad Reza Heidari, the Iranian consul in Oslo, had resigned his post and would likely be seeking political asylum in Norway. While Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki is for now "rejecting" the resignation, it is obvious that the regime has suffered at least one diplomatic casualty to the opposition.

But there are signs that Heidari may not be alone. Soon after his resignation, he stated that "many of [his] friends have been in touch and say they are thinking of [also resigning]." Ali Akbar Omidmehr, the Islamic Republic’s former ambassador to India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, appeared to confirm this when he revealed in an interview with Voice of America (VOA) that many other diplomats in addition to Heidari had resigned from their diplomatic posts and had sought political asylum in their respective countries. Specifically, Omidmehr identified four asylum seekers as two diplomats in Germany,…