December 04, 2000
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Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi has been sentenced to death after using his music and social media accounts to speak out against his country’s government.
According to NBC News, the Hip Hop artist is one of approximately 18,000 people believed to have been arrested during protests in Iran following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. The young Kurdish Iranian woman died in September 2022 after being detained by the country’s “morality police” for not following the strict Islamic dress code.
Her death sparked weeks of protests that lead to more deaths at the hands of Iranian authorities in violent clashes with demonstrators.
Days after Amini’s death Toomaj Salehi posted a video to Instagram that saw him marching alongside other protesters. “Unity is the secret to our victory, we are all Iran’s family,” he captioned the post.
Salehi’s online commentary echoed anti-government themes in his music. One of his most recent songs, uploaded to YouTube in October, spoke directly to injustices against the Iranian people in the years since the Islamic Revolution replaced former Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime with a religious fundamentalist political system.
“How many young people did you kill to build towers for yourself?” he raps in Persian on the song “Fal”. “Someone has lost their young children and someone has lost their youth/ Someone’s crime was having hair that flows free in the wind/ Someone’s crime was having a brave heart and a sharp tongue.”
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