Iranian Pharrell fans arrested for Happy tribute video

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Iranian Pharrell fans arrested for Happy tribute video
The video shows several people dancing to Pharrell's number one single in and around Tehran

A group of Iranian fans who created a tribute to Pharrell Williams' hit song Happy have been arrested.

The video shows three men and three unveiled women dancing to the song on the streets and rooftops of Tehran.

Police chief Hossein Sajedinia said the "vulgar clip" had "hurt public chastity", the ISNA news agency said.

Iran's state-run TV broadcast a programme on Tuesday, apparently showing the men and women confessing on camera.

Thousands of Iranians have been arrested in the past 35 years for being happy [and] partying”

Golnaz Esfandiari, Iranian jouralist

A subtitled edition of the TV clip, posted on YouTube, identified the detainees as "actors" who claimed they were tricked into making the Happy video for an audition.

"They told me they are making a feature film and they had a permit for it," said one man in the video. "They said those things and they fooled me."

Another young woman added: "They had promised us not to publish the video."

According to some unconfirmed reports, a total of 13 people were arrested in connection with the video, but official sources have not confirmed the exact number of detainees.

The video has been watched more than 40,000 times

Williams performed the song at the Oscar ceremony in March

Williams, whose song was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year, has protested at the arrests.

"It is beyond sad that these kids were arrested for trying to spread happiness," the singer wrote on his Facebook page.

Under Islamic law, in force in Iran since the 1979 revolution, women must cover themselves from head to toe.

Patrols of so-called "morality police" regularly enforce standards of Islamic dress on Iran's streets.

The internet is also heavily filtered in Iran, with the authorities blocking access to popular social networking sites.

The "Happy we are from Tehran" video, originally posted on 19 May, has now been seen more than 40,000 times.

At the end of the clip, the credits read: "Happy was an excuse to be happy. We enjoyed every second of making it. Hope it puts a smile on your face."

Iranian journalist Golnaz Esfandiari tweeted in response to the arrests: "Iran [is] a country where being 'happy' is a crime.

"Thousands of Iranians have been arrested in the past 35 years for being happy [and] partying."

Many Twitter users have begun using the hashtag #freehappyiranians to put pressure on the Iranian authorities to release those arrested over the video.

Tributes

Williams' song has inspired hundreds of tributes since it was released last year on the soundtrack to hit animation Despicable Me 2.

The music video lasted an exhausting 24 hours - with dozens of people filmed lip-syncing and dancing to the feel-good anthem, which was played on a loop.

The clip sparked a YouTube craze, with thousands fans around the world staging their own performances of the song.

When shown a montage of the tributes on the Oprah Winfrey show last month, Williams began to cry, saying the response to the song had been "overwhelming".

In the UK, the track has reached number one on three separate occasions, while in the US it spent 10 weeks at the top of the Hot 100.

AbukRokok

teruk dah syiah Iran ni....semua xbole itu xbole ini xbole....

bersyukurlah kita sunni malaysia

ElmoRed

kesian happy berakhir dgn unhappy

anees~nuhara

lagu je la yg bez ponn

Artemesiaa

Happy yang berakhir sedih

amyainsamad

sdap lgu ni

cikatilia

alahai
xtau nak komen apa
tp aku ske lagu ni

hepi jek

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Iranian regime still fears girl hanged 30 years agoIran’s Revolution Guards hanged a girl 30 years ago as part of their attempt to purge the country of its Baha’i religious minority. In doing so, they created a martyr they fear to this day.

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17-year-old Mona Mahmudnizhad was hanged by Iran's Revolutionary Guards in 1983 and has since become a hero of the country's persecuted Baha'i minority, of which she was a member.

By: Payam Akhavan Published on Mon May 12 2014

Imagine a muscular bearded revolutionary with a machine gun. Now imagine him putting the hangman’s noose around the neck of a blindfolded 17-year-old girl. Her heinous crime? Teaching Sunday school for children. And then imagine the same militant forces returning to excavate her gravesite 30 years later to remove all traces of this shameful act.

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This shocking scenario unfortunately is not from a poignant Hollywood film. It is the reality playing out in Iran today, as the powerful Revolutionary Guards excavate the historic cemetery in the city of Shiraz where Mona Mahmudnizhad and nine other women executed in 1983 are buried, together with 950 other members of the persecuted Baha’i religious minority.

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This latest act is profoundly repugnant and perplexing. What, it may be asked, are the mighty Revolutionary Guards so afraid of?

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Since the earliest days of the 1979 Islamic revolution, the Baha’i minority of Iran has been subject to violent persecution. Almost the entire leadership of this peaceful community was systematically exterminated in what UN expert Benjamin Whitaker had described by 1985 as a “genocide.”

It was in this context that on June 18, 1983, 17-year-old Mona Mahmudnizhad and nine other women were executed. Thousands of others were imprisoned, tortured, dismissed from employment and schools, or had their properties confiscated. The desecration of religious sites and cemeteries was a particularly blatant expression of ahateful ideology of “cultural cleansing,” aimed at eliminating all traces of Iran’s Baha’i citizens.

I was a contemporary of Mona, and her extraordinary courage left a deep and lasting impression on my generation. Reports emerged from sympathetic prison guards that, after severe torture, when she was being insulted and spat upon by those that were about to hang her, she put the noose around her own neck and smiled in a final act of defiance. Her torturers had not managed to break her. Hers was a triumph of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable cruelty.

The Baha’is continue to be an all-purpose scapegoat for the Islamic Republic. Arelentless stream of hate propaganda has accused them of every conceivable evil in the fertile imagination of the authorities: American imperialism, espionage for Israel, Wahhabism, religious “waywardness,” sexual promiscuity, satanic rituals, and myriad other misdeeds.

The Baha’is have also been blamed for the massive 2009 post-election protests — the so-called Green Movement. In short, the Baha’is are an expedient distraction for all the woes of a regime that continues to subject its citizens to human rights abuses, including the highest per-capita rate of executions in the world, as well as corruption and poverty.

So what are the Revolutionary Guards so afraid of?

The escalating demonization of Baha’is in recent times speaks volumes about the regime’s fear of losing its grip on absolute power. The Iranian people have awakened to the reality of the hate propaganda as an instrument of repression. In unprecedented acts of solidarity, senior Islamic clerics such as Ayatollah Masoumi Tehrani havespoken in defence of Baha’is.

Another example is Mohammad Nourizad, a former senior figure in the regime, who went to the home of a four-year-old Baha’i child whose parents are both in prison and — defying the fanatical view that Baha’is are “ritually unclean” — kissed the child’s feet in a courageous act of contrition.

While the Revolutionary Guards busy themselves with desecrating the bones of their victims, a new post-hatred Iran is being born, in which the people demand respect for the human rights of all citizens. That is what those in power fear the most.

Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” The fanatic, whose ideas cannot prevail through reason, needs to hang a 17-year-old girl to feel powerful and heroic. He needs to even erase traces of the long dead victims to desperately convince himself he has triumphed. But no matter how deep he digs the earth, the spirit of Mona and others like her will continue to inspire people of conscience to defy hatred and violence.

Payam Akhavan is co-founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre, a former UN prosecutor at The Hague, and professor of International Law at McGill University in Montreal.

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