By Azadeh Moaveni @ NewYorker.com, July 9

​Last December, an image was posted on Instagram that showed a young woman named Vida Movahed standing on top of a sidewalk utility box on Revolution Street, a crowded thoroughfare in Tehran. Her dark hair was curled around her neck, and she was waving her white headscarf on a stick in front of her. She stood quietly, until she was arrested, an hour later, for not wearing her hijab. The next month [....]

[....] Videos of these confrontations appeared in Iranian media and the international press. Masih Alinejad, a prominent Iranian anti-mandatory-hijab activist based in New York, deemed the moment the start of a real feminist movement in Iran [....]

The protests have served a different purpose in the United States. As headlines across the world have heralded #TheGirlsofRevolutionStreet as Iran’s #MeToo movement, the Trump Administration has deployed the cause as part of its campaign to isolate the Islamic Republic and promote regime change in Tehran. From the moment that the U.
S. pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, has put Iranian women at the center of the Administration’s new strategy. In a major policy speech at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, Pompeo said that Iranian women’s protests were evidence of a growing divide between Iranians and their government. “The brutal men of the regime seem to be particularly terrified by Iranian women who are demanding their rights,” he said. “As human beings with inherent dignity and inalienable rights, the women of Iran deserve the same freedoms that the men of Iran possess.”

Pompeo has since become the most outspoken Secretary of State in U.S. history on the subject of Iranian women’s struggle for equality. On his Twitter account, Pompeo released an eerie graphic of a miniature Movahed [....]