Grading PolitiFact: Iranian women at risk for want of proper hijab?

Our stalwart bunglers at PolitiFact remain busy--far too busy for me to keep up, unfortunately.

The picking on Palin series received a recent update, so I chose that entry for my latest critique.

Iran ain't Miami Beach, but beatings and killings for immodesty? No

The giveaway deck is accentuated by the trademark "Truth-O-Meter" graphic with needle buried at the "False" end of the scale. On to the rationalization:

In arguing for a hard line against Iran, Gov. Sarah Palin invoked not just that country's uranium-enrichment efforts and attitude toward Israel, but also its treatment of women.

"It is said that the measure of a country is the treatment of its most vulnerable citizens," Palin wrote in a Sept. 22, 2008, opinion piece in the New York Sun. "By that standard, the Iranian government is both oppressive and barbaric. Under (President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad's rule, Iranian women are some of the most vulnerable citizens. If an Iranian woman shows too much hair in public, she risks being beaten or killed."

That New York Sun link may not last long. I understand the paper has suspended operations. PolitiFact provides sufficient context for the quotation, happily.

The issue, as is often the case with PolitiFact, comes down to a judgment. Should Palin's statement be judged as to its truth or in terms of whether it might supply a misleading impression in terms of the underlying argument? PolitiFact vacillates in its judgments. One time the literal meaning is at issue, as when Barack Obama used the odds of a lightning strike as hyperbole. Another time the flacks at PolitiFact try to skewer the underlying argument--however they happen to see it.

Fact-checking ought to be a more systematic pursuit.

In the case of Palin, PolitiFact apparently grants the literal truth of Palin's statement. That's not enough for her statement to be as much as "Barely True," however. The PolitiFact writer, Alexander Lane, emphasizes that the Iranian government does not sanction the beating (at least since a change in hijab law way back in 1988) or killing of hijab outlaws. Beatings, along with any killings that might have occurred, were a by-product of the criminal's resistance.

Palin might have received a contrary impression from stories such as this 1A item from The Los Angeles Times (2005):

There are Muslim countries where women have no choice but to cover their heads. Religious police in Saudi Arabia and Iran hunt and even beat bareheaded women.

Not that you should go around thinking that the stuff you read in the papers is true, mind you.

I have no reason to doubt Lane's finding that the government does not officially sanction the beating or killing of women who fail to properly wear the hijab. However, some of the hard-liners in power apparently wish they held enough sway to enforce that aspect of Sharia law:

"Women who do not respect the hijab and their husbands deserve to die," said Hassani, who leads Friday prayers in the city of Urumieh, in Iranian Azerbaijan.

"I do not understand how these women who do not respect the hijab, 28 years after the birth of the Islamic Republic, are still alive," he said.

"These women and their husbands and their fathers must die," said Hassani, who is the representative of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei in eastern Azerbaijan.
(ADN Kronos)

One might suggest that the argument underlying the underlying argument suggests that the hard-liners in the ruling establishment of Iran would like to have women beaten or killed. But that may be too complicated even for the media professionals at PolitiFact.

I'll give PolitiFact a D for this entry. I dispense credit for researching the current state of hijab law in Iran, but dock 40 points for failing to discern the attitude of Iran's ruling religious elite toward the issue of hijab and for the amazing arrogance displayed in rating a true statement "False."