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On the day after Iran erupted into yet another revolt against the dictatorship of “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, much of the mainstream media in the West acted as if nothing had happened.

As Iranian women tore off their hijabs in protest on Thursday, the Friday edition of one Toronto paper carried a large photograph of two women in hijabs on the cover of its “insight” section, with the title #ACTIVISM.

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For many Iranians in Canada, it could not have been a worse insult.

The first protests in Iran erupted in the country’s second-largest city of Mashhad. They are most certainly of an economic nature. One does not need to be a Marxist to connect the dots between the economic deprivation of a million slum dwellers and their desire for economic change.

Keyvan Soltany, a Toronto-based Iranian activist, shared the work of Ali Ranji Poor, a BBC Persian-language journalist, who wrote an eye opening article on Sept. 1, 2016, revealing that one of every three people living in Mashhad resides in slums, in deplorable conditions.