From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

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nice five-star review. On today's episode, we're going to take a look at what's been happening in Iran. On September the 16th, the young woman from a Kurdish family, Masa Amini, died in a Tehran hospital after she'd been arrested by the government's religious morality police for not wearing the hijab, the headscarf that's required of Iranian women.

The government insisted that the 22-year-old, who was otherwise apparently in excellent health,

had somehow died of a heart attack. But eyewitnesses reported that she'd been heavily beaten.

As news of her death spread, protests erupted across the country and grew increasingly

virulent. The protests are continuing today. In conditions

of extraordinary state control of information, it's hard to get an accurate picture of what's been

going on, but credible reports suggest that more than 200 people have been killed. So what is

actually happening and what might it all mean? After 43 years of repressive theocratic rule by Iran's

Mullers, punctuated by repeated episodes of

protests, could this finally be what some have taken to calling a second Iranian revolution

following that original Islamic revolution in 1979? Or will this round of protests meet the fate

of so many previous ones and be crushed by the ruthless regime. Well, to look into all this,

I'm pleased to say I'm joined by Ruel Mark Correct, one of our most insightful and knowledgeable

commentators on the Middle East. Ruel is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

and a former fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. He writes frequently for the journal

editorial page, among many other publications, and he's the author of several books on politics and society and culture in the Middle East. Early in his career, he served as a case officer at the CIA. So he has profoundly important insights, and I'm very glad to say that Ruel's with me now. Thanks very much for joining us, Ruel. My pleasure. So let's start off for me then with this, if you give us a sense, and again, you have good contacts and good sources and a good understanding of what's going on in that country, of where we are in these protests. I mean, going on now for nearly two months. We've seen some extraordinary pictures. We all saw those pictures at the prison in Tehran, which went around on social media. We've seen pictures of mass protests in the streets

and violence by the authorities. What's your sense here of where we are in this protest?

I mean, it looks like we're on a slow boil. The regime, it's proving incapable of shutting

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