A group of engineering students at UBC Okanagan gathered Thursday to paint the “E” in front of the department building in support of the protesters in Iran. Professor Ray Taheri says there are about 150 Iranian-Canadian graduate students in the engineering program at UBC Okanagan and many more undergraduate students. “So there’s a lot of weight, in the School of Engineering and also at UBC,” he said. Protests have rocked Iran for six weeks, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died after being arrested by the country’s morality police for not wearing her hijab properly. Taheri says they were given permission to paint the iconic ‘E’ red, white and green – the colors of Iran’s flag – along with the words ‘women, life, freedom’. The phrase has become a rallying cry for protesters in Iran. The big ‘E’ has been outside the UBC Okanagan engineering building for about a decade and has been painted over the years to support various causes. “It’s very iconic, it’s very symbolic. But it shows that the engineering school as well as UBC is always on the right side of history,” Taheri said. Kelowna’s Iranian-Canadian community has also been the driving force behind a petition to the House of Commons calling on the federal government to designate a branch of the Iranian Armed Forces as a terrorist entity.
