Posts tagged iran
Iranian Cartoonist Draws Politician, Sentenced to 25 Lashes
Via the Guardian:
An Iranian cartoonist has been sentenced to 25 lashes for a caricature of a local MP, the semi-official Ilna news agency has reported.
Ahmad Lotfi Ashtiani, MP for Arak, took offence to a cartoon published in Nameye Amir, a city newspaper in Arak.
The cartoonist, Mahmoud Shokraye, depicted Ashtiani in a football stadium, dressed as a footballer, with a congratulatory letter in one hand and his foot resting on the ball.
Iranian politicians, including Ashtiani, have been recently criticised for interferring in the country’s sports…
…Shokraye was subsequently sued by the MP for having insulted him. A court in Markazi province, of which Arak is the capital, sentenced the cartoonist to 25 lashes – an unprecedented punishment for an Iranian cartoonist.
Iran's Halal Internet Coming Soon?
If you’re a government that believes the Internet “promotes crime, disunity, unhealthy moral content, and atheism” there seem to be two options: unplug or roll your own.
Reports are appearing that indicate Iran’s going with the latter and will launch of a countrywide intranet to save the masses from online evils.
Via the International Business Times:
Millions of Internet users in Iran will be permanently denied access to the World Wide Web and cut off from popular social networking sites and email services, as the government has announced its plans to establish a national Intranet within five months.
In a statement released Thursday, Reza Taghipour, the Iranian minister for Information and Communications Technology, announced the setting up of a national Intranet and the effective blockage of services like Google, Gmail, Google Plus, Yahoo and Hotmail, in line with Iran’s plan for a “clean Internet.”
The government is set to roll out the first phase of the project in May, following which Google, Hotmail and Yahoo services will be blocked and replaced with government Intranet services like Iran Mail and Iran Search Engine. At this stage, however, the World Wide Web, apart from the aforementioned sites, will still be accessible.
In a follow-up, the IBT reports that Iran’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology denies they’ll block Iranians’ access to the wider Web and blames information about it on Western propaganda.
The idea of an Iranian Internet isn’t new. Last year, Al Jazeera among others reported that the effort was in the works, with Technology Review writing:
It would be unlikely, but not technically impossible, for Iran to step up its censorship and filtering regime to create this “halal Internet.” After all, most Cubans, for example, are priced out of the actual Internet and steered towards the Cuban equivalent, which is restricted to an internal e-mail network, and a handful of pro-government sites. In a similar vein, the Chinese Internet is limited largely only to websites that the government doesn’t view as threatening.
Ninjas, News and Politics
Iran has suspended Reuters’ accreditation in the country over a story the news agency ran on Iranian women practicing the art of ninjutsu.
At issue is wording in the Reuters report that called the women “ninja assassins” with the perceived implication that they’re training to protect the country from Western infidels.
In a statement, Reuters writes:
The story’s headline, “Thousands of female Ninjas train as Iran’s assassins”, was corrected to read “Three thousand women Ninjas train in Iran”.
Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance subsequently contacted the Reuters Tehran bureau chief about the video and its publication, as a result of which Reuters’ 11 personnel were told to hand back their press cards.
“We acknowledge this error occurred and regard it as a very serious matter. It was promptly corrected the same day it came to our attention,” said editor-in-chief Stephen J. Adler.
Meantime, some of the women are suing Reuters for misrepresenting them.
“Reuters has introduced us as assassins to the whole world,” says one. ”The truth must come to light and everyone should know that we are only a group of athletes. We are supervised by the Ministry of Sports and the federation of martial arts.”
Background via The Atlantic.
Image: A Ninjutsu practitioner performs a split as members of various Ninjutsu schools showcase their skills to the media in a gym at Karaj, near Tehran. By Caren Firouz, via Reuters.
Shirin Neshat, Women of Allah
Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
This photograph forms part of Neshat’s Women of Allah series, created between 1993 and 1997 after the artist’s first trip to Iran after the Revolution. The aesthetic of these black-and-white photographs, in which women (the artist and others) appear in veils (chadors), often bearing firearms, mimics newspaper clippings she gathered that depicted the involvement of women in the Iran-Iraq War. Neshat used these images to comment on the violence of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, after which she was barred from entering the country, and later on post-Revolution society in Iran. Historically, the role of women in Iran is fraught with repression and restriction. Thus, feminist poetry was an important source of inspiration for Neshat’s series of photographs. The verses handwritten on the photographs reinforce Neshat’s feminist beliefs (she often quotes the poet Furugh Farrukhzad) and also engage with images of violence.
Image: Via Tradition and Modernity in flux: Visual Binaries in Contemporary Iranian Photography.
BBC Attacked by Iran’s Cyber Army?
On March 1, parts of the BBC were unable to access e-mail and other internet services, possibly due to an attack caused by its systems being overwhelmed by a flood of external communication requests.
Recent attempts were also made to disrupt the Persian Service’s London phone-lines through multiple automatic calls and to jam two BBC Satellite feeds into Iran.
Though Director General Mark Thompson would not comment on the details of these attacks, he did write a blog post last month on interference and harassment of BBC Persian service by the Iranian authorities.
via BBC News:
The revelations follow Reporters Without Borders “Enemies of the Internet” report which was released at the start of the week.
The free-speech lobby group reported that Iran and some of the other countries on its register “censor internet access so effectively that they restrict their populations to local intranets that bear no resemblance to the world wide web.”
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard created a “cyber army” in 2010. Hundreds of net users have been arrested and some even sentenced to death.
US intelligence suggests no Iranian nukes
US intelligence suggests that while Iran is continuing work on its uranium enrichment facilities, there are currently no indications that it has begun work on a nuclear weapon, the US defense secretary has said.
Via mohandasgandhi
FJP: Unless you’re CNN’s Erin Burnett. Then you take the same footage but claim that Iran’s on the cusp of targeting the United States with nuclear tipped ICBMs.
Via Glenn Greenwald:
I’ll just note that [Burnett] begins her remarks by announcing that “no one buys Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes,” and to prove her point, she immediately introduces footage of yesterday’s Congressional testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper which, she said, “drove that message home.” Except the clip then showed Clapper saying this: “Iran’s technical advances … strengthen our assessment that Iran is more than capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon if its political leaders, specifically the Supreme Leader himself, choose to do so.” Is there really not a single brain in the entire CNN apparatus that stirs in the presence of a contradiction this glaring that it virtually screams its demand to be recognized? And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Leon Panetta just yesterday said “the intelligence does not show that they’ve made the decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon,” a fact that Burnett did not manage to mention, even though the same fact was also expressed last month by Israeli officials (“The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon”).
Click through for video of Burnett’s interview with NY Representative Peter King.
Iran Sentences Web Developer to Death
Iran’s Supreme Court confirmed the death sentence for Saeed Malekpour, 35, on Tuesday on charges of “insulting and desecrating Islam”. He could now be executed at any time.
Malekpour wrote a photo uploading application that was later used by a porn site. He claims this was done without his knowledge. In a letter translated by Persian2English, a human rights organization, Malekpour writes:
Some of the confessions they forced me to make were so ridiculous and far-fetched that they are not even possible.
For example, they asked me to falsely confess to purchasing software from the UK and then posting it on my website for sale. I was forced to add that when somebody visited my website, the software would be, without his/her knowledge, installed on their computer and would take control of their webcam, even when their webcam is turned off. Although I told them that what they were suggesting was impossible from a technological point of view, they responded that I should not concern myself with such things.
Image: Saeed Malekpour via Amnesty International.
How News Organizations Can Help Battle Internet Censorship
Internet censorship is growing throughout the world, according to a study conducted by the Canada Centre for global security studies and Citizen Lab, and the BBC.
“This problem of Internet control is becoming an issue for more than human rights concerns,” Ronald Deibert, director of the Centre, tells the New York Times. ”The fact is that you have dozens of countries not just filtering for porn, but political filtering and key events as well.”
Called Casting a Wider Net (PDF), the study focusses on China and Iran where the BBC has a pilot program to provide proxy services to citizens in an attempt to to get around censorship barriers.
Key takeaways from the report include understanding circumvention tools such as Web proxies as publishing tools or “channels” in and of themselves that help drive content to audiences; an understanding that blocking is unpredictable and often occurs when particular news breaks; and that different methods should be simultaneously deployed such as Web proxies, email newsletters and Twitter posts in order to reach core audiences.
Images: Web Proxy and Twitter logins, and replacement proxy logins circa July 2011 in China.
Report (PDF).
The Green Wave, an animated documentary about Iranian protests during and after the country’s 2009 election, premiered last night at the Sundance Film Festival.
Color us amazed by the innovation that went into its production.
Via the Guardian:
How do you show what it was like for the Iranian protesters arrested during the green revolution of 2009? That was the challenge facing Ali Samadi Ahadi when he was working on his documentary about the abortive uprising, The Green Wave. The answer? Get online. The Green Wave is based on first-person accounts collected from tweets, Facebook entries and blogs. It features footage of protests and public gatherings shot on cell phones. But after the government militia turned on protesters and hauled them away to jail, the documentary trail ran cold. That’s when Ahadi turned to animation.
To critics who say the film doesn’t bring new information to the table, Ahadi responds, “I don’t say we all have all aspects of this time in the film. I don’t say it is an objective view of the situation. It is a subjective, very personal view of the situation in Iran after the election.”
