Iran, China Block Outside Sites to Muzzle Mideast News
source: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/
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The authoritarian regimes in Iran and China are playing a double game, when it comes to the unrest in the Middle East. Tehran and Beijing are doing their best to spin the protests in their favor, when they talk to the world. But at home, they’re pursuing a different strategy: trying to muzzle anything but the official line on the upheaval.
Commentators have been keen to liken the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia both to the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian regime to power and the electoral protests of the Green Movement which tried to unseat it. Not surprisingly, the Iranian government has preferred to use the latter comparison.
Iran has sought to graft its own ideology and history onto the protests — as seems to be popular these days — painting the movements as the Egyptian version of the 1979 Iranian revolution that ushered in its theocracy. “Iran’s Islamic Revolution became a role model for the Egyptian nation. Without doubt the Egyptian dictator [President Hosni Mubarak] will share the same destiny as that of Iran’s dictator [Mohammad Reza Pahlavi],” the military affairs advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader told the semi-official Fars News Agency. Fars has pushed the supposed continuities further, playing up the claims of some Tunisian activists that they intend to form a group based on Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the political party cum terrorist group which acts as a proxy for Iran.
Iran’s enthusiasm for analogies between revolution and Egypt’s ends at 1979, though. Although it’s probably pleased to see an American-aligned rival regime go, Iran still seems a little nervous about giving its own reputedly Twitter-powered dissidents in the Green Movement too much inspiration from the anti-government protests in Egypt. Since Monday, Iranians’ access to outside political news from Yahoo, Google and Reuters, some of the few remaining such outlets available in Iran, has been cut off without explanation, though some anodyne entertainment news is still accessible.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/
Commentators have been keen to liken the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia both to the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian regime to power and the electoral protests of the Green Movement which tried to unseat it. Not surprisingly, the Iranian government has preferred to use the latter comparison.
Iran has sought to graft its own ideology and history onto the protests — as seems to be popular these days — painting the movements as the Egyptian version of the 1979 Iranian revolution that ushered in its theocracy. “Iran’s Islamic Revolution became a role model for the Egyptian nation. Without doubt the Egyptian dictator [President Hosni Mubarak] will share the same destiny as that of Iran’s dictator [Mohammad Reza Pahlavi],” the military affairs advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader told the semi-official Fars News Agency. Fars has pushed the supposed continuities further, playing up the claims of some Tunisian activists that they intend to form a group based on Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the political party cum terrorist group which acts as a proxy for Iran.
Iran’s enthusiasm for analogies between revolution and Egypt’s ends at 1979, though. Although it’s probably pleased to see an American-aligned rival regime go, Iran still seems a little nervous about giving its own reputedly Twitter-powered dissidents in the Green Movement too much inspiration from the anti-government protests in Egypt. Since Monday, Iranians’ access to outside political news from Yahoo, Google and Reuters, some of the few remaining such outlets available in Iran, has been cut off without explanation, though some anodyne entertainment news is still accessible.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/
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