Tehran Bureau reports:
Government anxieties about social networking featured in a military parade held in the central-Iranian city of Isfahan on Tuesday to mark Iran’s Army Day.
In the course of the procession, military vehicles bore oversized placards labelled “instances of soft war”, the first of which was headed “damages of the Facebook internet site”.
It was followed by displays accusing western powers of “promoting bad hejab” (a reference to the sartorial choices of secular Iranian women), and encouraging “new addiction: shisha, cocaine, crack, and paan”. (Shisha is Iranian slang for crystal meth, and crack refers to the least pure form of heroin, rather than crack-cocaine).
But where was the beloved cardboard Khomeini?
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps last month announced that it had established a new, sealed-off communications network for its commanders called Basir (Perspective). According to an article in a Guard periodical, “The armed forces had no trust in the telecommunication equipment produced by other countries. So, an indigenous multilayer nationwide system was designed and built.”
As you may recall, last year Iranian state TV broke the shocking news that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a Zionist “who offered a prize for Israelis who kill Palestinians.”
I’m not a fan of Facebook, but if Iran’s rulers consider it such a threat, it deserves some respect.
