This is Iranian Idolotry
With some bearded Ryan Seacrest-type in a rumpled off-the-rack jacket, and Badmood Ahmadinejad in a white muscle t-shirt.
Sounds like riveting television:
Yesterday marked 6 1/2 months since masked agents of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry robbed my mother, Haleh Esfandiari, of her belongings and passports at knife-point. It had been more than 70 days since her incarceration in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison before I finally saw her this week — not as a free woman, but in footage of a KGB-style television “confession” broadcast by Iran’s state-run television.
…
The bulk of the program was made up of footage of years-old revolutions in Eastern Europe. Also shown was another jailed dual citizen, Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planner arrested in May. My mother is seen saying that her job was “to identify speakers” and “to organize conferences.” These and other statements she made about her work at the Wilson Center were cut off in mid-sentence and spliced with seemingly endless footage of civil unrest in Eastern European countries, as if organizing conferences and talks amounts to revolutionary activity. So it went from one sorry frame to another.
Sounds like Monty Python, but then much of the Iranian government’s behavior appears to arise from the mistaken notion that Monty Python was a documentary—with Ahmadinejad playing the Michael Palin role.
Kamangir agrees, in his own way:
Either I have forgotten Persian or they really didn’t have much to say, rather than “we went to this conference†and “talked about thatâ€. Is talking and shaking hands with people an offense?
And now, for something not so very different:
In an article titled “The Holocaust – The Big Lie,” the weekly Sobh-e Sadeq, which is the mouthpiece of Iranian Supreme Leader ‘Ali Khamenei circulated among the Revolutionary Guards, states that the Holocaust is the greatest falsehood and forgery in history. The paper added that the Jews, who created this lie, believed that their wretchedness would convince the international community of the need to establish a state for them.