Slashdot Mirror
Iran Cracks Down on Internet Sites
Dan Brickley writes "It appears that Iranian ISPs have been ordered to block a large number of popular Web sites, including weblogging, community, chat and email services. Web (particularly weblog) use has been increasing rapidly in Iran, with 64000+ weblogs published by Iranians via various sites. As of today, if the news is correct, the majority of these may be inaccessible to their authors, as will the email (eg. Yahoo) services they use to communicate with friends, colleagues and family worldwide. See stop.censoring.us and hoder.com for more details. The newly expanded blocks include PersianBlog, Blogger and the Google-hosted Orkut 'social networking' site, where Iranians come third after Brazil and USA, representing 7% of all users. How can we get our Iranian friends back in the Web?"
I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of Orkut users don't miss their "Iranian friends" as much as you might thing. There's been a lot of bitching about them and the Brazillians from the English-speaking Orkut users. Can't say whether the complaints have any merit or not, but I've heard them in more than one place.
I'll bite.
Invasion is one solution. I do not favor it as being "the" solution, but you know, when I look back on Bush's last four years, I am firmly convinced he invaded the wrong country. Hussein was a wussy. Easy pickings. I would have voted for Bush if he had invaded any other member of the Axis of Evil. Iraq? Bah.
Of course, the cards have been laid down, and we have a far more dangerous regime to worry about because it was felt more expedient to settle old scores than deal with the issues that are relavent today, like Iran and N. Korea's ACTIVE development of WMD's, rather than Iraq's now proven theoretical development of such weapons.
Sorry for the rant. I had a bad week.
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
July 1999. The mullahs slapped them down. Hard.
Interestingly, Iran was the only middle eastern country to have spontaneous pro US demonstrations after 9/11/2001.
Uh, you're free to speak, and you're free to write. The broadcast airwaves belong to everyone, which is why they're government regulated. For access to them, broadcasters agree to certain terms. No one forces them to use that medium.
Hey Dan, Michael, let me give you a little hint: You can't. Or, as Stalin once said of the Pope, "How many divisions does Slashdot have?"
The Islamofascist Mmullahs ruling Iran have made it quite clear they're immune to such chimeras as "international pressure." What are you going to do, impose sanction? Yeah, that worked so well with Saddam.
Given a regime where critics of the regime have to flee for their lives, and where they executed retarded rape victims for the "crime" of having sex, what makes you think any actions short of armed revolution will get their Internet access back? Who are they going to listen to? Kofi Annan? Get real.
There are only two things which might actually allow Iranians to get back their Internet freedoms:
1. A full-scale liberation invasion by U.S./coalition troops, a very difficult and probably quite bloody task, or
2. A "decapitation" strike that takes out the Islamist religious leadership, possibly some high level military assets, and probably as much of their illegal nuclear weapons infrastructure as we can locate.
The chances of either being undertaken right now are slim, and the chances of the majority of Slashdot digirati support such a move are close to zero.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
As a point of information, Iran was a democratic country up until the government decided to nationalise the oil industry. This was too much for the West to tolerate. The democratic leader Muhammad Mussadegh was overthrown by the CIA and replaced with a Western puppet dictator - the Shah.
These are essential facts for understanding why aggressive nationalism plays such an important role in Iranian affairs.
The UK controlled all of Iran's oil resources prior to Mossadegh. After the CIA overthrew Mossadesgh, the US received 40% of Iran's oil revenues in compensation.
As for nationalizing oil resources, every country in the Middle East has done that since 1953. Despite this fact, the big Anglo-American oil companies still make huge profits from their involvement in Middle Eastern oil.
Islam doesn't NEED instructions on how to act civilized.
Colombia is 95% Catholic, yet they have a massive, massive drug problem. And they have terrorism too. Should I blame Christianity? How come Cocaine comes from the Catholic countries anyway? You won't see Iran manufacturing it anytime soon.
The believers of Islam don't rape 72 virgins in heaven either. The virgins are only a minor perk of Paradise anyway.
Fatwas aren't issued to anyone who questions Islam, but the Ayatollah of Iran said Salman Rushdie should be killed for purposely insulting the religion. That was his view, and other countries didn't second him.
Female genital mutilation is not an Islamic thing. It's an African thing. African Pagans still do it, and so do some African and Egyptian Christians.
You remember people dancing in the street? Iran and many other Muslim countries held candlelight vigils for the 9/11 victims. There was TONS of condemnations of terrorism from all over the globe and Islamic groups issue condemnations very often.
>> Why did millions of the practitioners of the religion of peace laugh,
>> cheer and dance in the street because 3,000 innocent men, women and
>> children were murdered by seventeen men who supposedly hijacked the
>> religion of peace?
> Why do anti-Muslim bigots keep clinging to this Urban myth? The
> "video" of which you allude was of about 30 people in the Occupied
> West Bank. Some of the videos shown on Fox later turned out to be
> library footage of Palestinians celebrating the 1993 peace accord,
> NOT a celebration of 9\11.
Wrong.
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/cnn.htm
Only on
We didn't move to help the Jews, we moved to help our allies that were threatened by the Germans. Sorry, your analogy failed... next.
Are you really that naive?
Guess who sold Saddam the helicopters and chemicals he used to gas the Kurds? Guess who visited Saddam after this incident and shook his hand? (Rumsfeld; google for it and you'll find a picture).
I'm sorry, but if any other country made the case they wanted to liberate the Iraqis, that would have been fine with me. But we were propping Saddam up while he was committing these atrocities, and treating him like gold. It wasn't until he invaded Kuwait that we turned on him. If anything, we should be paying Iraq reparations for having to put up with Saddam's rule.
As for Iran, it's our own fault that the current government is in place. They used to have a democratic government, but because they didn't bow to our wishes, we overthrew them and installed the Shah. He wasn't too popular, so they had a revolution, and of course the radical Muslims came into power.
The thing is, it is unacceptable that people are denied equal rights just because they happen to be homosexual, and it is unacceptable that prison rape occurs, and it is unacceptable that drug addiction is so unreasonably dealt with.
All of these things are unacceptable, most particularly the first case since drug-taking is after all relatively speaking a choice, whereas outside fundamentalist theorising neither homosexuality nor being born female are 'a choice'. And yes if a country started stringing people up for the crime of being homosexual, I'd be thinking it was very much time for the rest of Planet Earth to react on that matter. So what's your point?
I find a good solution to cultural relativism is the Declaration of Human Rights, which you can find right here. Although I realise that we here on slashdot apparently hold the UN in deepest contempt, this particular document is worth taking a good look at. As far as I am concerned, it solves a lot of problems, as one can look at situations within which one might be tempted to invoke cultural relativism and say: is this against human rights? If it is, it's not OK to just shrug and go "strange places, strange people", and if it isn't, shrug away... Cultural relativism is a useful concept when it comes to accepting weirdnesses and overcoming culture shock, but it is not a catch-all excuse.