The Iranian First Amendment Strikes Again

No one would ever suspect the Arab news service al-Jazeera of being Zionist or pro-West. Al-Jazeera routinely runs and distributes anti-US and anti-Israel propaganda and toes the line of Islamofascism in most things. It broadcast those famous photos of US and British troops being held captive or of the bodies of dead soldiers, and it broadcast the films of those infamous beheadings. It also routines the tapes that are supposedly showing bin Laden and his sidekicks or their stand-ins.

But even such a loyal jihadist "news agency" is a bit too much for the ayatollahs of Iran. Yesterday they decided to shut down the offices of al-Jazeera in Iran for distributing a story of which the mullahs disapproved. The offense of al-Jazeera? The mullahs claim it was "inflaming ethnic riots in the south of the country." "If it is proved that al-Jazeera committed a crime, it will be prosecuted," Mohammad Khoshvaght of the culture and Islamic guidance ministry told state television.

Al-Jazeera had reported and discussed reports of unrest in Iran's south-west Khuzestan province near the Iraq border, which has a large ethnic-Arab population, and during which 200 arrests were made over the past few days. Iran's Arabs, who are the majority in Khuzestan's capital Ahwaz but make up only 3% of the country's population, often get their news from al-Jazeera. The Popular Democratic Front of Ahwazi Arabs in Iran, which is based in London, told al-Jazeera that it had called for peaceful demonstrations in Khuzestan to "to mark 80 years of Iranian occupation" but the government had opted to deploy military force. This is a group of Arab militiamen that the moonbat Left does not automatically support, because they are not blowing up Jewish civilians. Al-Jazeera has been banned from Iraq and threatened with banning by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait.

Al-Jazeera said today it had appealed to the government to reverse its decision. Meanwhile AP reports that more than 400 men, women, and children gathered at a meeting in Tehran on Wednesday to pledge their commitment to carry out suicide bomb attacks against both Israelis and Americans in Iraq. "Some 440 volunteers, most of them women, signed up today," said Mohammad Ali Samadi, spokesperson for the Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement, which organized the meeting.