Tuesday, February 15, 2011

15-Feb-11: PressTV: No protests here, and Israel and the US are behind them

As we have been pointing out several times this week, you can search high and low on the home page of the Iranian government-controlled TV-and-web news channel PressTV, and you will manage to see nothing at all about the mass street protests that are  paralyzing Tehran.

Ah, with one tiny exception.

Buried deep in the "Iran" section as of late this afternoon (you can see it over on the right), there is an unobtrusive headline reading "Larijani blames US for protests". And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the 24 -hour-a-day channel's sole reference so far to the biggest Iranian news story this year.

Click the link and you get to PressTV's rationalization of why thousands of Iranians are taking their lives in their hands to protest the repressive Mullah-controlled regime. The blame, as if we didn't know already, is with the Americans and the Israelis. But the gyrations performed by the hapless journalists at PressTV are quite something:
Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani says the United States is behind anti-government “sham” protests cloned off the pro-democracy movements in Tunisia and Egypt. “The main purpose was to clone [the protests] so they could claim that the crises plaguing US-linked dictatorships in the region has spread and that Iran -- which has been the forerunner of democracy in the region -- is also having internal problems,” Fars news agency quoted Larijani as saying on Tuesday... Referring to the protests in Egypt and Tunisia, the parliament speaker said “roots of the Islamic awakening” in the region were in the hostile and condescending attitude of the United States and Israel toward Muslims. Larijani added that the US, “angered” by Iran's support of the pro-democracy protests in the region, orchestrated such “sham rallies” to break the will of those nations heading toward revolution."
Sadly, it's not sham injuries that the people who stand up to the repressive Iranian war machine suffer.

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