Islamic Republic's Spending On Qatar Delegation Draws Ire
The extravagant presence of the Islamic Republic’s officials and propagandists in the World Cup in Qatar has enraged many Iranians, including some of the regime’s insiders.
The extravagant presence of the Islamic Republic’s officials and propagandists in the World Cup in Qatar has enraged many Iranians, including some of the regime’s insiders.
Moeineddin Saeedi, a member of the Iranian parliament representing Chabahar, in the underprivileged province of Sistan and Baluchestan, said Thursday that “it is preposterous to send some people to Qatar with the nation's money."
He added that some officials justify the expenditure as means to promote “the Islamic Revolution,” noting that even if the purpose of such a measure was just, the people who should have been chosen should wisely.
According to different reports, between 100 to 350 people were given free tickets and accommodation to accompany the country’s soccer squad in the World Cup in Qatar as journalists and reporters. But they were not sent to report about the team. Their sole mission was to populate the stadiums and events on the sidelines of the World Cup as representatives of the Islamic Republic and make sure that no voices of dissent or news about the current protests would be reflected by foreign media. Some estimates put the amount spent on these so-called “cultural agents” as over 630 billion Iranian rials, or about $2 million.
The MP also called on the parliament’s cultural committee and other relevant committees to investigate how such people were selected and what were the justification for such a measure considering the current situation in the country.
“At least those who know the English alphabet should have gone,” he quipped, in reference to a video of two Iranian women that went viral because of their embarrassingly low level of English proficiency when speaking with foreign media. One of the women, who later turned out to be the deputy director general for foreign media of the Islamic Republic Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, was asked by a foreign correspondent about developments inside Iran, in which she could only utter “because” and “in Iran” in English and continued to answer the reporter in ineloquent Persian. The other one, one of the managers of Fars News Agency – a media network affiliated with Revolutionary Guard – intervened to help her friend. She said, “We slow the problem,” while she meant to say "We solve the problems,” referring to the ongoing antigovernment protests.
People on social media immediately started to make fun of them naming them “Mrs. Because and Mrs. Slow,” and created numerous dubsmash videos or music remixes of the footage. Despite their sheer lies about equality between men and women in Iran, the thing that made the video to go viral was their level of English comprehension and conversation, irking some regime insiders that such people are chosen to represent them in an international arena such as the World Cup.
Islamic Republic’s Football Federation has said that in addition to the country’s officials and state media reporters, more than 22,000 free tickets -- about 7,000 per match -- have been provided for the country’s cherrypicked supporters to go to Qatar from Iran. Moreover, there are videos and photos of Bangladeshi and Pakistani citizens – reportedly workers who helped built Qatar’s stadiums under inhumane working conditions – paid to pose as Iranian football fans, carrying the Islamic Republic’s flags.
The user-initiated change which people began noticing on Wednesday is not unprecedented. In August 2015 the name of the bustling street, which runs nearly 18 km from the south of the capital to north, reverted to Pahlavi for a short time. The state broadcaster IRIB reported the incident at the time and called it “Google’s mischief”.
Similarly, the name of Vozara hotel-apartment on Tehran’s Vozara street, now shows as Mahsa Amini Hotel Apartment, presumably because it was at the morality police headquarters on Vozara street that she had a stroke caused by blows to her head while she was being arrested. On social media there have been many calls to rename the street after her.
Google, however, may have nothing to do with the change, which supporters of monarchy in Iran have hugely welcomed. Although individual users cannot change city, town, village and street names on the maps, names can be altered using Google’s feedback feature of the maps if a large group of users report the names are wrong and suggest alternative.
Google maps may have become a new battleground where the opposition demanding regime change and the authorities and their supporters fight over street and even city names. Both sides have the means to fight the battle, but who wins will remain to be seen.
“This street was built by [Reza Shah] Pahlavi and its name will always remain Pahlavi,” one the many twitterati who welcomed the change wrote.
The boulevard, which is also the longest in the Middle East, has gone through several names since it was completed in 1933 after a construction period of eleven years. The tree-lined road with massive trees on both sides was originally called Pahlavi Avenue, after King Reza Shah Pahlavi, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty.
Like many other roads and even cities and towns, the street was renamed after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The first name chosen by revolutionaries was Mossadeq, after Mohammad Mossadeq, the former nationalist prime minister under the Shah who was venerated by many for nationalizing Iran's oil.
Two and half years after the revolution, when Islamists had consolidated their power in the country and completely driven nationalists to the sidelines, the road was once again renamed, this time to Valiasr, to reflect the change. Valiasr (vali-ye asr) refers to Imam Mahdi, an Arab descendant of Prophet Mohammad, who Shiites believers say has been in occultation since the 9th century AD.
In the coming years many other place names underwent similar changes. Most new roads, squares, and highways were named after historical and contemporary Islamic figures such as Sheikh Fazlollah [Nouri] (1843-1909).
Nouri was a Qajar period cleric and politician who was hanged as a traitor by revolutionaries during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) for defending the old order and opposing constitutionalism and the establishment of a parliament. While the religious establishment venerates Fazlollah and calls him a shahid (martyr), to many ordinary Iranians to this day Fazlollah is a symbol of reactionary religious establishment because he supported the king’s coup against the constitutionalists and opposed modernization of the country.
Prosecutor General of Tehran Ali Alghasi-Mehr said on Wednesday that the probe into the cyberattack against Fars news, a cultural propaganda machine with close links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, is because a significant database of personal information of journalists and employees has been leaked.
However, it seems that the investigation has been launched because the authorities are not sure what has been hacked and what database has been breached.
A new word has been coined to refer to the large amount of data leaked from the hack: Farsgate.
A 123-page document, a copy of which Iran International obtained, is among the material the hacktivist group Black Reward uncovered. The document which includes both hearsay and excerpts from domestic and foreign-based Persian media was made in one copy only for the eyes of the IRGC chief commander Hossein Salami. Earlier in the week, Black Reward also released some audio files from a meeting between Qasem Qoreyshi, the deputy commander of the paramilitary Basij and media representatives.
Black Reward announced on Friday, November 25, that it had attacked the database of Fars News Agency claiming that it deleted nearly 250 terabytes of data from all the servers and computers of the website and obtained confidential bulletins sent by the news agency to the office of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The report revealed a lot of recent orders by Khamenei about the ongoing protests that have engulfed the country since mid-September following the death of the 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini in the custody of morality police. Now, after several batches of information were leaked to the media, the authorities have started a damage control campaign to seize back the narrative, as most of the data prove that the Islamic Republic is frustrated and weary over its inability to end the protests.
The secret reports also revealed that most Iranians are getting ready for a revolution in the country as the popularity of the regime has dwindled, even among those considered supporters of the Islamic Republic. According to the documents, the level of dissatisfaction is so high that Khamenei has ordered some fundamental change in the structure of the regime in order to prevent a collapse.
The reports came as the protests in the country show no sign of ending and the movement has been spreading at universities and turning into strikes of employees in the industrial and services sectors, such as truckers.
While Iranian universities have turned into a battleground for antigovernment protests, students and professors in more than 150 universities around the world held events in support of the protests in Iran.
Meanwhile in Iran, Rasoul Jalili, the president of Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology, said on Wednesday that the university has increased its security staff by recruiting forces from private security companies. The measure is probably aimed at silencing those who criticize the university for allowing government security forces – especially the IRGC’s Basij paramilitary forces – to enter the campus to crack down on student rallies and sit-ins. If the measure proves successful, it can serve as a model for other universities to clamp down on students.
While Iranians have planned to hold three days of nationwide protests next week – 5-7 December – strikes by employees of industrial factories and truckers have injected fresh blood to the uprising.
Truck drivers and owners in several cities such as Esfahan, Bandar Abbas, Qazvin, and Kermanshah as well as many other western cities refrained from moving goods in support of the protests and strikes by industrial workers. Many people on social media describe the strike by the truckers as a significant blow to the Islamic Republic since it has the potential to cripple the economy. Some people say, “the truckers are leading the revolutionary uprising.”