Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Crushing Free Speech In Iran

Iran's judiciary has banned a moderate news agency only hours after it had resumed transmission following a week-long suspension, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported Wednesday.

"Based on elements of the case and many complaints, ILNA (the Iran Labour News Agency) may no longer pursue its activities and the order has been given to block the agency's site," an investigating judge was quoted as saying.

The report said Abotorab Fazel was appointed the new head of ILNA after the week-long suspension, and that the last transmission had been just before noon.
This is the same justice that enabled the mullahs to sentence an adulterer to death by stoning. The woman involved in the same case will be stoned tomorrow. Human rights and civil rights are a foreign concept, and free speech is nonexistent, where everything in the press gets scrutinized by the government.

To further put this story in context, the paper hewed to the line of former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Those two are treated to the label of reformer and more conservative, respectively, but that's simply in comparison to the current batch of mullahs who ignore Iranian civil rights at every turn. They were no more interested in human rights than the current batch.

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