Fragile Iran regime attacks BBC-Persian channel

NY Times:

As Iran’s ruling ayatollahs tell it, the main strike force plotting to end Islamic rule in their country is not on the streets of Tehran but on the upper floors of a celebrated Art Deco building in central London.

The propagators of an “all-out war” against the Islamic republic, as Iran’s semiofficial news agency has called them, are a group of 140 men and women who work at the BBC’s Broadcasting House, a stone’s throw from the shopping mecca of Oxford Street in London. Mainly expatriate Iranians, they staff the BBC’s Persian-language television service, on air for only six months and reaching a daily audience of six million to eight million Iranians — a powerful fraction of viewers in Iran, with its population of 70 million.

The audience estimate, BBC insiders say, came from a leaked document prepared by Iran’s state-run broadcasting service, which warned before the current upheaval of the threat from the new channel.

PTV, as those in the London newsroom call it, is at the heart of a new kind of political upheaval that has played out in Tehran, where a disputed presidential election two weeks ago sent tens of thousands of protesters into the streets claiming ballot fraud in the re-election of the hard-line incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In the protests, an archaic political system has been shaken by the use of powerful new weapons: foreign-based satellite television channels like the BBC’s that beam their signals into Iran, social networking tools like Twitter and sites like Facebook that act as running diaries on the upheaval and as forums for coordinating protest activities, and cellphone videos that have captured the confrontation in Tehran for worldwide audiences, perhaps most importantly in Iran itself.

“It’s a totally different country now because of the new media,” said Sina Motallebi, 36, who oversees interactive elements of the BBC channel’s coverage in the London newsroom.

Mr. Motallebi, more than most, understands the new technologies’ power — and the Iranian government’s determination to suppress them. In 2003, as one of Iran’s most famous antigovernment bloggers, he was imprisoned briefly in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, along with murderers, rapists and other criminals. Many others working at the BBC channel gained their first experience working on reformist newspapers and blogs in Tehran.

The government has singled out several foreign news broadcasters for what it calls biased coverage: CNN, broadcasting in English, as well as the Voice of America and the BBC, which broadcast in Iran in Persian, the country’s national language.

But the BBC’s Persian channel has been cast as the main threat, partly, BBC officials say, because Britain’s colonial past has earned it a special place in Iran’s official demonography. Hamid Reza Moqaddamfar, chief of the semiofficial Fars news agency, has described the channel’s coverage as “psychological warfare,” and said its mission was “spreading lies and rumors and distorting facts.”

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The truth hurts sometimes. As Jack Nicholson's character said some people can't handle the truth. What is scary for the control freak religious bigots of Iran is that they are losing control of their message and more Iranians are finding the truth. In someways they remind me of liberals in the US attacking Fox News.

I suspect that the BBC-Persian channel may be one reason why the government is arresting British Embassy employees.