Elections in Iran, USA censure
June 22, 2021 1:10 PM   Subscribe

Hardliner Ebrahim Raisi elected Iran’s new president. Who is him?
In continuity with Trump policies, after 6 rounds of talks the US refused to remove Iran sanctions. US government also seized the .com domain of Iran’s Press TV and two other media outlets. Internet users can still visit Press TV using the Iranian domain.
posted by - (23 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- goodnewsfortheinsane



 
Is there a precedent for seizing another nation's website? Not that the us is concerned about such things, but it just seems .. offensive (both meanings).

Who to trust anymore? Would personally give more weight to Iranian / Mid-East news sources than Western ones. Seeking control like this (plus sanctions) increases likelihood of conflict - again a thing america seems to relish, no matter who is in charge.
posted by unearthed at 1:34 PM on June 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


It's a legacy of the US holding rights to the .com domain scheme, I think. Anything under .com naming used to be assigned by US Department of Defense, and even though it's under Verisign now, .com is still under US jurisdiction.

Wikipedia has more on the history.
posted by caution live frogs at 1:59 PM on June 22, 2021 [4 favorites]


Is there a precedent for seizing another nation's website? Not that the us is concerned about such things, but it just seems .. offensive (both meanings).

Definitely. The US has done it before. But I can't imagine China hasn't shut down .CN domain sites, for example.

"Seizing" is also just shutting down the URL for the .COM registries(for those, like me, who assumed something else) so you need to get the info from an alternate site. It's not like .IR sites are being hacked and taken off line.
posted by mark k at 2:02 PM on June 22, 2021


There must be a better source about the seizure than RT.com, a tendentious and bombastic broadcaster whose reliability (like that of PressTV itself) is no better than Fox News. I see something on the PressTV.com website that purports to be a seizure notice, but if so maybe the US government itself has something to say about it.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:29 PM on June 22, 2021 [7 favorites]


I have to imagine that the Trump admin scuttling JCPOA and Biden not making it a priority one fix has given ammo to reactionary forces in Iran because why wouldn't it.
posted by Ferreous at 2:45 PM on June 22, 2021


CNN has it too, but the Feds haven’t commented yet.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:02 PM on June 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


What would a reactionary force in Iran even be? A monarchist? A liberal? It's not like the Iranian government has changed much over the past few decades.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:12 PM on June 22, 2021 [2 favorites]


Anything under .com naming used to be assigned by US Department of Defense

Department of Commerce, IIRC. They got authority over com/net/org, but delegated the day to day administration to InterNIC, which at some point was folded into Verisign. When it was decided we should have competing registrars ICANN took on that role instead, making Verisign one of many registrars.

Commerce has never given up their ultimate authority over the historical TLDs, they just rarely exercise it. It would be pretty remarkable if Commerce did use their authority to seize a domain, though. While seizures happen all the time, they're based on court orders, not the executive branch acting unilaterally.
posted by wierdo at 3:59 PM on June 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


A reminder for anyone who doesn't already know- Iran's elections are not fair or free. Raisi was basically installed by the Supreme Council. Iranians do not want this butcher as their president.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 4:28 PM on June 22, 2021 [13 favorites]


The news links in this post are all state-run or state-supported. Al Jazeera is alright; these others are garbage. I think this post should go away.
posted by mr_roboto at 5:39 PM on June 22, 2021 [3 favorites]


Well, two of them are to the same website which is the subject of this post, one is an article on that same website about the subject of this post, two are to Al Jazeera, and one is to RT.

Unless we can't link to the subject of posts, what exactly is your complaint?

obviously, RT is not the most reputable, but it's understandable that they'd be providing more coverage of something like this than a US news agency.
posted by sagc at 5:41 PM on June 22, 2021 [3 favorites]


A reminder for anyone who doesn't already know- Iran's elections are not fair or free.

The Freedom House report on Iranian elections looks like a good resource on this. I don't know that this makes much difference, though: other nations have no choice but to deal with Iran's government.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:47 PM on June 22, 2021


The news links in this post are all state-run or state-supported.… I think this post should go away.

Ah, so no more BBC, CBC, NHK, etc. No more public broadcasters. Hysterical.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 7:29 PM on June 22, 2021 [4 favorites]


here is a pretty good article from an academic: Iran election: what Ebrahim Raisi's victory will mean for his country – and the rest of the world
posted by davedave at 9:01 PM on June 22, 2021


What would a reactionary force in Iran even be? A monarchist? A liberal? It's not like the Iranian government has changed much over the past few decades.

I believe it's more complicated than that. They've vacillated between moderate reformers and reactionary presidents, going back to Khatami ('97-'05). Presidents are constrained by the clergy, so it doesn't change Iranian policies overnight. But they have influence.

Iran has become significantly less democratic since Khatami, at least from my (very limited, American) understanding. Khatami would not have been allowed to run today.

Factions and constituencies are not static. I really think that we (the US) missed an opportunity to give the reform wing in Iran some visible wins when Khatami gained power. Would it have changed something? I don't know.

If we were to welcome them into our sphere of influence at the expense of the soon-to-wane Saudis, it would be a master stroke.

So obviously from my above sentiments, I don't disagree. But the phrasing makes it sound like it's our choice. It's not. There's never been a hint that the clerical leadership would even consider entering a "Euro-American axis."
posted by mark k at 10:39 PM on June 22, 2021 [4 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted. This is a post about Iran elections, and shouldn't be diverted to argue about about Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:50 AM on June 23, 2021


BreakThrough News,
Western media describe Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi as a "hardliner." But what does that actually mean for Iranians?

@s_m_marandi tells @RaniaKhalek “hardliner” just means someone who wants to defend Iran’s sovereignty against imperialism.
YouTube link
posted by Space Coyote at 1:35 PM on June 23, 2021


@s_m_marandi tells @RaniaKhalek “hardliner” just means someone who wants to defend Iran’s sovereignty against imperialism.

Iran is an imperialist power. One of the ideological pillars of its regime is “exporting the Islamic revolution”. It presently dominates Iraq, controls southern Lebanon via its proxy, Hezbollah, has Syria as a client state, and is fighting another proxy war in Yemen. It literally has a national holiday celebrating its plans to destroy Israel, a vastly smaller country thousands of kilometres away.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:12 PM on June 23, 2021


The New Yorker had an excellent article about Iran a little over a year ago: "The Twilight of the Iranian Revolution". It had one paragraph about Raisi, discussing him as a possible successor to Khamenei :
Most people I spoke with believed that the Guard would maintain a façade of clerical rule. Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s Chief Justice, is frequently mentioned as a candidate. Raisi, along with leading the judiciary, is an influential member of the Assembly of Experts. He also proved his revolutionary fervor at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, when he helped carry out the extrajudicial killings of thousands of M.E.K. prisoners and other leftists. “He’s drenched in blood,” Reuel Gerecht, an Iran analyst and a former C.I.A. officer, told me.
posted by riruro at 2:39 PM on June 23, 2021


Here's the US Justice Department press release:
United States Seizes Websites Used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union and Kata’ib Hizballah

It doesn't have a list of the websites, which disappointed me, but apparently this is not the first time the US has seized Iranian domain names: it took 92 of them in October 2020 and a further 27 in November.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:53 PM on June 23, 2021


BreakThrough News

What is this? It looks either Chinese- or Russian-supported. One of the major contributors seems to be Eugene Puryear, who’s associated with Radio Sputnik, a Russian propaganda house.
posted by mr_roboto at 8:37 PM on June 23, 2021


Ah, so no more BBC, CBC, NHK, etc. No more public broadcasters. Hysterical.

How about no Putinist disinformation orgs?
posted by mr_roboto at 8:42 PM on June 23, 2021 [3 favorites]


U.S. Website Seizures Targeting Iran Cast Wide Net Over Dissident and Religious Broadcasters
The crackdown is a test case for American control over the internet, as the U.S. government flexed its muscles over the information sphere in a way few states could. The choice of targets also raises questions about whether there are enough guardrails over this newfound power — and whether U.S. officials can separate their political struggle with the Islamic Republic of Iran from an ideological struggle against Shia Islam.

“At the same time the Saudis are trying to claim the Sunni beliefs and religion in their name, Iran is trying to do the same thing with Shia beliefs,” said Mustafa Akhwand, director of the Washington-based organization Shia Rights Watch, who said he has been in touch with the U.S. government about issues relating to adherents of the Islamic sect. “I have told the administration many times, you are not doing a favor for yourselves. … Shia are trying to disaffiliate themselves from Iran, and you are doing everything you can to tell the Iranians, ‘These are yours.’”

Critics of the moves worried that a lack of transparency around the website seizures cloaked cases of mistaken identity and other errors. In the case of one of the Shirazi movement’s channels, Al Anwar TV, Akhwand believes that the U.S. government may have been trying to close al-Anwar 2, a pro-Iranian station that was set up to compete with the Shirazi-aligned network. Al-Anwar 2’s website is still online.

“Making a mistake like that is showing that the administration — or whoever put [al-Anwar] in — did not do their homework at all,” Akhwand said.
New boss, same as the old boss.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 8:49 AM on June 26, 2021


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