Middle East Focus-Arabia Deserta: Of Naughty Mullahs, Naughty Oligarchs, Hypocritical Europeans……

Arabia Deserta

Of Naughty Mullahs, Naughty Oligarchs, Hypocritical Europeans……

“"Iran has been regularly jamming the broadcasting by satellite of a number of foreign televisions and radio stations . . . since December 2009, a repetition of its practice in the run-up to the disputed elections earlier that year," Miliband, along with counterparts Bernard Kouchner of France and Guido Westerwelle of Germany wrote in a recent letter to the EU's foreign policy chief, Baroness Catherine Ashton……… The French daily Le Figaro reported that potential sanctions could include stopping companies such as Germany's Siemens or Finland's Nokia from delivering technologies to Tehran that allow the interception of cellphone and e-mail conversations. On Tuesday, Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi blasted Nokia Siemens Networks, a subsidiary of Siemens and Nokia, saying the company supplied Iran with software used to suppress dissent in the Islamic Republic. "Unfortunately, a certain number of firms support the Iranian regime in its repression and censorship," Agence France-Presse quoted her as saying on France Culture radio. "It's clearly the case with Siemens and Nokia when they send the Iranian state software and technology that it can use to monitor mobile telephone calls and text messages," she said………..”

Naughty mullahs. If true that they monitor telephone calls, there should be pressure on the European companies to ban export of the technology. Privacy should be a scared right in all countries. Not only in the case of Iran, but in all Middle Eastern countries, as I suspect many of them do it as well. The same goes for selling WMD components, of the kind the good Europeans sold to Saddam to use when he was flush with our pious Gulf cash.
As for jamming television, the Iranians have also been complaining about their television channels being taken off satellites as well, and I am not sure if it is legal to get Iranian television channels in the US and some European countries.
Cheers
mhg

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