Iran Declares Online Support For Israel ‘A Criminal Offense’
Iran’s Attorney General has officially designated any action promoting, strengthening, or supporting Israel online illegal.
Iran’s Attorney General has officially designated any action promoting, strengthening, or supporting Israel online illegal.
The decision also encompasses providing services to platforms associated with Israel and facilitating the travel of Iranian citizens to the country through online means.
The Law on “Confronting Hostile Actions by the Zionist Regime Against Peace and Security”, was submitted to the parliament and approved during an open session in 2020. The legislation was recently updated by the Committee for Determining Instances of Criminal Content.
The update also “extends to any collaboration, interaction or exchange of information with both official and unofficial entities and individuals affiliated with the Israeli regime.”
The legislation reflects Iran's long standing stance as an opponent of Israel, whose destruction it has called upon for decades, reversing the good relations the countries shared before the revolution of 1979.
Iran has historically barred its athletes from competing against Israeli counterparts, leading to athletes intentionally losing games, forfeiting matches, or claiming injury under pressure from sports federation officials to avoid facing Israelis.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has consistently lauded Iranian athletes who refuse to compete against Israelis and as recently as September 2021, encouraged them to persist in their stance, even if facing potential repercussions from international sports governing bodies.
Houthi forces in Yemen, armed with Iranian weapons, launched drones toward the Israeli port of Eilat on Tuesday that were intercepted over the Red Sea. At the same times, another drone attack targeted the Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq, where US forces are stationed. An Iraqi Islamist group aligned with Iran took responsibility for the strike.
However, Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told CNN last week that the Islamic Republic was not involved in recent attacks against US bases, insisting that no group takes orders from Tehran, and that Iran has no proxies in the region.
For years, the Iranian regime has been making triumphant statements about its leadership of the “resistance axis”, that includes militant groups, such as the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, the Houthis in Yemen and the Syrian regime, to name the most prominent forces supported financially and militarily by Tehran.
The Iranian regime has become the focus of attention in the West after the terror attack on Israel by Hamas, another militant group it supports. Although voicing unequivocal support for Hamas, Tehran has been denying any role in the bloody invasion that killed around 1,400 Israelis.
The United States has warned Iran not to escalate the Gaza war and has dispatched substantial naval forces to the region as a deterrent to Tehran and its most powerful proxy, the Hezbollah, which can open a second front against Israel in the north.
Notably, Kayhan, the most hardliner newspaper in Tehran on Tuesday declared that the Islamic Republic will not enter a war for any other nation.
Kayhan stated, “The discourse of the Islamic Revolution is based on awakening and empowering nations. Moreover, it supports and strengthens any oppressed people who desire freedom. However, it never engages in any war on behalf of any other nation and this exact strategy has effectively thwarted various scenarios presented by the United States against Iran in the West Asian region.”
Iran’s strategy since the 1980s, when it helped establish the Hezbollah, has been to use militant and violent groups to build influence around the world and target the interests of Israel and Western countries.
Kayhan is financed by the office of Iran’s ruler Ali Khamenei and is seen as reflecting the views of his office, especially when promulgating hardline foreign policy dictums.
While Hezbollah has had skirmishes with Israeli forces in the past three weeks, it has so far avoided a full-fledged war. Some observers argue that as time goes on and the Israeli ground offensive in Gaza progresses, the opportunity and perhaps the will for the Shiite group to risk total war with Israel decreases.
Israel said on Tuesday that its forces were already attacking Hamas gunmen inside the militants' vast tunnel network in Gaza after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed calls for a halt to fighting to ease a worsening humanitarian crisis.
The gradual Israeli progress and Hezbollah inaction influence calculations in Tehran, which prefers to use proxies to a limited degree to show support for Hamas but avoid a full escalation that can endanger to regime.
Houthis also escalated clashes with Saudi Arabia in Yemen, after nearly two years of relative calm. They had already fired cruise missiles and drones, potentially toward Israel on October 19 that were intercepted by a US Navy warship.
Sotoudeh, who had previously denounced Armita's death as a "state killing" in a Facebook post, attended the funeral without a head covering. She was apprehended alongside Manzar Zarrabi, a mother who lost four family members in the tragic downing of a Ukrainian airliner over Tehran in 2020, as well as numerous other women and men.
Initially, Sotoudeh was taken to a detention center in Shahr-e Ray, located in southern Tehran, and then transferred to the infamous Vozara Detention Center in North Tehran. It's worth noting that Mahsa Amini fell into a coma at this facility last year and ultimately lost her life, sparking months of anti-regime protests.
According to Sotoudeh’s husband, Reza Khandan, his wife and other detained women have now arrived at the infamous Qarchak Prison in the south of the capital, but Zarrabi who suffered a convulsive episode was freed.
Khandan who spoke to his wife on the phone briefly when she was at Vozara says both women who refused to wear the hijab as demanded by the agents were assaulted even more badly and that his wife has been rejecting food and her medication in detention.
Prominent Female Islamic Scholar Sedigheh Vasmaghi who in an open letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei strongly challenged his edict over hijab was also assaulted by four agents after the funeral but was reportedly rescued by other people at the scene.
Vasmaghi who used to wear a black veil for years now appears with no hijab. She has argued that there is no evidence in Sharia that women must cover their hair. She has become a campaigner for abolition of compulsory hijab.
“We will establish women’s freedom to choose their clothing to honor the deaths of Mahsa and Armita,” she wrote in an Instagram post Sunday after the assault.
According to Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, a member of the Cooperation Council of Iranian Teachers’ Unions, Masoud Zeinalzadeh, and Mohammad Geravand, one of Armita’s relatives, were among those detained at the funeral.
Activist and former political prisoner Shahriar Shams was among those beaten by plainclothesmen after the funeral.
“They took him into their van and demanded his mobile passcode. They beat him up badly when he refused to do so … Then they searched his backpack … They took his cash to let him go and told him he had to pay for his freedom. We took him to the hospital tonight and the doctor said he must get an MRI due to the possibility of [serious] neck injury,” Ali Nanvayi, Shams’ friend,wrote on X.
Students in several universities on Monday honored Armita Geravand whose death was announced after twenty-eight days of coma by hanging posters on the walls and graffiti.
At Tehran’s prestigious Sharif University of Technology, the Islamic Association of Students posted photos of Armita, Mahsa Amini, Nika Shakarami, Sarina Esmailzadeh, and other young girls killed during last year’s nationwide protests on their notice board.
One of the posters on the board, which was later cleared by the university security, simple asked, “Did Armita Geravand Die [or Got Killed]?” while another said, may the day come when God reveals his punishment so “child-killers cannot find fault with other child-killers”.
This could be a reference to the Islamic Republic, which has never taken responsibility for the deaths of these teenagers and tried to justify them with far-fetched scenarios such as suicide and falling from rooftops that few have believed, calling Israel “the child-killing regime”.
