Less than four months after a mob attacked the British Embassy in Tehran and forced its closure, the regime has blocked a new British government website designed to keep open channels of communication with the Iranian people.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office launched “UK for Iranians” last Wednesday to give visa advice, information on Britain and “an accurate and undistorted picture of the UK’s policies towards Iran and the Middle East”. It survived just three days before it was blocked on Saturday.
William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, condemned the move yesterday.
“We have no quarrel with the Iranian people and regret that the Iranian authorities fear their own citizens’ interaction and involvement with the outside world,” he said.
The regime’s move was part of an escalating crackdown on British influence in Iran in particular, and Western influence in general.
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Last week Mark Thompson, the BBC Director-General, accused the regime of launching a cyber-attack against BBC Persian in addition to jamming the Farsi-language station’s satellite signal and arresting relatives of its London-based journalists. The regime has driven out British diplomats and journalists, and even banned advertising of the few British goods that are still exported to Iran.
More broadly, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, announced the formation last week of a Supreme Council of Cyberspace to purge from Iran’s internet all sites deemed a threat to the country’s morality and national security. Its membership is said to include top military, intelligence and media officials.
“We have identified and confronted 650 websites that have been set up to battle our regime,” Hamid Shahriari, a conservative cleric who will sit on the Council, told the semi-official Mehr news agency.
“Thirty-nine of them are by opposition groups and our enemies, and the rest promote Western culture and worshipping Satan, and stoke sectarian divides.
Mr Hague said: “Iran’s people have had to ensure an ever-tightening stranglehold of censorship. The blocking of our website is only a part of what Iranians undergo daily: millions of websites blocked, access to e-mail denied, international television channels jammed, films and theatre productions closed down, books unpublished, traditional Persian literature rewritten and newspapers banned.”