The laughable propaganda coming out of the Iranian regime aimed at the British authorities’ handling of recent riots has descended to even more embarrassing levels.
Not content with publicly criticizing UK police “brutality” and “human rights abuses”, Iran has published photos of the riots to illustrate their point.
Or have they?
The Guardian reports:
Iranian media affiliated to the Islamic regime have been accused of using library images from different times and locations in Britain and other parts of the world to portray the UK riots as “the uprising of the oppressed against the British monarchy“.
Soon after the rioting broke out, the Iranian regime seized on the unrest to get back at the British government by condemning what it described as “the violent suppression of the political opposition and the oppressed”.
But in recent days Iran‘s online community and blogosphere have shown that pictures published in the regime’s news agencies and daily newspapers were taken at different times and places.
Most were published by the semi-official Fars news agency, whose paymasters are the elite revolutionary guards, and Keyhan newspaper, which is under the direct control of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Pictures provided by Fars are widely used in other media groups across Iran.
An Iranian who blogs under the name Gomnamian has devoted significant time to demonstrating where some of the pictures used by Fars were published beforehand. Fars deleted some pictures once word spread across the web.
Among the pictures is a one of a man whose face is covered in blood, which the Daily Mail had published in September 2010 alongside a story about security plans ahead of a football match between Manchester United and Rangers.
Another photo used by Fars was taken from a 2009 London protest in support of the Palestinians.
One appeared to be from Chile, and featured a road sign in Spanish.
One image showed a street full of police but was actually taken at the Notting Hill carnival in 2008.
A picture showing police on horseback was from the miners’ strike in 1984.
Perhaps we could laugh off these rather pathetic efforts by the Iranian regime and its media at anti-British propaganda. Except that Iran is a brutal, terror-sponsoring state seeking nuclear weapons capability and represents a threat not only to Israel but the entire civilized world.
Isn’t it time that the UK finally shut downs Press TV and prevents Iranian propaganda reaching British television screens?
