Big Budget For Iran’s State TV Leads To Criticism Amid Money Crunch

Both Iranian and Chinese flags were beamed onto the well-known landmark for several hours during a ceremony Sunday attended by the Chinese ambassador. Tehran municipality officials said the ‘video-mapping’ had been proposed by the Iran-China Friendship Association.

Foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian posted a photo of the event on Twitter Sunday evening, offering good wishes to the Chinese government and people for New Year and over hosting the Beijing Winter Olympics. "We will implement the comprehensive cooperation plan between the two countries with vigorous energy, so that the second 50-year-old Iran-China relationship will be even more powerful!" Amir-Abdollahian wrote in his tweet.

But the display of the Chinese flag was too much for some social media activists who detected a sign of "concessions" to Beijing and "Iran's colonialization by China."

"God on the same level as the Communist stars?” one Twitteratus opined. “Do you know what you are doing Mr. Abdollahian? Haven't you seen the Iranian people's reaction? Or maybe it's more important to keep the Chinese happy rather than us people…?”

Twitterati left angry comments under Amir-Abdollahian's post, with one using the hashtag No-to-Chinese-Globalism and evoking the 1979 slogan "Neither West, Nor East.”

"You have dressed the symbol of Iranian's freedom and independence in the flag of a foreign power and felicitate them on colonizing you. Happy anniversary of the Revolution!" another angry comment read.

While some Iranians take umbrage at Iran’s efforts to expand relations with China, and especially at the 25-year cooperation pact agreed in March, China’s regional role is growing fast.

The New York Times noted Tuesday that “in January alone, five senior officials from oil-rich Arab monarchies visited China,” and suggested that for a range of Middle Eastern countries “China promises to be a long-term buyer of oil and gas and a potential source of investment, without the political complications involved in doing business with the United States.”

Some Twitterati defended the display of the Chinese flag, noting that video-mapping national monuments with other countries' flags or symbols on suitable occasions was done widely around the world. One posted a photo of video-mapping of the Eiffel Tower in Paris in tribute to 16 Iranian firefighters who lost their lives in incident in Tehran in 2018.

The Islamic Republic's expanding relations and long-term partnership with China has stirred much controversy among Iranians, particularly since March 2021 when Iran and China signed a 25-year cooperation pact.

Built in 1971, the Azadi monument was originally named Shahyad (the Shah’s Monument) but renamed after the ruler was toppled by the 1979 Revolution.

Health Minister Bahram Eynollahi said on Wednesday that some of the proposals about nationwide lockdowns by the ministry are not approved by the country’s Covid-19 taskforce despite the increasing rate of infections and hospitalizations.

Eynollahi said when the contagion reaches a peak, patchy quarantine or isolation of cases will be ineffective, calling for a total lockdown.

The authorities’ hesitation to announce nationwide shutdowns may be attributed to the government plans to hold celebrations, including nationwide rallies to mark the anniversary of the 1979 revolution.

This would not the first time the Islamic Republic prioritizing official events over the health and safety of people. There were media allegations that authorities played down the threat from Covid back in early 2020 so as not to deter voting in the parliament election.

Last Thursday, the health minister announced the start of the sixth wave of the coronavirus pandemic as hospitals reported an increasing number of referrals related to the highly infectious Omicron variant.

According to latest reports, over 40 cities are designated as “red zones”, which means hotspots with the highest number of cases, while the daily verified cases on Wednesday were over 38,000.

Radio Farda, a United States-funded station and based in the Czech Republic, reported Tuesday it had been given the “highly confidential” document by the ‘Edalat-e Ali’ group and published an account, the day after the group hacked live streaming on the website of Iranian state television.

Edalat-e Ali released the document on Twitter Wednesday, saying the minutes were from a November meeting of IRGC's ‘Livelihood-Based Security Crises Prevention Taskforce.’ They record an intelligence official, whose surname is given as Mohammadi, citing a survey that social discontent had increased by 300 percent in the previous year. "The society is boiling over and may explode,” the official reportedly said.

The hackers said the meeting took place at the IRGC Sarallah Headquarters, responsible for the security of Tehran, on November 21 with representatives of various bodies including the Tehran Prosecutor's Office, the intelligence ministry, police, and IRGC intelligence.

The minutes recorded Mohammadi saying that "several shocks” − including a fall in the stock market prices – had led Iranians to doubt the ability of President Ebrahim Raisi's government, which took office in August, to improve the situation and warned that protests were taking place over high inflation, delays in paying wages, and water shortage.

A police officer, ‘Colonel Kaviani,’ said that since the beginning of the Iranian calendar year on March 21 there had been a year-on-year increase of 48 percent in protest rallies with a 98 percent increase in participants, mainly in front of the parliament and the ministry of labor. He predicted a 22 percent increase in protests in subsequent months.

In the past few months many Iranian media and politicians have warned that economic pressures may lead to social upheavals. Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei said Monday, according to the IRGC-linked Javan newspaper, that people might lose trust in politics "if they see that social justice is diminishing."

Funeral of the Islamic Republic

Ahmad Naderi, a conservative member of parliament, on January 30 blamed the previous administration of President Hassan Rouhani administration for economic woes but also criticized Raisi’s draft budget bill. “We will reach a point where we will see great social upheavals if these approaches [in the economy] continue,” he said.

Hawks in the United States have for years argued that US ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions, which sent the Iranian economy from growth to deep recession in the two years after 2018, should be stepped up to foment social unrest.

The nature and motivation of the hackers Edalat-e Ali are unclear. The group appeared last August by circulating footage from security cameras in Tehran's Evin prison and recently hacked television coverage of the Iran-United Arab Emirates football match with a video showing Guy Fox masks from the 2005 US-British film V for Vendetta.

The group said they wanted to turn the ten-day celebration of the 1979 Revolution into "the funeral of the Islamic Republic.” Edalat-e Ali group's name evokes the first of the twelve Shiite Imams, Ali, but may also refer to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The State Department’s Reward for Justice Program said in a statement on Tuesday that Mohammad-Hosein Musa-Kazemi and Sajjad Kashian sought to sow discord and undermine voters’ faith in the US electoral process.

The two contractors employed by Iranian cyber company Emennet Pasargad (formerly known as Eeleyanet Gostar) “participated in an Iranian state-sponsored, multi-phased online operation that attempted to interfere with the 2020 US presidential election” from at least August through November 2020, read the statement.

Kashian managed computer network infrastructure while Kazemi helped to carry out the campaign by compromising servers that were used to send the threatening voter emails, preparing emails for the voter threat email campaign, and compromising the email accounts of an American media company.

The cyber company provides cyber capabilities and support to Iran’s Intelligence Ministry Security as well as to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the IRGC-Qods Force – both of which are designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

Both hackers face sanctions and federal criminal charges in connection with their activities, the statement added.

Iranian sociologist Taghi Azad-Armaki, a professor at the University of Tehran, added in an interview with Etemad Newspaper in Tehran on Tuesday, that policies by successive governments, sanctions, and a decline in Iran's per capita income have decimated Iran's middle class.

The academic argued that throughout its history Iran has often been a country with three socio-economic classes: A ruling affluent class, an underprivileged class, and a middle class that always represented the country’s values and brought about fundamental changes. He also argued that all social developments in Iran had something to do with the dynamics between social classes.

Only one month after President Ebrahim Raisi took office, as he continued to make economic promises, Eghtesad News, the country's leading economic website warned him that "The country's middle class was declining as a result of major economic crises." The website reminded that coupled with the coronavirus pandemic, the economic crisis caused by sanctions, has left the country's middle class out of breath, while also exerting massive pressure on the underprivileged people.

Meanwhile, in December last year, Hashem Pesaran, a Cambridge University academic, said that inflationary pressure and taxes annihilate the middle class and the foundations of society. There will be no middle class to read books, travel the world, learn, and teach and convey the culture of democracy.

Pesaran opined that the elimination of the middle class will inevitably lead to the destruction of the government. He argued that under the current situation, Iranian society is likely to be turned into a bipolar society in which the affluent class and the underprivileged will have to face each other in a fierce confrontation.

"A conflict will certainly take place and that is very dangerous. The former will be blinded by pride and the latter by grudge. The affluent class will become increasingly conservative and will hide behind bureaucratic organizations and the angry poor people will be looking for an opportunity to attack and take revenge. When there is tsunami, everyone sinks, no matter how big their ship is," Dr. Pesaran warned.

He added that if there is a strong middle class it will act as a shock absorber that facilitates interaction between the other two classes.

In his interview with Etemad, Dr. Armaki pointed out that the two revolutions in Iran's modern history, the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 and the Islamic Revolution of 1979 were both motivated by class struggle. The Constitutional revolution took place as the middle class joined hands with ruling class (landowners).

In the Islamic revolution, the middle class formed an alliance with the lower class to bring about a massive change. Armaki argued that in both cases the middle class was the driving force for social change. The academic further argued that the Islamic Republic has annihilated Iran's middle class because it knew that it was capable of bringing about two major revolutions in less than a hundred years. The Islamic Republic, said Armaki, has manipulated the middle class, has exerted economic pressure on it and in an optimistic scenario, it simply ignored it for decades, allowing it to decline.

Armaki said that all the post-revolution governments have contributed to this dynamic by ignoring concepts such as democracy, civil society and sustainable development. He said the reform government in mid-1990s was the only Iranian government that paid attention to these factors but came under fire by totalitarian groups and political figures.