Smash hit

Journalists say that Iran’s supreme national security council has put out an order censoring any item that might be seen to weaken the resolve of the nation as a whole, or needlessly create anxiety. As a result there is no dissenting voice on the issue even from the opposition reformists.

“Don’t worry too much about the sanctions,” the council’s chief, Ali Larijani, told reporters this week. “They won’t happen, and if they do, sanctions will harm those who impose them more.”

Access to other sources of news was curtailed this week when the police began raiding rooftops in Tehran to remove satellite dishes.

Watching satellite television has been illegal as it is seen as the conveyor of decadent western culture. But the ban had not been enforced for a few years and the new campaign has angered many among the 1.5m owners of satellite receivers in Iran who had been drawn to BBC, CNN and others.

Hardline Iranian leaders say that sanctions will not cause Iran many more problems than there are already as Iran has been under US sanctions for many years. They say that Iran will be able to weather a new round of sanctions just like it did during a bloody eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s under most stringent western sanctions.

The war in Lebanon has emboldened Iranian leaders who see the outcome as a victory for Hezbollah, which they helped to create in the 1980s.

Posters of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, have appeared all over Tehran and other big cities as the face of the new hero of the Islamic republic.

“Your victory is the victory of Islam,” said Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a message to Nasrallah. “It shattered the myth of the Zionist army’s invincibility.”

While they have been celebrating Hezbollah’s “victory”, the Iranians also suspect the fighting may have been a dress rehearsal for an attack by US or Israel to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities.

One senior cleric reminded Israel this week that Iran’s Shahab-3 missile has a range of 2,000km, considerably longer than those owned by Hezbollah. The Iranian army has also begun a series of military manoeuvres throughout the country “to show off Iran’s military power to the enemies”.

The celebrations are also being marked by the opening of an international exhibition in Tehran of cartoons mocking the Holocaust — which, according to Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a myth. The cartoons were solicited by a newspaper here on its website to counter what it calls “western taboos about the Holocaust”.

The exhibition is aimed at questioning the right of Israel to exist. So does Ahmadinejad — he has called for it to be wiped off the map. No wonder ordinary Iranians, as they go about their shopping, are quietly fearful of the future.

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