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November 13, 2006

Google Angers Iranians With Redrawn Map

Topics: Internet

Google, which lives in the land of the great satan, has angered the Iranians with a video that places the ancient city of Tabriz in the Azerbaijan republic instead of Iran. As the Iranians see it, the video is a U.S. plot to intervene in Iran's internal affairs:

Google has provoked the wrath of Iran's notoriously suspicious authorities by appearing to question the country's sovereignty over the province of Azerbaijan in an entry on its Google Video website.

In a move tailor-made to wound Iranian patriotic pride and arouse a blizzard of protest, the Azeri provincial capital, Tabriz, is located "in southern Azerbaijan, currently in the territory of Iran". To add insult to injury, the ancient city is listed as being in Azerbaijan, rather than Iran. Tabriz and southern Azerbaijan have belonged to Iran for more than 4,000 years.

The text of a tourist film on the site has drawn accusations that the US-owned search engine is deliberately trying to undermine Iran's territorial integrity by fomenting separatist sentiment in the mainly Turkish-speaking province.

Valiallah Azarvash, an Iranian MP, said: "An Iranian never accepts such slights. Since the second millennium BC, eastern Azerbaijan and Tabriz have never been separated from the body of Iran. How can they now belong somewhere else?"

The information technology ministry has branded the entry an attempt to intervene in Iran's internal affairs and has urged Iranians to flood Google with emails.

Two things jumped out to me about this article - its in the al-Guardian, a British Islamophylic and Iranian apologist, and two, the Iranians will use anything to stir up anti-Americanism. As for Google's nomenclature in their video being a U.S. plot, given Google's left-leaning history, that's a bit of a stretch.

Posted by Mike in Iraq at November 13, 2006 4:56 AM

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