A funny thing happened this morning, when I received a phone call from someone claiming to be a prisoner in an Iranian jail. There was a lot of talk in the background, as if the call was made in a train station or an airport. The caller asked me what the American Government was going to do next? Would there be more sanctions or what?
I said I didn’t work in the government and had no knowledge of their intentions.
Why didn’t the government punish the leaders? He asked.
They have, I said. Several individuals have been identified by Treasury as targets for punishment.
What will the US Government do for us? He asked, adding that if America invaded Iran, most Iranians would support it.
You have to ask the government these questions, I said.
Can you put me in touch with someone in the government? He continued.
No. I’m a writer, not a government official.
And so it ended there. I told him I hoped he would get out of jail…
The phone number listed on my phone was 33331727290. Assuming that’s an international call, it came from France. But of course the number can be falsified if, as I rather imagine, it came thanks to an Iranian government agency.
It seems to me that the caller was trying to get me to say something to indicate that I was working for Obama. After all, I’m regularly accused of being an organizer of the opposition movement, and the tyrants in Tehran seem to believe that the US Government, in cahoots with the evil Zionists, is the moving force behind it all.
And so they came up with this clever scheme (NOT).
I was not the only writer to receive a provocation from Iran today. A well known journalist friend of mine got an email claiming to come from an Iranian living in Tehran that said, in part,
We are an opposition group. We love our patriot but not this regime we want change this regime and for this project we have ideas:
In Tehran, we know where Khamenei(Leader of regime), President Ahmadinejad and other leaders of regime live, we know their houses and their families.If you provide our necessairy and protect us we can hit them.Also we can make explode a microbiological bomb in Tehran near a military laboratory of pasdaran organization where I know, then media broadcast in the world…
I wonder how many others have received similar provocations…Journalists writing freely are a great threat to the regime, as Khamenei said last year:
“Today, the most effective international weapon against enemies and opposition is the weapon of propaganda and the media. Today, this is the most powerful weapon and it is even worse and more dangerous than the atomic bomb.
And so they’re busily trying to manufacture “proof.” Which comes naturally to them, to put it mildly.
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