If the hero lived in Finland or in the UK, he would be arrested for incitement of religious beliefs.
It also pains me to read the BBC article, knowing full well that the Beeb is chock-full of anti-free speech types who love to smear anti-Islamization activists on a regular basis, all in the name of multiculturalism and conformity.
The satirist who mocks Iran’s ayatollahs
What Iranian would dare mock his country’s religious leaders online?
He runs a Facebook and Twitter account in Persian using a fictional character to parody the religious politics of Iran’s imams and mullahs. BBC Trending spoke to the man behind Ayatollah Tanasoli – which can be translated as “Ayatollah Genitals” or “Ayatollah Penis.”
Tanasoli has 20,000 likes on Facebook and 7,000 followers on Twitter – not enormous numbers but significant for Iran, where many people are afraid of openly aligning themselves with scathing satire and criticism.
His persona is that of a ridiculous and hypocritical hard-liner who seems to completely lack self-awareness.
- “We condemn any sort of violence, except for the violence we commit ourselves.”
- “If they had Islamic democracy in France, just like ours, those cartoonists wouldn’t have been assassinated; they would have been hanged ten years earlier.”
- “Islam values women’s rights, especially the rights of those women who give birth to male children.”
