Hoviyat
Hovyiat (Template:Lang-fa, "Identity") was a biweekly TV program on Iran's IRIB's Channel 1 in 1996. The program's objective was said to be "confrontation with western cultural invasion."[citation needed] The series targeted a broad range of Iranian intellectuals (secular as well as religious modernists), archeologists, artists, scientists and national leaders as Mohammad Mosaddeq.[citation needed]
It has been described by critics as part of an "ideological campaign" by the Ministry of Intelligence "to paint Westernized [Iranian] intellectuals and artists as unpatriotic, un-Islamic, a threat to Iran's national and religious identity,"[1] and which included the "chain murders" of Iranian intellectuals that also occurred during the 1990s.[1][2]
The show is said to have "specialized in naming intellectuals as `hired agents` of the Bahais, Zionists, Freemasons," and foreign powers.[2] A signature of the program was the morphing of an image of American Benjamin Franklin on the American hundred-dollar bill, "into the face of the Iranian intellectual under attack." [1]
One Iranian dissident, Faraj Sarkohi, was kidnapped by security officials after (amongst other things) publishing an article "critical" of `Hoviyyat.` He was "tortured to `make and remake` videotapes confessing to being a `foreign spy` and giving outrageous lies about his own and his colleagues' sex lives," before being released.[3]
Responsibles
Targets of the propaganda
- Mohammad Mosaddeq
- Ahmad Tafazzoli
- Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub
- Ezzatollah Sahabi
- Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani
- Nasrollah Pourjavadi
See also
References
- ^ a b c My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran By Haleh Esfandiari, p.136-7
- ^ a b Tortured confessions: prisons and public recantations in modern Iran, Ervand Abrahamian - 1999, p.222
- ^ Tortured confessions: prisons and public recantations in modern Iran, Ervand Abrahamian - 1999, Page 227