Guard blames US, Israel for anti-govt rallies
TEHRAN: The Iranian Parliament held a closed-door meeting on Sunday to discuss the deadly protests that hit the country last week, while more pro-regime rallies were held in several cities.
Lawmakers interrogated Interior Minister Abdolrahmani Rahmani Fazli, Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi and Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani, Parliament’s ICANA website reported.
Some voiced concern over the Internet controls put in place during the unrest, including a ban on Iran’s most popular messaging app, Telegram, which officials said had been used to incite violence.
“The Parliament is not in favor of keeping Telegram filtering in place, but it must pledge that it will not be used as a tool by the enemies of the Iranian people,” Behrouz Nemati, spokesman for the Parliament’s presiding board, wrote on Instagram, which was also temporarily blocked during the unrest.
Many Iranians use Telegram as their main source of news and a way of bypassing the highly restrictive state media, with almost a third of Iran’s 80 million people using the app daily.
Some 9,000 online businesses have been disrupted by the blocking, semiofficial news agency ISNA reported, quoting a report by the Culture Ministry’s digital media center.
Pro-government rallies were again held in several cities on Sunday, this time in Qazvin, Rasht, Shahr-e-Kurd and Yazd.
Tens of thousands of people have participated in similar rallies in the past few days.
The rallies are “the people’s response to the rioters and troublemakers and their supporters,” said state television.
It also repeated official claims that the unrest was orchestrated by the US and Israel with the complicity of “anti-revolutionary” groups.
In a statement on its website, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard also blamed the unrest on the US and Israel, as well as an exiled opposition group known as the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, and supporters of the monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 revolution.
The US and Israel have expressed support for the protests, but deny allegations of fomenting them.