Strong reactions by Iranian people and authorities were provoked by a video appeared on Google Video Website, where the Azeri provincial capital , Tabriz , is specified as being in Azerbaijan, rather than Iran.

For those who have some problem with middle-east geographical evolutions, Tabriz and southern Azerbaijan have belonged to Iran for more than 4,000 years.
Mistakes are very common on the Internet, they are part of  the nature itself of the web, and they can be corrected quite easily in most of cases.

But this time, the matter seems to be far more complicated, indeed the Iranian Information Technology Ministry denounced it as a sort of a deliberate attempt to “undermine Iran’s integrity” and incited Iranian people to flood Google with mails, because "this act is a typical example of interference in the affairs of another country," said Samad Mohmen Bela, the IT ministry's representative in parliament. "The simplest, most effective response is for all Iranian users to reflect their objection to Google's management."

This opinion is shared by many Iranian people, as  an Iranian MP explained to the “Guardian Unlimited” :   "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?"

And the local  press itself accused Google of “strange, suspicious and dubious act".

Well, in a way this concern is quite comprehensible: Tabriz is one of the most important cities in the history of Iran, and for an Iranian man it represents the same as Waterloo for the Britons or Granada for Spanish people..

This isn’t the first time that protest spread out  for similar “social-geographical mistakes”, indeed earlier this year a wave of violence shake the whole province when a cartoon was published in a Farsi-language newspaper depicting a cockroach speaking in the local Azeri tongue.
And two years ago, the National Geographic was strongly criticized and invaded with protest-mails for labelling the sea between southern Iran and neighbouring Arab states as the Arabian not the Persian Gulf.
Immediately,  web surfers  launched “Google bombs” :  any time a person googled for “Arabic gulf”  it lead to a web page  reporting "The gulf you are looking for does not exist, try Persian Gulf".
 As if those protests weren’t enough, the magazine was banned in Iran and its  reporters and journalists were pushed out the country.

Anyone still saying that geography isn’t worth studying?

Comments Index (Total Messages: 4)

solution Written by Guest on 2006-11-15 13:16:11

this are not errors.. Written by Guest on 2006-11-15 22:46:51

why just happen to Iran Written by Guest on 2006-11-16 12:38:01 Reap what you sow Written by Guest on 2006-11-29 16:47:45

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