Iran News Round Up

(Thanks to Ali Alfoneh for his compilation)

(The round-ups will continue to be slow and short during the extended Nowruz holiday when most Iranian papers do not publish)

Politics

Supreme Leader Khamenei names the Iranian year 1387 as the year of “Innovation and Flourishing;” 1386 had been the “Year of Unity and Islamic Consolidation.”

Religion, Culture, and Society

The decision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, both television and radio, abstain from playing traditional Persian music hailing the coming of the new year, provoking angry commentaries among Amir Kabir Polytechnical University online newspaper’s readership. Many comments say the Islamic Republic is Arabizing Iran.
Amid questions over his interview with Voice of America, Ali Daee, coach of the national football team, says he is not political.
Deutsche Welle’s Persian service publishes an analysis of Ahmadinejad’s new year speech in which he claimed the (pre-Islamic) Iranian new year Nowrouz was a Shi’i ritual of awaiting the 12th Imam.

Diplomacy

Egypt tells Iran that U.S. nuclear submarine which passed through Suez Canal is heading for Persian Gulf.
General Masoud Jazayeri, deputy chief of the General Command Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran Armed Forces, to the Emirati newspaper Al-Khaleej: “The Zionist regime is weakened from within, and is not able to commit anything but terrorist acts, assassinations and kidnappings… The count down has begun for the demise of Israel, and this regime will cease to be sooner or later… America is a prisoner in the quagmire of Afghanistan and Iraq and the American people want to withdraw their forces…The U.S. is weakened under present conditions and is not planning to start a new war… One can’t rule out the possibility of irrational behavior, but we must stress that if the U.S. attacks us, they can’t decide how the war ends, since Iran knows how to manage the war and to make the enemy regret…The countries of the Persian Gulf region have no reason to fear Iran’s nuclear program… Iran has improved her relations with Arab neighbors ever since the revolution…The U.S. president Bush is a war criminal and should be tried as such…The latest Persian Gulf incident and the sudden U.S. silencing of the affair is yet another example of U.S. miscalculations…The armed forces in the Islamic Republic are indoctrinated to abide by the principle of non-intervention of the armed forces in politics, and what military commanders mention with regard to political affairs is not intervention in the politics of groups or factions, but shows the level of their political awareness. Their support for principles is not support for The Principalist Alliance, but principalism as an ideal in the Islamic Republic…When it comes to our military industry, it was our dependence on the U.S. which debilitated our military industry. Now we have learned to rely upon ourselves.”
Chris De Burgh reaffirms intention to perform in Islamic Republic.
Foreign Ministers of Persephone countries, Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, discuss their political, economic and cultural relations in Dushanbe.

Economy and Trade