Thursday, June 13, 2002

Iran is now broadcasting the news in Hebrew on shortwave. I listened to it at http://www.irib.com. - and it's actually very tame. It starts with a lot of techno music, then there's an inoffensive newscast, more techno music, and then two "messages" from leaders of the Iranian Jewish community about how they able to practice their religion in freedom and get along with everyone.

The announcer has a heavy accent that made it difficult to understand anything that I hadn't already heard about, but the text that he was reading from was in almost perfect journalistic Hebrew. The newscast led with something about a meeting between EU and Iranian officials; other than that it was all short Israel-related items. Actually it sounded like a professional translation of a wire service. The other strange thing was that instead of saying "Yerushalyim", they would say "the holy city".

Update: Not to be paranoid or anything, but maybe the Iranians are concerned that Israel is about to knock out their nuclear weapons program - and are trying to charm us out of it.

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