Quick to condemn as a "violation of freedom of expression" the revocation of the licence of a television station which blatantly called for and helped organize a coup d’état, European countries have no qualms about the silencing, on obviously fallacious arguments, of satellite TV stations that criticize their policies.
We may recall in 2004 the decision of the French State Council to ban the Hezbollah channel, Al Manar, for allegedly disturbing public order, or more recently the European Union’s decision to order Libya’s state TV channel off the air during NATO aggression against the country, or the banning of Syrian channels in view of a possible war.

Today, it is Ofcom, the government-approved media regulatory authority, which removed the broadcasting license of international news channel Press TV Iran, for airing an interview with Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist imprisoned in Iran, which was allegedly conducted under duress and for the broadcaster’s failure and refusal to pay a fine of 100,000 pounds.

The journalist was jailed in Iran for a little over three months for comparing Supreme Leader Khamenei to the Shah of Iran, the dictator who was put in power in 1952 by the CIA and British MI6, then deposed in 1979, and who is considered in Iran as the equivalent of any one of the great European dictators. The monarch had recruited as head of the dreaded secret police, General Zahedi, a former Nazi.

At any rate, if this type of slander is not liable to imprisonment in states belonging to the Council of Europe, it is absurd to ban a television channel from broadcasting on the pretext that it has done an interview of Mr. Bahari in prison.

In the context of a concerted campaign to isolate the Islamic Republic and its anti-imperialist channel transmitting worldwide, the ban reflects the state of disarray gripping the Atlantic powers on the decline, which have reached the point of violating the very principles they are supposed to stand for when it comes to criticizing Iran.