Modesty Forbids

We have seen Iranians complaining that Western women's dress appearances are too rude for Iranian male religious sensibilities on a number of occasions, mostly around sports such as the Winter Olympics, and the World Cup. We have even seen them altering pictures that showed too much contact between an Iranian male, and the non Muslim widow of a family friend, when he offered the simple hand of comfort during her grieving.

However what I hadn't realised until recently, was that there is in fact apparently an entire industry in many arenas of the Iranian media for photo-shop experts, whose sole task is to carefully censor pictures of non Muslim women that have to be shown in the Iranian media, to make them look like Muslims ... or rather, to make them appear to conform to the dress codes of a Muslim woman.

Examples exposed by the press have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous with the modest Michelle Obama getting the treatment .....

Mrs Obama Before and After the Censorship

Then there was the even more modest and matronly European Union foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton who also offended their dress sensibilities.

Catherine Ashton Before and After Press Censorship

Oh and in case you were wondering how they deal with these issues on TV .... well they either just pan away from shots of Western women (and even their own females in the case of coverage of the country's successful female volleyball team, with complaints over the "un-Islamic" clothes worn by women, in the crowd of a tournament held in Sardinia .... although this probably means the non-muslim women), or they simply blur them out .... Mrs Ashton gets the treatment again.

Mrs Ashton Blurred From History ....

I don't think I really have to add a comment to all of this abnormal behaviour ..... there are almost times when I actually feel sorry for them to live in such a world and with such a sad world view of half of the human race  .... but only almost.