The Iranian "Movement of Students for Pursuing Justice" is offering rewards for the killing of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Mossad director Meir Dagan, and military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin.
MEMRI has identified a site that is promoting this effort - adlroom.com - but neglected to mention that this site has a domain name registration maintained by a US company and that it is hosted by a US company. Providing such services is a violation of US sanctions against Iran.
adlroom.com: site of the glorious Islamic revolution,
hosted in the USA
A plain english explanation of US sanctions as relates to hosting websites is this: if a website offers news, information and opinions not commonly available in the Islamic Republic of Iran - e.g. it is a site that is opposed to the Ayatollah's regime) - then, on a case by case basis, the US Treasury may at its discretion allow such a site to receive services from a US company.
Even a cursory look at adlroom.com by a non-Farsi reader will reveal this to be a site that represents the most radical of pro-regime opinions from within the Islamic Republic, and so it seems unlikely that the Treasury would in this case grant an exemption to the sanctions.
In addition the site was associated with the Holocaust cartoon contest promoted by Iranian President Ahmadinijad (see for example, this link).
A 26 September 2007 story released by the Open Source Center and prepared by BBC Monitoring is titled Iran's Latin American Policy: Romantic Ideology or Practical Politics?. In it, the adlroom site is discussed as follows:
Vocal supporters of Ahmadinezhad's aggressive policy write for adlroom.com, a website dedicated to strengthening ties with the Latin American states. The site has a special section on world resistance front that includes speeches of Fidel Castro, and anti-imperialist news from Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia. It has a special section opposed to negotiations with Uncle Sam.Signs of this outreach effort are not hard to find on the site:
And who else supports Columbian terrorist group FARC?
(Hint: first name "Hugo")
Returning now to the Iran/USA connection, we count the following among the "dirty little secrets" uncovered in the course of six years of activity by the Internet Haganah:
US sanctions against Iran and Iranian rhetoric against the USA notwithstanding, most Iranian websites are hosted in the United States. The last time we tried to produce a list of all those Iranian sites we abandoned the effort when the list grew to more than 10,000. Better to focus occasionally on particularly egregious examples such as:
Name: adlroom.com
Address: 74.124.198.61
Host: InMotion Hosting, Marina Del Rey, California, USA
Domain name registrar: ONLINENIC, INC., San Francisco, California, USA
Domain name reseller (onlinenic's customer): Identified only as "Domain Registrar" with the following phone number: +97.145646456
Domain name registrant:
PASAD
info@pasad.com
+98.218319048
pasad.com
Tehran, IRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF 164444
It is messy little situations like this that explain why the domain name registrars would like to not have to publish any whois information for domain names. They would rather not be held accountable for who it is they provide services to even - or perhaps especially when - that provision of service is itself a violation of law.
Posted on 13 March 2008 @ 15:21