The rising cost of chicken in Iran has prompted the country's police
chief to urge broadcasters to censor it from television screens in the
interests of social harmony.
Against a backdrop of lengthening food queues,
Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, the head of Iran's law enforcement forces, has
warned that films depicting scenes of chicken dinners could provoke the
underprivileged classes to attack the rich.
"They show chicken being eaten in movies while somebody might not be able to buy it," Mr Ahmadi-Moghaddam, brother-in-law of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told a law enforcement officers conference in Tehran.
"Films are now the windows of
society and some people observing this class gap might say that we will
take knives and take our rights from the rich. IRIB [Iran's state
broadcaster] should not be the shop window for showing all which is not
accessible."
The warning is the
latest sign of official alarm over the strains being caused by rampant
inflation and international sanctions aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear
programme, which the West suspects is intended to produce an atom bomb,
despite Tehran's denials.
The
country's already creaking economy suffered a further blow this month
when a EU boycott of Iranian oil sales took effect, at the same time as a
fresh US embargo penalising countries that continued to buy Iran's
crude.
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