Revolutionary Guards destroyed 6,000 satellite dishes in Shiraz on January 20 as part of a ceremony celebrating Iran’s “Fortification of Honor and Nobility.”

“Satellite dishes are a silent invasion,” announced Gholamhossein Gheybpour, commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards of Fars Province. “They target the foundations of the family and seek to deprive society of its religious values. And, unfortunately, they have been successful to some extent.”

The destruction of the dishes took place at the city’s Bahaman Stadium and Commander Gheybpour said households had “voluntarily” given up the dishes, doing their part to “promote religious values”.

“Nobody is against science and history,” he said, but those involved in the business of supplying satellite dishes or transmitting content via them are “not concerned about public virtues”. “I ask the people to do some research on the effects of satellites on their family life and to not surrender everything they have to foreigners who do not care about our lives.”

Fars Revolutionary Guards held a similar ceremony in September 2014 at the shrine of Seyed Alaedin Hossein in Shiraz. In that ceremony, forces destroyed 800 satellite dishes and receivers using military tanks.

The 2014 ceremony coincided with President Rouhani’s trip to the United States, where he told an audience, “The goal of the Iranian government is to provide public access to information; if you look at the rooftops in Iran, you will see even people in small villages have access to satellite channels.”

Gheybpour described this week’s ceremony, in which an unprecedented number of dishes were destroyed, as “an innovation” to coincide with “delivering digital systems to national television”.

The Guards published a statement that said they had taken a “meaningful symbolic measure” and dismissed criticism and “scandals” spread by what they called the “hostile media.” Some of the photographs the media had published cast the ceremony in a bad light, they claimed.

Watch Naja Warriors: The Battle Against Satanic Dishes, a satirical video by a citizen journalist about clampdowns on satellite dishes in Tehran.

Read the original article in Persian