“Decadence, Satellite TV and Cell Phones have Spoiled our Youth”

Reza Shirozhan, the Deputy Police Chief for Social Affairs of Lorestan Province, says the youth and the students face a threatening triumvirate: decadence, satellite television and cell phones.

Speaking to a group of teacher trainees at the Applied Science University of Lorestan in western Iran on February 11, the deputy police chief said technology and immoral behavior were responsible for “social traumas, particularly among school children and university students.”

It was the second official to lash out at modernity in front of a Lorestan audience in recent weeks – and the second to group perceived threats in threes. In late January, Mohammad Hossein Nejat, the cultural deputy for the Revolutionary Guards, told a crowd in Khorammabad to be wary of “the internet, Hollywood and Harvard University.”   

According to an article published on the Khormaabad section of the Iranian Students News Agency website, Shirozhan said Iran’s youth was suffering from a lack of hope for the future and was blind to the prospects that Iranian culture offered. This, he said, was a major challenge for universities, but could be easily remedied through observing appropriate Islamic values.

Shirozhan said, “Mobile phones can cause school children significant damage. That’s why we have asked the authorities of the Ministry of Education in Lorestan to ban children from bringing phones to school.”

He attributed the breakdown of families to the availability of 17,000 satellite television channels across the country, and singled out Turkish soap operas like Roozi Rooxegari as being particularly harmful. “Ninety-five percent of satellite TV serials made in Turkey are not broadcast here due to their traumatizing effects.”

On the topic of Islamic head covering for women, Shirozhan promoted the chador, saying if it was established as a  “constitutional part of culture,” it would go some way toward cultivating strong, moral values. But he warned, it involved true commitment. “It means nothing when a woman puts on a chador when she is at university and then takes it off when she leaves,” he said.

The group of young teachers heard how “moral perversions” threatened the emotional health of society. Shirozhan expressed remorse that young people were less inclined to study religious courses, and warned against the dangers of joining “sham mystical orders,” a possible nod to the recent sentencing of 16 followers of a spiritual order in Tehran.

“We do not accept unconditional freedoms in all circumstances,” the deputy police chief said. “A good university should train good teachers and good teachers should create a good university.”

Read the original article in Persian