Stefan Mileschin

Tehran is claiming that its move to block access to Google and Gmail is in reaction to an anti-Islam film that triggered protests across the world.

The movie, Innocence of Muslims, which appears to have been created to start riots in Arab countries, has placed Google in a position where Iran wanted. The Iranians had wanted a pretext to ban Google from Iran for a while, but really did not have a good reason until YouTube refused to take down the anti-Islam film.

Now the Iranian government can safely say they are saving Iranians from the evil Satanic Google.

According to the Guardian, Abdolsamad Khoramabadi, an Iranian official with the state-run body in charge of online censorship and computer crimes, said that Google and Gmail will be filtered throughout the country until further notice.

He did not indicate if the filtering would be temporary or permanent, however smart money is on a total ban. The Iranians are currently planning to pull their country out of the Internet and run the nation as a big Intranet of state controlled information. Google and its webmail operation would have no place in such a scheme anyway.

Iranians do not really care that much about the movie, according to the Guardian, but are a bit miffed that they have lost their Gmail accounts.

Golnaz Esfandiari, who has a blog on the Radio Free Europe website, Persian Letters, tweeted: "By blocking Gmail/Google, #Iran government punishes its own people over anti-Islam movie. Most Iranians have not seen it/don't care."

But the move comes just as the Iranians move to stage one of their cunning Internet plan.

Ali Hakim-Javadi, deputy communications and technology minister, according to the semi-official Mehr news agency said that all governmental agencies and offices have been connected to the national information network.

Iran is worried about another outside cyber attack, particularly if it gets involved in a war with Israel or the US.

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