Iran's hard-liners outraged by viral videos of schoolchildren dancing
It was lighthearted fun: children singing and dancing to a popular Persian pop song. But when hard-line Iranian authorities saw the videos, uploaded to social media by teachers at several schools, they were not amused and unleashed their wrath.
"The enemy is trying different ways to create anxiety among the people, including by spreading these disturbing videos we have been seeing in cyberspace," Iran's education minister, Mohammad Bathaei, said last week. "I'm certain there's some kind of political plot behind the publication of these devious clips in schools."
Such outrage is nothing new. Since the 1979 revolution that toppled the shah, conservative Islamic clerics have tried to reduce or eliminate the influence of Western culture. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, for example sought to ban
