VOA News - Britain Replaces US as Favorite Target of Iran: Via Voice of America.

In the aftermath of the disputed Iranian presidential election, Tehran has hurled some of its sharpest rhetoric not at its traditional nemesis, the United States, but at Britain. Iran accused Britain of instigating protests, arrested some of its embassy workers and expelled a British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent. Britain has now ascended to the top of Iran's enemies list.

Virtually every week since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Friday prayers in Tehran have been punctuated with the ritual cry of "Marg bar Amerika" -- Death to America. But in recent weeks, that has been replaced by a new slogan -- "Marg bar Ingles" -- Death to Britain.

Iranian officials have described Britain as the most treacherous power and railed against what they claim to be British instigation of protests over last month's disputed presidential election.

Has Britain replaced the United States as the "Great Satan" in official Iranian eyes?

Analysts say Britain already occupies a special place in Iranian political mythology.
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Persian Station in Britain Rattles Officials in Iran: Via NYTimes.com .

LONDON — As Iran’s ruling ayatollahs tell it, the main strike force plotting to end Islamic rule in their country is not on the streets of Tehran but on the upper floors of a celebrated Art Deco building in central London.

The propagators of an “all-out war” against the Islamic republic, as Iran’s semiofficial news agency has called them, are a group of 140 men and women who work at the BBC’s Broadcasting House, a stone’s throw from the shopping mecca of Oxford Street in London. Mainly expatriate Iranians, they staff the BBC’s Persian-language television service, on air for only six months and reaching a daily audience of six million to eight million Iranians — a powerful fraction of viewers in Iran, with its population of 70 million.

The audience estimate, BBC insiders say, came from a leaked document prepared by Iran’s state-run broadcasting service, which warned before the current upheaval of the threat from the new channel.
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