We don't need no color code

But the bloggers were quoting the newspapers -- they weren't relying on the National Post's original news story. And it's a historical fact that Iran used to require non-Muslims to wear visual identification that they were not Muslim.

Hi, Eric. Can you clarify the distinction you're making between quoting the newspapers and relying on the National Post's story? I don't get it. Robert Spencer (cited above) was taking the National Post story at face value. It doesn't make a difference which newspaper the bloggers cited, does it?

This episode should remind us that sometimes inflammatory stories in the press are full of errors or exaggerations. The historical fact about what happened in the past becomes the template into which to build a tale of outrage.

A notorious example of such a fabrication was the "incubator story" circulated before Gulf War I; the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US lied to a congressional panel, claiming she had been in Kuwait and had seen Iraqi soldiers ripping babies out of hospital incubators in order to steal the equipment.

A bill has been passed out of the Majlis and is awaiting a ruling by Khameni & co which will settle on the idea that there should be a national uniform for Iran. What I understand that national uniform to be is currently unsettled with the legislation establishing a committee to deal with the details. Religious minority dress codes would not need to go through the parliament again but merely be a matter of the committee passing an enabling regulation.

The original article seems to have gotten ahead of itself but I'm not so sure that there isn't real cause for worry.