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Marco Werman: It looks like men in Iran may have to start hiding their bling. This week Iranian officials declared that Iranian men can no longer wear necklaces. They’re un-Islamic. Iranians weren’t shocked by the announcement. Authorities there have long frowned on Western style haircuts for men, and women aren’t supposed to wear loose-fitting headscarves and tight-fitting coats. It’s all part of a larger effort to fight what Iranian authorities call a Western cultural invasion. Los Angeles Times Bureau Chief Borzou Daragahi is in Beirut.

Borzou Daragahi: This happens every year, you know. For a week or two, all my Iranian friends cover up a little better, they dress a little bit more conservatively. And then the crackdown ends and the headscarves go back further, the bling comes out, the sandals come out, the jeans get shorter, etc. The clothes get tighter, and the hairstyles get more outrageous. It just happens over and over again.

Werman: But I imagine, when there are these restrictions, and they’re announced to the public, it’s probably pretty sensitive for young people?

Daragahi: Actually, the young people are the ones who really don’t give a hoot. Every young person I know in Iran has spent 12-24 hours locked up for not being dressed properly or for saying something inappropriate to a security official or something like that. It’s a kind of mark of pride. Iran is a strange country where, for example, it’s a mark of distinction if you’ve spent time in prison, you know, rather than a blemish. And if you’re a guy who has never been pinched by the morality police, so to speak, no girl will want to date you. Something that’s very strange about Iran, where the security forces, like in many authoritarian states, are viewed as such the enemy of the people, that it’s not a stigma to be arrested or detained for something like this.

Werman: Tehran’s moral police are enforcing the dress code. Remind us of who they are and what they do.

Daragahi: They used to be a lot more reckless and a lot more willing to even invade people’s homes and so on. In recent years they’ve been put, so to speak, under more and more of a leash. Now they’re uniformed and they drive around in official vehicles and they’re a little bit more under the control of the security forces. It should said that they seem to come out whenever there’s a politically sensitive time. So this whole morality police “card” becomes an excuse to deploy additional forces around the city to frighten people, to keep a sort of control over people. It’s about control more than what people are actually wearing or not wearing.

Werman: This week marks the second anniversary of what Iranian dissidents call the stolen election. Iran’s Green Movement has called for silent protest. Did anyone take to the streets?

Daragahi: Yeah, a lot of people took to the streets. They went into the streets, but there was apparently such a huge security presence that no one dared chant any slogans for fear of being arrested over nothing.

Werman: Can Iran’s Green Movement still be energized by the Arab Spring? Is that even in the cards?

Daragahi: Iran moves to a different rhythm than the Arab world. Iran has been much more unstable in many ways than the Arab world has been. They’ve had so much regime change. They’ve already been through this once. Sort of like Lebanon, where I am now. They say “Pft, revolution? We tried that once, and look where it got us.” Taking to the streets in protest, it doesn’t really work. There’s a sort of jadedness in countries that have a history that’s different from the mainstream of the Arab world. In Egypt, in Syria, in Libya, these are novel things, taking to the streets in hopes of making change. But in Iran, it’s something that has been happening for 100 years. It’s just a different rhythm. In addition, Iran is definitely part of the Arab world, in that they speak a totally different language, they’re not watching the same TV channels. The Al Jazeera effect… There’s no Al Jazeera Iran. There’s no legitimate, popular international, locally based television channel that unites the Iranians the way that Al Arabiya  and Al Jazeera do.

Werman: Los Angeles Times Bureau Chief Borzou Daragahi in Beirut. Thank you very much, Borzou.

Daragahi: It’s been a pleasure.

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Fati Zarei is one of about a million people who go online every week to watch Parazit. It’s an Iranian news satire show that some are calling a Persian version of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Like the Daily Show, Parazit delivers the more bizarre moments of political news with big doses of straight-talk, outrage, and satire. But the focus is Iran.

So instead of shots of Sarah Palin, there’s a montage of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei repeatedly warning of the foreign enemy:
Instead of clips from Fox News, there’s an Iranian journalist professing his desire to be the first to upload news that the Messiah has come.

Fati Zarei sometimes can’t quite believe what she’s seeing. “This is so stupid!” she says, but then she adds, “But this is real!”

And instead of Comedy Central footing the bill, it’s the Voice of America, the official broadcasting service of the U.S. government. It’s among a few foreign-based news outlets that offer an alternative to Iran’s state-controlled media.

Iranian officials maintain that the VOA is an arm of the CIA, waging a soft cultural war to overthrow the government.

Parazit, which means “static” — a reference to what happens when the Iranian government blocks the satellite airwaves that illegally broadcast the program into Iranian homes, plays on those claims.

In the opening credits, Parazit’s 35-year-old host Kambiz Hosseini announces Voice of America, and then mocks Iran’s suspicion of it.

“This is the show brought to you by children of the revolution, which is us, who have now become foreigners and enemies and infidels to spread imperialism all over Iran,” he says. “It’s an angry humor, dark angry humor. It’s a voice of my generation.”

The voice of a generation, or the Voice of America? — Whichever it is, Hamid Dabishi, a professor at Columbia University, says he loves the joke.

“The service of American imperialism,” he laughs. “It is ingenious!”

Dabishi adds that Iranians, like him who dismiss Voice of America as propaganda, have become online fans of Parazit.

“I don’t watch Voice of America,” he says. “Nobody watches Voice of America. Voice of America is the Voice of United States Congress. But I watch Parazit very regularly. The fact that it comes from the VOA is almost irrelevant.”

Kambiz Hosseini, who hosts Parazit from VOA headquarters in Washington, where he’s lived for the past three years, says he feels free to do what he wants on the show. He adds that after last year’s disputed presidential elections in Iran, that means meeting a new demand.

“All of a sudden in Iran we have many young people who they are interested in politics,” he says. “They’re getting entertained by politics, but they also don’t trust the news that they get in the newspaper.

Ali, an artist in Tehran who didn’t want to give his last name, says he was badly beaten by government forces during last year’s unrest. He says he watches Parazit to get informed about what’s going on — without getting too upset about it.

He says there’s a lot of bad news in Iran. “It’s bad for your blood pressure,” he says. “Naturally we want to forget it.” But he adds that if it’s delivered with some humor and irony, it’s a little easier to take.

Parazit regularly skewers TV programs that are awash with religious pronouncements. In one ski, an Islamic expert explains that Arabic, the language of the Koran, is spoken in heaven, and Persian, the language of Iran’s 72 million people, is spoken in hell. So Hosseini and a friend head to heaven, where they sweet talk their way past the bouncer at the door by repeating the only Arabic they know, a phrase for “welcome.” When they get in, they’re shocked to see an Iranian judge notorious for executions. Hosseini unconsciously slips back into Persian. There’s a clap of thunder, and he’s sent to hell where he can drink and talk freely.

Parazit’s FaceBook page now has 160,000 followers. That’s more than the page of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader who has commanded huge street protests in Iran. Still, despite the growing popularity of Parazit, Hosseini says it’s not easy being Iran’s Jon Stewart. He notes that great comedy comes from tragedy, but it’s hard to deal with human rights issues and “the many violations” of the Iranian government.

Still he admires what Jon Stewart does. “I think people look at politics in a different way because of what Jon Stewart does.”

Then, with a reference to Stewart’s October rally in Washington, Hosseini says, he hopes that “someday we could restore sanity in Iran also.”

It’s unlikely that Hosseini would lead a rally anytime soon in Iran. His home country is a dangerous place for journalists, fake or real. Last year, Iran imprisoned Maziar Bahari of Newsweek magazine. He was charged with conspiring with the West. The evidence? A clip of his appearance on the Daily Show, talking with a news correspondent dressed as a spy.
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• Parazit on Facebook
• BBC Persian

This week’s edition of BBC Radio Four’s ‘Analysis’, produced for the domestic UK audience, investigates this phenomenon. The program contains an e-mail interview with Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri (pictured) – one of the Shi’ite world’s most senior and respected clerics and one of Iran’s most outspoken critics of President Ahmadinejad’s government.

In this interview, he calls on Iran’s clergy to work with political activists to bring about reform, urging them to be “in step with the people”. Grand Ayatollah Montazeri is at the forefront of a surprising alliance that is emerging in Iran – between hard-line secularists and orthodox Muslim clerics.

The BBC’s Edward Stourton asks whether this alliance could cause the collapse of the Islamic Republic as we know it and lead to a greater separation of Islam and the Iranian state.

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• Read the full text of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri’s email
• BBC Radio Four’s ‘Analysis’ program
• More ‘Best of the BBC’ on The World