The Persian Bomb

?The gulf you are looking for does not exist. Try Persian Gulf.?

That is what you see if you Google ?Arabian Gulf? and click on ?I?m feeling lucky?. It is a successful implementation of what is known as a Google bomb, planted by thousands of internet users last week. It is as much a testimony to the staggering display of unity as it is to the power of the blogs.

It all started when the National Geographic decided to include the term Arabian Gulf, as an alternative to Persian Gulf in its latest edition of the world atlas. It also renamed the Iranian territories of Lavan and Kish islands, using foreign Arabic names, and undermined Iranian sovereignty over three other Iranian Islands that have been claimed by the U.A.E. That sparked a spontaneous flow of outrage in Iran and also among the Iranians living abroad, from North America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, all the way to Japan and China.

The issue of naming this particular body of water has long been a sensitive subject between Iranians and Arabs. Historically, this body of water has been called Persian Gulf by almost all ancient languages. It was consistently labeled as the Persian Gulf even on maps drawn by prominent Arab geographers. However, since the 1960?s and with the rise of Arab nationalism, pan-Arabists led by late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and followed by the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein have tried to re-categorize it as the Arabian Gulf. Since then this term has become popular in Arab countries, and it is increasingly being used by the western media outlets as well, which Iranians believe is largely due to Arab countries? financial influence.

As a result of the National Geographic incident, Iranians came together last week in various forms ? most prominently in cyber space ? to protest against the issue. While Iran banned National Geographic reporters and sales of the magazine, several petitions were also passed around the internet, gathering more than 42 thousand signatures as of the time of writing this article.

But the most striking display of protest was through the implementation of the Google bomb. A Google bomb is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by Google, which can be achieved if a large number of webpages link to a specific site all with the same keyword. It has been used before in a number of occasions, most notably with the search query ?miserable failure?, which returns a biography of the US president George Bush as its first result.

Several days after the incident, I pitched out the idea of using a Google bomb to voice our objection on my blog (www.legofish.com). I set up a simple page, similar to the Internet Explorer?s ?page not found? error page which humorously stated that ? No body of water by the name of Arabian Gulf exists?. I asked other bloggers to link to that page and before I knew it, hundreds of bloggers from all over the world and different backgrounds were in on it. It quickly developed into a massive movement and within three days of my original post the page reached number one in Google?s search results for ?Arabian Gulf?.

More than anything, it has proved the astonishing power of bloggers. While the Iraninian government has increasingly limited reformist newspapers, the Internet has become a powerful means of communication. As a result, the number of Iranian bloggers has risen astronomically over the past few years, so much so that in a recent ranking of all internet blogs categorized by language, Persian (a.k.a. Farsi) was ranked third.

Eventhough some attempts have recently been made by the Iranian authorities to limit this virtual freedom as well, such as filtering nonconformist websites , the Internet still remains the number one outlet for free expression in Iran. And this latest movement is a perfect indication of that.