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Perceived slight stirs Iranians' anger
But that's all it took to get fiercely proud Iranians to rise up against what they saw as an attack on their history.
In its latest world atlas, National Geographic added the name "Arabian Gulf" in parentheses beneath "Persian Gulf" on a map to label the body of water that cuts along the coasts of Iran and its Arab neighbors.
The implication that Iran somehow may be losing its historical dominance of the ancient seas pierced the cultural pride of the land once known as Persia.
It added fuel to longtime tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia and a widely held Iranian suspicion that Arabs have been lobbying for years to change the name of the gulf.
Magazine banned
The Islamic Republic swiftly banned National Geographic from selling its publications or sending journalists here."Under the influence of the U.S. Zionist lobby and the oil dollars of certain Arab governments, the society has distorted an undeniable historical reality," wrote Hassan Hanizadeh in Tehran Times, a leading daily newspaper.
So keen was the perceived slight that it brought a fleeting unity to Iran's far-flung political spectrum.
Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite station whose headquarters are perched in Qatar on the other side of the gulf from Iran, played an animated cartoon to poke fun of Iranian ire.
In the cartoon, an Iranian mullah is oblivious to regional strife but furious over the name of the gulf.
Iran responded by threatening to restrict Al-Jazeera's work along with the National Geographic ban.
Even computer techies sympathetic to Iran were stirred to action, and pulled off a "Google bomb," successfully manipulating the search engine to obtain a high ranking.
When computer users type "Arabian Gulf" on Google, the first link is to a Web site, http://arabian-gulf.info, which announces, "The Gulf you are looking for does not exist. Try Persian Gulf."
No apologies
National Geographic has remained unapologetic.The publication recognizes "Persian Gulf" as the primary name, but "we want people searching for 'Arabian Gulf' to be able to find what they're looking for and not confuse it with the nearby Arabian Sea," said a statement by Allen Carroll, chief cartographer on the National Geographic Web site.