NEWS: CNN cancels interview with Iranian president over scarf request

Vet­er­an CNN reporter Chris­t­ian Aman­pour pulled out of a meet­ing in New York with Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Ebrahim Raisi after he asked him to wear a scarf.

Aman­pour said no pre­vi­ous pres­i­dent had made such a request when inter­view­ing out­side Iran.

Raisi’s advis­ers said it was because of the “Iran situation.”

The death of an Iran­ian woman who was arrest­ed for vio­lat­ing the head cov­er­ing pol­i­cy has sparked vio­lent riots in the country.

Mahasa Ami­ni, 22, fell into a coma last week hours after moral police arrest­ed her.

Her cops alleged­ly hit Ami­ni in the head with her baton and slammed her into one of her cars. Police said there was no evi­dence of ill-treat­ment and that she suf­fered a “sud­den heart failure”.

The protests, now in their sev­enth day, have spread to 80 oth­er cities and towns in the Islam­ic Repub­lic. At least 17 peo­ple have died.

The inter­view will be Raisi’s first inter­view in the Unit­ed States while he is vis­it­ing the Unit­ed Nations Gen­er­al Assembly.

Aman­pour said he was ready to do so when one of his aides insist­ed that he cov­er his hair at Raisi’s request.

“We are in New York and there are no laws or tra­di­tions regard­ing head­scarves,” he lat­er said on Twitter.

Aman­pour said Raisi’s aides made it clear that she would not be inter­viewed if she was not wear­ing a scarf, say­ing it was “a mat­ter of respect”.

Her team reject­ed what it called “unex­pect­ed and unprece­dent­ed con­di­tions” and pulled out of her interviews.

The US host then post­ed a pho­to of her­self with­out her scarf in front of an emp­ty chair where Raisi would have sat for the interview.

Raisi was elect­ed last year and signed an order imple­ment­ing the new list of restric­tions in August.

She also faced manda­to­ry prison sen­tences for Ira­ni­ans who ques­tioned or post­ed online con­tent that vio­lat­ed hijab (scarf) rules.

While the restric­tions have result­ed in more arrests, more women have post­ed pic­tures and videos with­out head­scarves on social media, a trend that has inten­si­fied since Amini’s death.

This is a prob­lem that cor­re­spon­dents face when inter­view­ing high-rank­ing offi­cials whose hoods are prob­lem­at­ic. When she worked in Iran, where wear­ing a scarf was com­pul­so­ry, she had no choice but to comply.

Until now, Iran­ian offi­cials have assumed that the rule would not apply across bor­ders. But the sight of an Iran­ian cor­re­spon­dent ques­tion­ing an ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive pres­i­dent about what has now become an explo­sive prob­lem in his own coun­try would have been seen as too polit­i­cal­ly risky.

There are sim­i­lar sen­si­bil­i­ties in Tal­iban-con­trolled Afghanistan. Some Tal­iban offi­cials even say they can’t be pho­tographed sit­ting with jour­nal­ists. How­ev­er, some are less strict.

Many peo­ple are like­ly to think about “what is the most effec­tive” when they go to an inter­view. It’s impor­tant to strike a bal­ance between being polite and not being pre­ten­tious. But when it comes to inter­views about scarves, it’s a dif­fer­ent story.