Amid unrest, Iran's hardliners turn their anger to France

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

52% : State television said some clerics held similar protests in the shrine city of Qom, the center of religious learning in Iran.
43% : Tehran initially denied responsibility for downing the airplane before admitting to having mistakenly done so amid high tensions with the U.S.
37% :Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf on Sunday linked the French magazine's cartoons with what officials have repeatedly alleged is the West's plot to spread "riots" in Iran.
35% :Anti-government protests erupted across Iran in September after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who had been detained by the country's morality police for allegedly violating its strict Islamic dress code.
35% : Sunday was also the third anniversary of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's downing of an Ukrainian passenger plane with two surface-to-air missiles, killing all 176 people on board -- a tragedy that ignited an outburst of anger across Iran.
33% : Following Charlie Hebdo's publishing of cartoons mocking Iranian clerical figures, authorities in Tehran shut down on Thursday a decades-old French research institute and called the closure a "first step" in their response.
31% : "Resorting to insults on the pretext of freedom is a clear indication of their frustration in concluding plot for chaos and insecurity" in Iran, he said.
12% : Hundreds of protesters including students from seminary schools shouted "Death to France" and accused French President Emmanuel Macron of insulting Iran while urging Paris to stop "animosity" toward Tehran.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.