It's called Persian Gulf

(I came across this stone in Tenerife)

The persistence of some of the international media for referring to the Persian Gulf as the Gulf demonstrates the fact that they don't know or don't want to use the correct, historical name of the Persian Gulf. But this contagious “ignorance” (let’s just call it “ignorance”, for now) has recently moved up a level.

If the first level of the “ignorance” was to delete the word Persian from the Persian Gulf, the second level is to replace it with another word! This is the phase that we are now in. Seeing a recent petition [http://www.petitiononline.com/sos02082/petition.html] protesting against the wrong name for the Persian Gulf that was used by a major virtual globe programme motivated me to write a few lines.

I am very surprised that we even need a petition for requesting a mistake to be corrected! Correcting the wrong data entry should not need petitions. Mistakes of this nature should have not occurred in the first place. If the wrong data is entered it falls on people responsible for maintaining the database to rectify the error as a matter of urgency. The level of staff competencies and the organisation’s safety nets for prevention of such wrong doings in future also needs to be assessed by the independent external bodies.

Considering misrepresenting of the name of the Persian Gulf has now reached an epidemic, a “conspiracy” theory is also lurking in the background (this might even suggest the exchange of money for the favour of falsifying data). At the moment I would like to accept the “ignorance” theory and to think that using the wrong name for the Persian Gulf was just a mistake that will be corrected soon.

Some of you might think that this is only a trivial matter and specific to people with ties with Iran. In this case, I would like to ask what your reaction would be if you refer to a world map only to discover that the Irish Sea is called the English Sea and the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of USA!

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