Correcting Toronto Star

I proudly wore 'I love Tehran' t-shirt, when we did the photo shoot in the Iranian neighbourhood near Yonge and Steels

Toronto Star's GTA section editor and one of their staff reporters were extremely nice to me last week.

They published a full-page story on blogging in Iran, along with a rather big picture of me, which I'm sure my ego loves -- and whose doesn't anyway?

However, I can't ignore a couple of rather embarrassing mistakes they've somehow made in terms of some facts of the story.

As if I'm not already under scrutiny about every single word or picture or video I post, these mistakes would really cost me a lot.

The first fact they got wrong was the number of my email subscribers which is eleven thousand (11,000) and not one thousand and one hundred (1,100) which is published in the story.

Similarly, they got the population of Iran wrong: It's seventy million, not seven million. I think they have a problem with zeros.

The other problematic fact is that only forty percent of Persian blogs are written in Iran which is not true. My estimated is that over ninety percent of them live in Iran, simply because almost all of these blogs are located at blog hosting service websites such as PersianBlog or BlogFa etc., all operating inside Iran.

Also, I was not detained for six days during my last visit to Iran last summer. But I was detained for a couple hours at the airport when I tried to leave, which followed several hours of (friendly, I must say) interrogation at the Intelligence Ministry's building in Tehran a few days later, and was only allowed to leave the country after writing an apology and signing it at the airport. (I'd blogged about it before. Also AP had a story about that.)

But overall it was a nicely done report from an interesting angle, different with what the right-wing media usually view blogs as facilitators of regime change in Iran.

Below you'll find the full-text of the article which would soon be buried in Toronto Star's archive:

Blogging is the new revolution

Iranians take to their keyboards to slam politics, social culture under an oppressive regime

Toronto man gives voice to ideas that would be punishable if said aloud. Nicholas Keung reports

May 18, 2006. 01:00 AM
NICHOLAS KEUNG
IMMIGRATION/DIVERSITY REPORTER

The revolution will not be televised.... The revolution will be no rerun brothers; The revolution will be live.

— Gil Scott-Heron

And take note: It will have begun in Toronto.

When new arrival Hossein Derakhshan began his Web log here in 2001 and posted a how-to-blog-in-Persian guide on his website, http://www.hoder.com, the native of Iran had no idea he was launching a quiet revolution that would help liberate his keyboarding compatriots from the oppressive reality on the streets of Iran.

Within months, several thousand Persian online journals had popped up in cyberspace, with participants in Iran and outside it ranting on everything from discontent with the dictatorial religious regime to dating experiences between boys and girls (and, for that matter, boys and boys or girls and girls).

The Persian virtual community, with a global population of just 12 million online — more than half in Iran — claims to own 700,000 blogs.

Though it's hard to say how many of those are actively maintained, there is no doubt Persian has become one of the most widely used languages on the Internet. An estimated 40 per cent of Persian blogs are based in Iran, where freewheeling speech of the kind found in cyberspace is severely punishable in public.

In a recent Web poll, three of the top five Persian blogs were based in Toronto, including Derakhshan's and those run by exiled cartoonist Nikang Kowsar and University of Toronto student Nazli Kamvari.

"This trend is still growing fast and strong, because people suddenly find a personal way to express themselves and talk about things that are not publicly spoken in the current political and social culture in Iran," explains Maryam Aghvami, a former Reuters reporter who fled to Canada in 2001 after receiving threats from the regime.

"It's a revolution that we are seeing now among our younger generation."

Dubbed the "Father of Iranian Bloggers," Derakhshan, a keen computer gamer from Tehran, first ventured into "virtual freedom" in the mid-1990s, when he logged onto a local BBS, a precursor of the Web, through a fax modem.

"It really opened up my eyes, chatting with people who listened to Western music and whose mothers and sisters didn't cover their hair with headscarves," recalls the 31-year-old, who married a Canadian in Iran and joined her in Canada in December 2000.

But it wasn't until nine months later, when terrorists flew two planes into New York's World Trade Center, that Derakhshan got hooked — reading the personal blogs of eyewitnesses.

He launched his own on Sept. 25, 2001, in Persian, and his English version that November.

His blog now draws more than 10,000 daily page views and has 1,100 regular subscribers.

"Everyone is just fascinated by the opportunity to be self-expressive in a closed society, where the state controls people even in their bedrooms and talking about private life is deemed political," explains Derakhshan, a self-proclaimed "citizen journalist" who has been travelling around the world over the past year, documenting his experiences on his blog.

"Although only 5 per cent of the (blogs') contents are actually political, the fact that these people are communicating about their personal lives is, by itself, political in the eyes of the Iranian officials."

Derakhshan has his own theories on the popularity of blogging. He describes blogs as: windows through which individuals can show and display things important to them; bridges that connect people miles away in distance, in views and life experiences; and cafés that provide a space for debates and dialogues.

Blogging is particularly popular among Iranian women, believed to run 35 per cent of the Persian blogs.

Samira Mohyeddin began her own online journal (samiramohyeddin.blogspot.com) in 2004 after a visit to Tehran, which she and her family had left more than two decades ago.

"It's just depressing and distressing that you are told what to do, what to wear and where to go and are constantly under scrutiny.

"I looked at the beautiful beach but I couldn't swim in the water because I'm a woman. It's just absurd to me," says the 30-year-old U of T graduate student, whose blog gets up to 600 hits a day.

"Going to bathrooms can be political in Iran because if you use a modern toilet, you are considered westernized and non-traditional," she adds. "It's a schizophrenic society where, outside home, people behave in strange ways. Blogging provides a way of self-expression, where people know that they are not going to suffer any consequences. They just can't hurt us on the Internet."

Although the U.S. Persian population, about 1 million, outnumbers Canada's 300,000, the community here — which mostly arrived after the 1979 Islamic Revolution — tends to be younger, better educated and hungry for freedom, making it especially open to the new technology.

Aghvami, president of Journalists in Exile in Canada and a reporter for Voice of America, says blogging arrived fortuitously in 2001, just when the mullahs began cracking down on the media.

"In a short time, you had 130 papers shut down and people needed to find alternative ways to express ideas. People in this young generation are more computer-savvy, and they are not afraid to speak out because there's nothing to stop them on the net," she says.

Aghvami has noticed more community organizing, especially among Iranian women, who held a rally in front of a stadium earlier this year to push for their right to watch live sports. That wish was recently granted.

Bahman Kalbasi, a student activist from the University of Isfahan, says the Iranian government, fearing the consequences of its citizens' "taste of cyber freedom," has begun trying to censor Persian blogs, a task likely to prove insurmountable.

Recently, officials blocked all sites with the mention of "women" and reportedly set up an office to monitor blogging under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Over the years, some Iranian bloggers have been arrested and detained by the government for voicing opposition. Derakhshan says he, too, was detained for six days during a recent visit to Tehran.

"But bloggers will always be a step ahead of them. There are just so many of them out there. Most young people there have many different email addresses," says Kalbasi, 27, who started his own blog (bahmankalbasi.blogspot.com) after moving to Canada more than four years ago.

"The government can shut down newspapers, but it can't shut down Web logs. We are a force, a power that can impact things."

Persian blogging has been quick to capture the attention of the world media and the intelligence and academic communities. Over the past year, Kalbasi has been helping scholars studying the phenomenon at the University of California-Irvine and as far away as Germany.

"People are interested in what's going on in the psyche of these people in Iran, and by reading Iranians' blogs, they can get a sense of what's happening behind the veil," Kalbasi adds.

However, exiled journalist and cartoonist Kowsar warns that a blog could also be abused to mislead and misinform.

"You can't really count on all the information on the blogs being accurate. We all have to be our own inspectors to filter out the truth," says Kowsar, 36, who has a cartoon blog (nikahang2.blogspot.com) and a Persian blog (http://www.nikahang.blogspot.com) and recently ventured into blogging in English (nikick.blogspot.com).

"The bottom line is, everyone has the right to express his or her views on their blogs and we can always have all sides of the story."

What long-term impact the blogs will have on Iran is a matter for speculation, but the Toronto bloggers are clear that their goal is not to see a violent revolution.

"Blogging is certainly something for the better, because knowledge is power. And if we can educate our fellow Iranians back home and be their voices outside Iran, we are paving the way for a civil and democratic society," says Aghvami. She adds that the road will be long, as 90 per cent of Iran's 7 million population still doesn't have access to the Internet, and high-speed connections are uncommon.

But it's a good start, notes Mohyeddin, who has received death threats and been called "a sell-out to her country" by people who oppose her views.

"Most people have this monolithic and simplistic view of what's happening around the world, and I think all these blogs are showing the diverse points of view out there," she says. "To me, blogging is fabulous because it's taking journalism to its roots by expressing what's happening, and by doing so, holding governments accountable to the people."