Believe it or not, I've decided to run for parliament in upcoming elections in Iran. The good thing is I don't have to go to Iran necessarily and register there, I can do it here in Ottawa as well.
I'll talk about my plans and agenda in the next couple of days.
Mohammad Ali Abtahi is the first Iranian politician who has a weblog (Unfortunately only in Persian). Surprisingly, he doesn't discuss much about politics in his weblog. But he takes secret photos from Eduard Shevardnadze, he tells the story of how he was among thousands of Iranians who welcomed Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner, in Tehran Airport, and he writes about personal and unreported conversations with prominent politicians such as Mehdi Karrubi, the parliament speaker.
Aside from his weblog in Persian and the photos he takes occasionally with his cell phone, Abtahi's website includes his biography, press mentions, picture gallery, and interviews; plus a guest book which is not active yet. the English and Arabic versions of the website are not yet working either.
"In this website, I'm just Mohammad Ali Abtahi; without my political and legal responsibilities," he writes on his website. He also adds that he's been reading and enjoying a lot of Persian weblogs in the past 2 years, and hopes he can have some other officials to blog as guests or answer readers' questions.
I guess he intends to run for parliament in the upcoming elections in Winter 2004.
According to ISNA, high rate of car-accident-related fatilities, has made the official to reinforce the traffic laws.
Thus, for the first time after the Islamic revolution, the government has announced a penalty of over 100,000 Rials (about $140) for drinking and driving, which had never officially admitted to even exis. For the first time they will use equipmets that can measure the amount of Alcohol.
Can other social facts can lead the Islamic goverment to recognize the basic rights for Iranian people to live however they want?
Update:
- I must be an idiot to defend "drinking and driving" as a basic human right! But the right to choose one's cloths, food, etc are among basic rights that are simply denied by the Islamic government of Iran.
(Link via Zan Nevesht)
- Fact one: Dr. Mohammad Aliakbari is a native of Iran who is blessed with an unusual gift for healing.
- Fact two: He is a Doctor of Economics.
Source: Biography on his official website
Thinking about the recent sad news about Istanbul bombing, I guess as time goes by, the real struggle on the issue of world terrorism, comes down to a major conflict between the moderate and radical Islam, or in my opinion between Wahabism and Shiite. I say Shiites, because I regard them as the symbol of a flexible Islam, even though the emergence of a radical thinkers such as Ayatollah Khomeini, should not be seen as the birth of radicalism among Shiites.
In my opinion, the best way to defeat radical Islam, would be a) strengthen moderate Shiites scholars and religious leaders such as Khatami or even Khamenei (globally speaking of course) b) show the world how the most radical regime in the Muslim world, Khomeini's Iran, which rejected the whole Western world, were defeated by it's own people.
Not to mention that it's just a quick thought that started a few months ago when I wrote a piece on the situation on Iraq and the struggle between Ayatollah Khomeini vs. Ayatollah Khoie.
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In case you are wondering what has happened to persianblog.com's weblog that they are on the top of Blogdex, I have to say that there seems to be some serious problems with their servers.
They've officially announced that one of their hard drives is broken and they are trying to replace a backup drive. But then in a tech news group weblog, ITIran, Alireza Shirazi challenged the official announcement by accessing weblogs using queries, instead of sub-domains. (So the data is still there.)
So, as usual, rumors about what has actually happened, have started to develop. Even if it's a simple technical glitch, Iranians can not help themselves making up the strangest conspiracy theories. Although I'm not exactly a fan of Persianblog.com services, I guess this time is a technical issue again, as always.
Update:
- After about 24 hours, everything is back and running. But still seems that Persianblog.com prefers to hide the real reasons.
All my blogrolls in my different websites have been replaced by an English-language weblog named Laura's blog. I checked other websites and saw that everyone using Blogrolling.com's service has faced the same problem. I hope somebody wakes Jason up (He is in west coast where the time is about 7 AM. Too early for a programmer to wake up.) and tell him the bad news. I'm sure he can take care of it quickly.
Advice: Never make an entire website (blogs x iranians) using not-very-secure services such as Blogrolling.
Update:
- It's up and running again. Apparently it was a hacking incident.
I was really surprised when I saw BBC's Jim Muir reported on Iranian documentary filmmakers who were detained in Iraq by U.S. forces alleged of spying on military activities. Two days later they were released without any explanation.
Because of the bad history of Iranian Radio and TV related reporters, who were frequently sent abroad to actually do intelligence-related activities, I never truly believed they were real filmmakers.
Therefore I can't convince myself that they were released because they were innocent. My guess is that they part of a political trade which can include some Al-Qaida members or at least they names, or it could be something else that I know.
But an online poll that I did on my Persian weblog about what my readers think about them, showed that I am not alone. More than 60 percent believe that they "had possibly done something wrong that had led to their detention". However only near 15 percent think that they "were innocent and had to be released." Another 19 percent weren't sure or had no opinion about it.
Even though these online polls are not inferable to any population sociologically speaking, but the fact that a particular range of people are my regular reader can illustrate that many of educated, young, and Internet-savvy Iranians, both outside or inside Iran, have the same hesitation about those filmmakers.
Aside from the poll results, one only needs to see what kind of people were backing them during the detention and who the cheerful crowds and personalities were present at the Airport when those bearded, Hezbollah-looking men returned: Ali Larijani, the head of IRIB and a close ally to the supreme Leader, and Gholamhossein Elham, the radical Islamist who is the spokesman of the Guardian Council. No need to say that a day later, they were hugging Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme Leader, and were warmly greeted by Ali Akbar Nategh Nouri, the prominent hardliner presidential candidate who lost to Khatami a couple of years ago.
This the first time I smell some sort of compromise in Jim Muir's reports for BBC News. Especially that it was 2,3 days after the report when the so-called documentary filmmakers were released.
November 5 was the "Persian blogging day" and it's a big shame that I didn't remember it until yesterday and a bigger one that I haven't written anything about it here, although I posted something on my Persian weblog which now has English summaries below every single post.
Two years ago on this day I published a step-to-step giude on how to creat a Persian weblog, because many people have asked me to--apparently after they had read my Persian weblog for a couple of weeks. The guide helped many people create their own weblog and eventually helped Iranian find the real power of Internet which, to many,was only chat rooms.
Today there are probably more than 100,000 Persian weblogs out there (many of them not active obviousely), producing tons of Persian content everyday about the lives and minds of Iranians in a very important period in the history of Iran, when the religious regime has clearly failed to respond to its own people and is gradually changing.
If only the language barrier didn't exist, the whole world could see the most accurate and unique insight into the most complicated nation in the mid-east region, and maybe world politicians would really find out what would be the best approach to deal with the Iranian regime.
Many problems and misunderstandigs in the world eventually comes down to the language. Can we ever overcome this problem?