Editor: Myself

Ganji: Hero or loser

The more the American right puts more investment in Ganji by its unprecedented support, the more the Islamic Regime would become determined in taking care of Ganji.

Only a dead Ganji would give Mr. Bush a unifying symbol for the future phases of their desperate efforts to change the regime of Iran from outside. That's why they are all loving him so much. Because a dead Ganji will not be able to have nuanced opinions and could easily be hijacked by the neoconservatives for their own agenda.

The authoritarian regime of Iran is smart enough to keep Ganji alive and to use him for their own future plans; the same way they did when they saw hfound him a keen supporter of boycotting the last presidential elections. (They released him for a few days and allowed him to do as many interviews in defence of the boycott strategy, which was partly the reason for Ahmadinejad's win.)

Ganji, in my mind, has started a game in which the only winner will again be Khamanei and the biggest loser would be himself -- and of course Mr. Bush. They would keep him alive and will find a way to discredit him or make him ineffective by sending him to exile for, perhaps, 'medical purposes.' They are good at this. They've done it for almost three decades.

New article

The English version of my article about the Iranian youth and Ahmadinejad's win is now published on openDemocracy with lots of infromative links they've kindly added to it. Please check them out.

• Iran’s young reformers (openDemocracy)

• Ein TV-Sieg (Die Zeit)

Cartoon-friendly president

At least cartoonists are happy to see Ahmadinejad the president

An unwritten law had long prevented Iranian cartoonists from drawing caricatures of the clerics, including Iranian presidents so far.

But Ahmadinejad, who is the first non-cleric president of Iran after over twenty years, is the best thing that could happen to Iranian cartoonists.

Now, Gol Agha, the best-known satire magazine, founded by Kiumars Saberi during the first term of Rafsanjani in early 90s, has Ahmadinejad on its cover.

Under Rafsanjani, because he was a cleric, Gol Agha always drew Hassan Habibi, his deputy as a substitute for Rafsanjani himself.

Cross-posted on: Iran Scan

iTunes fail Persian

I'm glad that Apple has acknowledged PodCasts in the new version of its iTunes. But it's such a shame it doesn't have Persian (Farsi) among its supported language.

There are more than a dozen Persian podcasts out there now after I introduced it in my Persian blog a few months ago. They are a big step towards a free socio-political media space and they contribute to the process of democracy in Iran.

Please write to them and ask them to add Persian to their supported langauges.

EU conference on Iran

Here is the summary of my talk in today's conference about the future of EU relationship with Iran.

Ahmadinejad's first-round vote is not much higher than the conservatives' usual share of vote. So he is not representing a change in the mood of the county or in middle-class's political taste. His second-round vote says nothing about him though. It was a 'No ' to extremely unpopular Rafsanjani who was, to many ordinary Iranian, much more of an establishment figure than a challenger to it.

Three reasons were among the biggest for his rise:

• Khamanei's voting machine that can easily produces over one million votes for the favored candidate in any election.
• Deep socio-economic gap which was a direct result of the careless economic reforms started from Rafsanjani's term 16 years ago and was more or less continued in the same manner under Khatami.
• Apathy which was heavily encouraged and justified by LA-based satellite TV channels that have produced a paradigm of apathy and indifference, mixed with a deep interest in developing conspiracy theories especially against Rafsanjani.