Editor: Myself

'We Are Iran': A book on blogs in Iran

The worst thing about Iranian blogs is that they're written in Persian and as far as I know, only a small percentage of readers of this blog can read Persian.

But now a book is coming out in Canada and the States that is dedicated to blogs in Iran. It's called "We Are Iran" and it's written by Nasrin Alavi, a UK-based Iranian woman who has been closely following the Persian blogging scene.

The book basically consists of hundreds of translated blog posts by Iranians on different subject matters which is then completed by informative background information about each topic that makes up different chapters of the book. In other words, you get blog quotes plus some useful contextualization.

The book is already available in Germany and the UK, and will be available in the US and Canada in two weeks.

The fundamentalist minority

I'm very sorry about what this fundamentalist moron who happens to be Iran's president has recently said. But I have to say he doesn't represent the way the majority in Iran think. This guy is a fraud and is a puppet of Mesbah-e Yazdi, a radical cleric who is only gaining power after Khomeini's death.

Ahmadinejad only represents a small number of radical clerics around Mesbah and some Revolutionary Guards commanders who benefit from violence and war. Ahmadinejad is an indirect result of America's policy shift against the reformists in Iran. Maybe they wanted this in the first place? Who knows.
However, the best indicator for me about the general attitude of Iranians towards Israel happened last year during the Olympic games when the Iranian Judoka refused to face his Israeli counterpart and eventually lost a medal. Average Iranians were quite angry about that and even in a poll I put on my Persian blog, the majority disagreed with the official policy of the Iranian regime.

Also, in a region where US is usually seen as the closest ally of Israel, Iranians has one the most positive attitudes towards the United States which is very likely to extend to Israel, despite all the government's propaganda.

Meanwhile, one neglected aspect of Ahmadinejad's comments could be a reaction to Supreme Leader Khamanei who has effectively kept the area of foreign policy totally out of Ahmadinejad's control, by appointing Ali Larijani, his trusted young ally, to be leading the nuclear negotiation team.

Interestingly, the current Foreign Minister, Manoochehr Mottaki, has been an old assistant to Larijani and this shows how influential Khamanei is. So this could be a challenge by Mesbah and his allies, including Ahmadinejad, to Khamanei's control on foreign policy.

The cool Ayatollahُ

Last week something extraordinary happened in the Persian blogging community. Mohammad Abtahi, a former vice-president of Iran and an enthusiastic blogger was visiting the eighty-something dissident Grand Ayatollah Montazeri in Qom, a religious city south of Tehran.

"How is Mr Abtahi's blog doing," the Grand Ayatollah jokingly asks during a pause in a small gathering, while sitting on his special teaching chair which is higher than usual chairs.

According to a post on Abtahi's blog, the Ayatollah later tells him that he reads his blogs and asks him about its readership and the time he spends on it everyday. Like many, the Ayatollah is also angry about his website being filtered and provides the blogger cleric with a new unblocked web address for his website.

Any time you have party-animal teenagers and dissident old Ayatollahs doing the same thing, you must know it's a popular thing.

Panel on blogging at Frankfurt Book Fair

If you are in Frankfurt tomorrow and have nothing to do, you could come to the panel Deatsche Welle has organized about freedom of speech on the Internet:

Im Froum Dialog der Frankfurter Buchmesse vom 19. - 23. Oktober veranstaltet die Deutsche Welle in Halle 6.1 E 913 eine Diskussionsrunde zum Thema Weblogs.

Weblogs sind mehr als einfach nur "Online-Tagebücher": Sie sind zu einer wichtigen Informationsquelle im Internet geworden. Insbesondere dort, wo Presse- und Informationsfreiheit durch Zensur und Repression eingeschränkt oder gefährdet sind. Dennoch: Wer in totalitären Staaten seine Meinung in einem Weblog äußert, riskiert viel.

• Hossein Derakhshan, Medienjournalist und Blogger, Toronto
• Julien Pain, Reporter ohne Grenzen, Paris
• Gabriel González, Projektmanager "TheBOBS - The Best of Blogs", Deutsche Welle, Bonn

Moderation: Holger Hank, Deutsche Welle, DW-WORLD.DE, Bonn
Sonntag, 23. Oktober 2005, 11.30 – 12.30 Uhr

Europe, I'm coming!

I'm leaving today for Germany to take part on a DW panel on blogging, as part of the Frankfurt International Book Fair next week. I'll stay in Europe afterwards because the DW web awards is to be held in mid November and I'm a member of the jury.

The displaced person that I am, a month-long Europe trip would be a nice escape from the misreable reality of these days.

Listening to The Organ in Tehran

I discovered the wonderful music of The Organ through my Vancouver-based friend Mo who runs Government clothing and Dadabase store with his partner on Main st. (He also provides my cool print t-shirts I've been wearing for too long, I guess.)

So the other night, we went to see their show in Toronto at Revival on College street. After the show, my friend Takin, insisted on taking photos with their lead singer, Katie Sketch. So I came to her and told her she had no idea where I was listening to their music. "Tehran," I answered. "It was the soundtrack of my trip during the election is June," while a crazy political change was taking place.

She was tired, but after a little chat in which she said she knew Mo from the Dadabase, Katie agreed to take photos with us. It was nice.

You can also see the photos from their show on my Flickr space.

Neo-racism

Instead of saying all people from the Middle-East should be treated differently, the US government says people from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen should be treated differently.

This dosn't matter even if you have citizenship froma country like Canada. I was born in Tehran and it's enough for the US to treat me like a potential terrorosit.

That's mainly why I missed ConvergeSouth, the recent conference on blogging. What would you do if you were in our situation?

I'm back in Toronto.