Fighting the Internet censorship is not that easy in Iran. Instead of using a sophisticated keyword-based technology, similar to one that China uses, they are heavily dependant on human beings in defining what is appropriate and what is not.
So the fight is more like a a psychological war than a merely technical one, especially for me.
For the past two years, since my blogs have been blocked in Iran, I've been trying to facilitate my readers visit through some alternative domain and sub-domain names. So people could have used i.h0der.com or heyroon.h0der.net or editormyself.info instead of the usual hoder.com. But now they're all filtered and I've got really tired in this cat and mouse game.
But now I want to start another round of this on-going cat and mouse game.
The trick is if the authorities didn't know how many visitors come to my Persian blog, they wouldn't be able to understand how effective their filters have been. Neither would they realise how my new efforts have been effective in increasing the number of visitors to the blog.
That's why I have removed the link to a publicly available web statistics web application which could easily provide the authorities this kind of information. Instead, I'm now using the amazing Google Analytics application which produces amazing detailed reports on various aspects of your website's audience.
Meanwhile, I'm using another great service by Google (Google Groups) in order to send my blog posts to my readers everyday.
The number on my mailing-list is public ally available on its main web page and the number of my visitors to the website itself (excluding those who use proxies to access it) will be available to you at your request. But I still manage to reach to nearly 20,000 people inside or outside Iran every day. Add to this another 500 page views the English blog gets everyday.
Hopefully, it'll jump up a few thousands up after I take the new measures by the end of the summer.
This is what I would recommend Khamenei to do, if I were his advisor:
a) Suspend the enrichment
b) Make peace with Israel
c) Withdraw from the NPT
d) Publicly start making the nuclear weapons -- to protect your sovereignty against the current U.S. empire and the future Chinese one
Less educated rural men tend to be Ahmadinejad's real constituency who voted for him in the first round of the election. His win in the second round was mainly due to the fact that he was an unknown figure to most of Iranian outside Tehran, that he was not a cleric, and that his rival, Rafsanjani, was one of the most unpopular politicians in contemporary Iran.
So it's really surprising how desperate he is when trying to gather enough people in a big stadium in a city as big as Tehran.
Zeitoon writes in her blog that a friend of her at the university was trying hard to lure everyone to the Taleqani square in central Tehran tomorrow where they'd be picked up to be taken to the Azadi Stadium with a capacity of 12,000.
In return, she said, they were all given two free tickets for a public swimming pool, plus a brand new Maqna'e (government's favorite type of scarf) -- a brown one.
It's not very timely to post this. but this what I wrote for the Guardian last week on Iranian populaists and Zidane:
Why Iran loves Zidane (The Guardian)
By Hossein Derakhshan
Outspoken presidents and oil are not the only things Iran and Latin America have in common. There's also football. Which is why the head of the external relations committee of the Iranian parliament, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, has sent a letter to Zinédine Zidane, congratulating him for his "logical" reaction and "timely" defence against insult to his "humane and Islamic" identity. This, in case you missed it, refers to the exchange in the World Cup final last Sunday between the French national team's captain, and Marco Materazzi, which saw the Italian defender mutter something and Zidane react with his head.
Where Boroujerdi led, Kayhan, a radical hardline newspaper and a strong supporter of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad followed. It ran with Zidane on its frontpage, using two big pictures of the infamous headbutt. The headline read: "Zidane's proud farewell - The best player of the World Cup defended his Islamic identity."
The Iranian MP and Kayhan probably don't know that Zidane calls himself a non-practising Muslim and is married to a scarfless, non-Muslim dancer from Spain who has borne him four boys, none with an Islamic name. Nor did they know exactly what went on between the two players. But even if they did, it wouldn't change much. Football is so popular in Iran that the newly elected president likes to use it on any possible occasion to expand his influence among the masses.
Before Iran left for Germany for the World Cup, Ahmadinejad showed up at one of the exercise sessions, with the national jersey and football boots, and kicked a ball with the national team players. His shooting and dribbling skills and his lecture to the players, wishing them success similar to that of the other young Iranians who are driving Iran's nuclear programme, were widely covered by the local media. So was the photo-op later with captain Ali Daei who gave the president a jersey with number 24 on it.
It was the first time an Iranian president had done such a thing, most likely because all previous incumbents were clerics who found it insulting to appear in public with sportsmen's clothes rather than their sacred cloths.
Earlier this year, Ahmadinejad famously decided to rescind a long-standing ban on women in football grounds and ordered his deputy for sports to reserve the best seats for women so that they could also enjoy the games along with their families.
But critics were suspicious. Ahmadinejad's order was soon reversed by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamanei, and some analysts say the president was expecting this: that he knew all along that the religious establishment would oppose his decision, but his gesture to the large number of young women in the population would position him as a victim of religious fanaticism.
This in fact reveals a truth about Ahmadinejad. He is not a fundamentalist, he is a populist. And football just happens to be a very effective way of reaching the masses.
www.hoder.com
Things have been changing in the past few days for Akbar Ganji.
Since he arrived in London, he's started using the term 'regime change' more often and also, despite what he had previously said, it's very likely that he meets with Bush. So I suspect he's now joined the "Regime Change" campaign.
There are also other evidences.
Amir Taheri, a Paris-based journalist close to the American Neo-conservatives, reports that the hunger strike is a project organized by a new coalition of Iranian opposition groups in which Ganji only plays a symblolic leadership role. Because, as the well-connected Taheri suggests, "there is agreement that the initial phase of action against the Ahmadinejad administration must be led by independent personalities with no partisan affiliations." Then he notes that "the new consensus is already facing its first test over the campaign launched in favour of political prisoners."
Earlier this year, as revealed by Connie Bruck in the New Yorker, Shahriar Ahy, a key figure in the Bush's favorite Regime Change strategy, has started to transform the Referendum movement (was started by Mohsen sazegara and some Iran-based pro-American student activists such as Akbar Atri, Ali Afashari, etc.) into something bigger like a national congress, similar to the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi.
For that, Ahy has been constantly traveling, from London to Dubai, to meet with influential groups and political figures, Bruck writes.
He finally managed to convince some activists from some nationalistic or leftist groups such as Kambiz Roosta, Mashallah Adjoudani, Bagher Parham, Victoria Azad, Abdolsattar Doshooki, and Hossein Bagherzadeh, among others.
There's been several meetings of this kind in Goteborg, Berlin, and London which have not exactly been uniting. Some of the leftists groups had boycotted the London meeting and even Nasser Zarafshan, a leftist lawyer who was imprisoned in Iran and was a founding members of the Referendum movement, protested in a letter that they had mentioned his name for the London meeting's invitation without his consent. Some other groups have also objected to the efforts by the "the Reza Pahlavi's advisor and CIA agent" and has refused to join the coalition.
Now despite Ganji's sometimes contradictory statements which makes it difficult to fit him into a single political agenda or group, the hunger strike which he led was totally organised and covered (Radio Farda has had reports from every single city on the hunger strike and still closely covers Ganji's tour) by new and old supporters of the Referendum movement and the new coalition.
Ironically, they were mainly the same people who advocated the boycott during the last presidential elections which saw the moderate Khatami leaving and the hardliner Ahmadinejad coming as the head of the government. Ganji was also a key supporter of the strategy which was also benefiting the regime for it was only lowering the turn out among the middle and upper class who were more likely to vote for moderates.
I'm not still confident if Ganji is conscious about what's happening around him. After all, he's never lived outside Iran, doesn't speak a word of English or French or any other language, and is quite unaware of the larger picture in which his activities gain meaning. He also is a human being and loves the media attention and be treated like an alive hero.
At best, he is being tricked by the Regime Change to help their agenda, the same way he was used by some radical reformists in Iran to destroy Hashemi Rafsanjani before the sixth parliament's elections. At worst, he's consciously joined Mr. Ahy's new coalition.
His possible meeting with Bush and events for the rest of his trip, especially what he's going to do in Ramin Ahmadi's center center for Human Rights at Yale will determine which path he's chosen -- and whether he returns to Iran soon or stay in the U.S. for the "medical reasons."
Last year, when Akbar Ganji was in a dangerous phase of his hunger strike, I wrote in this blog that a dead Ganji would have had more benefit to Bush than an alive one who speaks, thinks, provokes and disagrees -- and here is the proof.
Ganji has totally disappointed the "Regime change" supporters by announcing he has no interest in meeting with any U.S. government officials or U.S. -based Iranian political groups. Instead is going to meet Noam Chomsky, one of the most outspoken critics of Bush and his gang. See what Eli has written for the New York Sun:
A spokesman for the ad hoc committee arranging Mr. Ganji's visit to America, Mehdi Amini, said yesterday that the former reporter and political prisoner did not want to risk arrest upon his return to Iran. "He has said he is not willing to meet U.S. government officials. He plans to go to Iran and he does not want this to be a reason for the Iranians to rearrest him," Mr. Amini said.
Mr. Ganji first came to the attention of the White House last July when President Bush became the first world leader to urge Iran's supreme leader to release Mr. Ganji from Evin prison, where he went on a hunger strike that lasted nearly two months.
While Mr.Ganji was on hunger strike last summer, Mr. Chomsky signed a petition urging his release. Mr. Chomsky then traveled to Lebanon this spring to meet with leaders of the Syrian-funded terrorist group Hezbollah, which Iran created in the early 1980s. The areas of southern Lebanon ruled by Hezbollah resemble the Shariah state Mr. Ganji is now dedicated to overturning in his native Iran.
But then Eli is so short of finding any credible source to trash Chomsky that he's asked Banafsheh Pourzand's opinion:
Yesterday, one New York-based Iranian-American activist, Banafsheh Zand Bonazzi, said she was disappointed that Mr. Ganji was meeting with Mr. Chomsky. "Because he has been sitting in Iran and has not had to live with Noam Chomsky, he does not know what people like Chomsky do," she said. "He is looking at Chomsky as a hero worshipper, and that Chomsky no longer exists."
The frustration over Ganji's public humiliation of the administration is so much that Eli has reminds us about the superman who was discovered by Richard Perle and unlike Ganji, he is meeting with U.S. officials. He's such a good boy that they've even echeduled a meeting with vice-president Cheney for him:
Mr. Ganji's meeting schedule is contrary in spirit to that of Amir Abbas Fakhravar, a student activist who arrived in Washington in May and has since briefed reporters at the American Enterprise Institute, as well as State Department officials. Vice President Cheney's staff has scheduled a meeting with the student leader.
This is from the BBC News:
Media organisations across Europe have been trying to decipher what Materazzi said to provoke such an extreme reaction from Zidane.
But it remains unclear exactly what was said and the BBC has broadcast two different versions.
BBC Radio Five Live asked for help from a deaf lip reader, Jessica Rees, who read the words phonetically to an Italian translator.
She deciphered the insult as being "you're the son of a terrorist whore" - a translation also carried by many national newspapers in Britain on Tuesday.
The BBC's Ten O'Clock News also called in experts to study the television footage of the incident and determined the following:
Materazzi's first word to Zidane was "no" before he then told him to "calm down".
He then accused him of being a "liar" and wished "an ugly death to you and your family" on the day the Frenchman's mother had been taken to hospital ill. This was followed by "Go f*** yourself".
Zidane's agent, Alain Migliaccio, has hinted that Zidane will soon reveal exactly what was said by Materazzi.
It's been a while since I last posted anything here. I've been to Bussels, Frankfurt and Freiburg ever since and am now in Paris.
I've been mainly doing my regular daily tasks as the webmaster of Rooz and Sobhaneh and of course my Persian blog, my emails and my travels after this.
But there are lots of things happening in Iran these days: detention of NGO activist Akbar Mousavi, Jahanbegloo's situation, Ganji's world tour, Nuclear negotiation -- and the world cup.
Wish I could get a chance to write about them here too. But please note that for every single post I make in Persian, I write a summary in English which also appears here on this page too. but unfortunately not in the RSS feed here yet. But I'll try to fix it soon.