It's the ultimate hypocrisy of the West to punish Iran for a crime Iran has not commited.
When no one has found the tiniest evidence of Iran breaking the non-proliferation treaty that it has signed, what international law justifies the UN security council's sanctions on Iran?
Since when the international law has been able to measure intentions of countries, if they say Iran intends to produce nuclear weapons? And how come the same UN Security council allows India, Pakistan to continue their attempts to produce and expand nuclear weaponry? (Although I repeat that I believe Iran has to produce weapons as deterrent after making peace with Israel.)
I believe Negri and Hardt are right to suggest that the new Empire, the United States, applies its dominance through supposedly neutral International organizations.
The more the clash between the West and Iran escalates, the more convinced I become that soon I have to take one side in this nasty conflict. Between Bush and Khamanei, I definitely take Khamanei's side.
Islamic Republic and Khamenei's worst is way better than anything that the United States or the European Union can bring to Iran.
And I'm saying this as a well-traveled Atheist who enjoys his best days of life in the wonderful capitals of Europe and who dreams of a secular Iran, run by a totally open democracy, with total peace with its neighbors including Israel. Not as a fanatic, religious support of Khamenei or Ahmadinejad or even Khatami.
My strong support for the reformists in Iran is more a matter of pragmatism, than an ideological one. I can't even tolerate having dinner with most of these people who still believe in God and heaven and hell -- and obviously never have tasted the joy of drinking May, or wine as it's known in Persian literature.
If the US waged a war against Iran, I'd absolutely go back and defend Iran. I can't let myself to sit down for a moment and watch they make a Baghdad out of Tehran.
Fortunately, I'm not alone.
When Danny Postel, an editor at openDemocracy who commissions most of the articles on Iran there, published his personal attacks and unfair accusations about me on oD, I was wondering how that article would be used and by whom.
Mr. Postel, refusing to discuss my main points in a piece I wrote for oD on Ramin Jahanbegloo's release and its implications, accused of me working for the Intelligence Ministry of Iran, by drawing a comparison between me and a character in a Milan Kundra's novel and attacked openDemocracy over giving a voice to opinons different than his.
Interestingly enough, the article written by Mr. Postel, a self-proclaimed leftist liberal, has provided evidence for a serious neo-conservative researcher, Michael Rubin, who after serving as a political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and as an assistant on Iran and Iraq at Rumsfeld's office, and the author of articles such as "Don't 'Engage' Rogue Regimes. What we need is military might, not diplomatic talk," to dismiss me as a reformer who think Bush has helped Ahmadinejad's election by actively and bluntly promoting a boycott in Iran.
Unfortunately, this usually happens to journalists, such as Mr. Postel, who market themselves as experts on a country or culture without knowing a word of their language or even having spent a day there: Their well-intended work is more useful to people they have always opposed.
Most of the articles he has commissioned for oD have a strong neo-conservative angle towards Iran and this obviously requires another article which I'd have to write at some point.
I haven't had a chance to follow the aftermaths of Le Web 3 conference in Paris. But I think despite its minimal organization team, it was a success on many levels, especially the logistics.
The first day was more a platform for businesses to market their brands and products, to be honest. But there is nothing wrong with that, I suppose, in a business conference. After all, the conference was not an academic one.
But the second day was more interesting. Even though I missed the first half of the second day, including Shimon Peres' surprise speech and a few other interesting panel, such as the one about the future of gaming and Danah Boyd's presentation on teenagers' use of the internet.
Loic had suggested me to meet with Peres and take some photos, but I didn't feel comfortable, to be honest. I was not sure meeting with a former senior official of Israel, who has actually said quite harsh stuff against Iran lately, would be a wise thing to do -- at least in that context. But the reason I missed his speech had nothing to do with that.
The reason was the party the night before which was one of the highlights of the whole event, and also the fact that I was still preparing my presentation in the last hours.
The party (some pictures) was actually quite funny. It was in a place called Bodego which was about to officially open a few days later.It was reserved for the conference attendees that was , predictably, dominated by men. So the first couple of hours the club was full of men. The bar was so busy it took half an hour for me to get a drink. (There was a gorgeous bartender there, by the way, called Colleta, I suppose, that I think had fascinated all the internet addict crowd. She's the one on the left here.)
The few women who were present, didn't dare coming to the dance floor in the beginning. But after many of the men left for different reasons, the crowd reached to a more or less balance and people started to feel comfortable -- and obviously drunk -- and started to dance to the music which was quite eclectic. I specifically liked a remix of the famous Pink Floyd song, Another Brick In The Wall, which I don't usually like, for I've heard it too many times. I wish the DJ had played more rock songs. Dancing to punk-rock, indie-rock, electro-pop, etc. is most fun for me. I get bored dancing to other types of music.
Anyway, the fun night ended with my sexy broken laptop., doing research for my presentation about internet censorship. I wanted to look at censorship in a different way and provide a broader definition of it and breaking some stereotypes, especially on Iran. (Check out a short report about it, plus some reactions from bloggers and some pictures -- Yes, i was wearing my I love Tehran t-shirt again.)
Later I'm going to write an article about it somewhere, but before that I'm going to post the presentation file here.
It was quite late when Loic added me to the program. I'm happy he didn't ignore the the more important non-commercial issues facing the web today in this conference. I hope he continues doing that in the coming years.
Good news coming out of the Interior Ministry's building on the city council elections. Apparently, the reformists are doing much better than expected and it's very likely that they have up to five candidates in the final fifteen member council.
Last week, the French press and Internet watchdog, Reporters Sans Frontier, sent out a press release announcing that Iran has blocked access to The New York Times, implying that the Islamic republic has expanded censorship to Western news websites and this is in line with the new anti-Western policies of president Ahmadinejad.
A few hours after that, through trusted journalists and friends in Tehran, I verified the report and realized that almost none of the websites mentioned in the report, including the New York Times were filtered. I even checked the websites of Israeli newspapers, Haaretz and Jerusalem Post and they were open too. So I concluded that the filtering has been a technical glitch in the Iranian-made filtering software and it's not a policy.
The combination of The Guardian's inaccurate reporting and RSFs unfair and partial press realase made a lethal mix last week and numerous news outlets used this to reinforce the negative image of Iran as the other North Korea.
The RSF, though, probably as a result of a post on this blog which was the only place questioning its findings, has retracted its report. But the way they've done it reveals how biased they are, even when they want to correct themselves.
Instead of removing the whole false story and unfair analysis based on it, from their website, they've just added a few paragraphs, confirming reports that the New York Times is unblocked.
In addition to that, they've refused to send a new press release correcting their big mistake which has significant implications, especially because of their hard work and efforts they're now seen as a trustworthy source of information on Internet censorship by thousands of analysts and policy makers. This is clear breach of fairness and impartiality, two principles of journalism for which RSF is supposed to defend as a media watchdog that protects journalists.
This reminds me of a similar false story on Iran forcing Jews to wear badges, first published by National Post by Amir Taheri, and in a few hours was spread all around the world in all languages and consequently affected hundreds of millions of people's perception of Iran. But predictably only a tiny fraction of all those outlets ran the retraction and only a few millions of those people were informed about its total falseness.
We live in a dangerous world where the reality is more and more constructed by the media and the media is losing its independence to governments or big corporations more and more everyday.
Unfortunately, until blogs are breathing in this same air and get their facts from these sources, nothing is going to change either, no matter how many trillions of blogs are out there, chewing on the same stuff the mainstream media is producing.
After participating in Le Web 3 conference in Paris, I'm in Madrid now and have problems accessing the Internet. I'm thinking of coming here and seriously start studying Spanish.
What a lovely city, Madrid is. I just wish I had more friends here. Any readers from Madrid?
Anyway, the Holocaust conference was finally held and caught me in a surprise. I wasn't expecting it to happen, after all the problems the whole silly line of radical anti-Israeli rhetoric of Ahmadinejad has created.
The more surprising fact is that the conference is organised by and at the IPIS, a respected think-tank at the Foreign Ministry which was for years under Sadegh Kharrazi, the moderate young diplomat who then became the ambassador in France.
The fact that IPIS has organized the conference, to me, hints at the fact that Khamanei and Ali Larijani have approved Ahmadeinjead's anti-Israeli comments. Or at least have not been able to resist against him and his arguments.
Whatever the reason, this conference is a sign that Ahmadinejad is consolidating his power inside the system gradually, carefully and quite intelligently. This is very alarming.
This is basically his style: Using Khomeinist ideological talking points to disarm the traditionalist conservatives and the Khomeinist reformers and consolidate policy- making power in areas he has not much control on, such as nuclear negotioations, foreign affairs, oil, intelligence, etc.
Khatami with the same tactic could've disarmed Khamenei as well, but he didn't, for various reasons.
The Guardian's story on the new wave of censorship was an example of unfair and partial journalism, despite a usually great job that Robert Tait does for the paper in reporting on the nuances of the system in Iran.
First I have to say that the blocking of those websites are removed now. I asked a few friends in Tehran to check nytimes.com, amazon.com, youtube.com, wikipedia.com and even the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.com. They were using various ISPs such as ParsOnline and Datak and they confirmed on Tuesday (today) that all these websites are accessible.
To be on the safe side, I asked them to check my own blog at hoder.com and also flickr.com which has been filtered for quite a long time. Both were inaccessible -- or filtered.
So obviously Mr. Tait has rushed into reporting on something which easily could have been a mistake or a software glitch. We know that due to the US embargo and other issues, Iran has been forced to develop its own filtering software and these applications have had problems.
There has been reports on them slowing them the system so much it made the whole access impossible. Or previously there have incidents when, similar to the recent problem, many websites were automatically and unintentionally blocked. For instance, PersianBlog and blogger have repeatedly been blocked and unblocked.
So the Guardian should have not rushed into conclusion that this incident shows a policy shift in line with Ahmadinejad's presumed policy of rejecting anything Western. Because that is not really the case. He's been quite pragmatic in a lot of areas. He and his culture minister have previously embraced the blogging phenomenon as something as positive as capable of fulfilling the early promises of the Islamic revolution.
There also has never been a policy to block non-English sources of information on the Internet. So for example, none of the English versions of Israeli newspapers are blocked, where as Radio Israel in Persian is blocked. Or when they filtered BBC Persian a few months ago, they didn't do anything to the English website.
The reason obviously is that the number of people who can read English is so small that the government can easily afford letting them accessible. Because their impact on the public debate is next to zero.
Now, why would a government want to suddenly change such a consistent information policy for no specific reason, while we know that the committee that decided about filtering has a very centralised structure and it's much more predictable and coherent compared to the arbitrary and decentralised structure of the judiciary and its treatment of the pres.
The Guardian is totally unfair to ignoring all these important aspects and rushing into turning a very likely unintended incident into an evidence of a change in a long-established policy.
It's also quite partial in that it doesn't even mention the possibility of a technical problem that has precedent. Mr. Tait cold have talked to an expert and include a quote on this angle just to be on the safe side.
Now, it's interesting that some organizations and publications, such as Reporters Without Borders and Wall Street Journal have not even waited for the story to be confirmed by other credible sources, either from Iran such as IRNA or ISNA or from outside like AP, Reuters or AFP, and then start making their repeated and politically motivated attacks against a sovereign, semi-democratic, popular and independent state such as the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I'll write more about why I've lost my trust in RSF and why, I believe, it has lost its credibility as an impartial watchdog.