Editor: Myself

Who is a 'populist'?

Continuing from my post about the politics behind the use of the word 'moderate' in the Anglo-saxon media, today I'm going to reveal the meaning of 'populist.'

Whenever you see the word 'populist' in description of a politician, you can change it to "an elected politician who has some socialist elements in its economic views."

No matter how much popular a capitalist politician, elected or unelected, is and what kind of methods they use to appeal to the poor, they are never described as 'populist.'

Don't tell me Human Rights organizations have no political agenda

If I had any doubt that almost all of these so-called Human Rights organizations have an anti-Iran (anti-Cuba, anti-Venezuella, anti-Syria or any other country that fundamentally challenges the U.S. hegemony) political agenda, now I'm convinced.

Imagine an Iranian think-tank, close to the establishment, had filed a libel lawsuit against an Iranian 'dissident' over his or her blog postings. Don't you agree that it would have already found its way to tens of press releases and hundreds of alerts and thousands of news stories over the world?

Now what is happening to me (with the $2 million lawsuit against me) is not much different. Except that no one cares when the same things happen to people like me who do not totally fit into the definition of dissident and the other side also is close to the U.S, policy-making machine rather than to Iranian establishment.

It's wonderful, isn't it?

When politicians love journalists

I beg to say that the main premise on which Sadeq Saba's new analysis is built upon is just false.

In his piece about the harsh criticism against Ahmadinejad, published in a newspaper in iran called Jomhoori-e Eslami, he argues that support for Ahmadinejad is diminishing among within the senior leadership of Iran.

That's becoming an increasingly popular theme these days and the way I read it is that the U.S./UK official line against Iran is slightly shifting towards exploiting the remaining limited potentials of Rafsanjanists in breaking the political unity and common will behind the nuclear programme and particularly the decision not to give up on the enrichment.

The British/American alliance has now publicly started to give a louder voice to the Rafsanjanists inside Iran (from Shirin Ebadi to Hassan Rohani) and outside (almost all Democrat-leaning figures such as Abbas Milani and Akbar Ganji) in order to widen the potential differences of opinions among the key decision-making figures and institutions.

So it doesn't matter to Mr. Saba that painting Jomhouri-e Eslami as a newspaper that reflects Khamenei's positions is totally false. One only needs to go back and see during the previous elections and afterwards it has always been Rafsanjani who has enjoyed the full support of the newspaper, not Ahmadinejad.

In this context, it is very predictable to see such attacks from one of Rafsanjani's most faithful media allies. And it's not event the first time Jomhouri-e Eslami is diong this. (See an eariler report from January 2007 for example.)

What is happening in the past few months is that Khamenei is becoming more and more supportive of Ahmadinejad in private and public, at the same time that he keeps his distance with him. So Khamenei supports him more while he also criticised him more. (For instance, read the transcript of his speech for the government cabinet a few months ago.)

Mind you that I didn't vote for Ahmadinejad and I have my criticism of many of his actions and rhetoric. However, I can't close my eyes on such obviously inaccurate and politically-motivated journalism that has shamelessly become so common in the Euro-American media.

Apparently Washington post's Robin Wright has become their role model.

What is censorship

I have come up with my own definition of censorship lately and I have used in my recent presentations in Ottawa and in New York City. Let me know what you think about it:

Censorship is controlling the reality by constructing various versions of it.

I think this could provide a start for a different way of analysing and talking about censorship in the media. Especially because it is inclusive enough to cover sophisticated form of censorship such as embedded journalism and disinformation campaign as well as the more primitive forms such as banning publications etc.

Tough times for the Iranian 'Blogfather'

I was in Canada two weeks ago for a panel discussion in a Canadian organization. So it was a good chance to raise the issue of free speech, both in Iran and in the 'West.'

The following is an article that was published in Ottawa Citizen when I was there. (Direct link to the article)

The Blogfather

Times are hard for Iran's online free-speech pioneer NN

Don Butler
The Ottawa Citizen

Friday, November 02, 2007

These are trying times for the Blogfather of Iran.

Beset by legal troubles, abandoned by former allies and angered by the West's hostile characterization of his native land, Hossein Derakhshan could be forgiven if the topic he is to address in Ottawa today -- the role of the media in democratic development -- isn't top of mind.

The 32-year-old Iranian Canadian, known as the Blogfather for his role in kickstarting Iran's blogging revolution, flew in from Britain for a panel discussion this afternoon sponsored by the International Development Research Centre.

But Mr. Derakhshan has more pressing matters to attend to while in Canada. Mehdi Khalaji, a visiting Iranian scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has just filed a $2-million defamation suit for critical comments about him on Mr. Derakhshan's groundbreaking blog, Editor: Myself. So now the Blogfather needs a lawyer.

"It would cost me so much money to find a lawyer, and so much time," Mr. Derakhshan moaned this week from London, where he has just begun an MA program in media studies. "It's really devastating."

After Mr. Khalaji's lawyers filed notice of libel in August, the Florida-based firm that was hosting Mr. Derakhshan's blog terminated his account, forcing him to migrate to a new Internet provider.

That Mr. Derakhshan's blog was shut down by an American company is more than a little ironic. It is, after all, the same blog that Iran's regime, so reviled in the West, has been blocking since 2004. (It still reaches a limited number of Iranians by e-mail or other roundabout means.)

And because he visited Israel last year in a high-profile effort to foster better understanding between Israelis and Iranians, Mr. Derakhshan can no longer return to his homeland without risking arrest.

But that's how things have been going lately for Mr. Derakhshan, whose former friends have cut him loose for his outspoken opposition to western attempts to portray Iran as a threat to global security.

So worried is he about the demonization of Iran that he has ceased all criticism of his homeland in English. (He still offers critiques, but only in his Persian blog.) "We should keep our internal problems to ourselves for a while until the threat is gone," he argues.

This summer, he shut down a website documenting censorship in Iran because he feared it would add fuel to the anti-Iranian campaign, though he says he may revive it later, in Persian only.

He has criticized NGOs such as Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch, saying their campaigns against censorship and human rights violations in Iran are often counter-productive and serve American interests more than those of Iranians.

He has even defended Iran's right to possess nuclear weapons for defensive purposes, and has publicly declared that he will return to defend his native land if the West attacks.

All this has left him isolated from the community of politically active expatriate Iranians who formerly supported him. Some bloggers have removed links to his blog. Others have actively urged readers to boycott him. Interview requests from western-based Iranian media have dried up, as have invitations to ex-pat events and panel discussions.

It's quite a change for someone once widely viewed as a free-speech techno-hero. The darkly handsome Mr. Derakhshan has been sympathetically profiled in such diverse publications as Wired and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. More than 7,700 people have watched his interview on CBC's The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos on YouTube.

Mr. Derakhshan arrived in Canada in December 2000 with his Iranian-Canadian wife (the two have since split) keen to experience the West's vaunted economic and political freedoms.

Within nine months, writing from the kitchen table of his Toronto apartment, he had started his blog, using the nom-de-blog Hoder, a contraction of his first and last names.

Mr. Derakhshan, who wrote about the Internet and digital culture for newspapers in Iran, was attracted to blogging by the freedom it offered. "I didn't want to be censored by the publishers and editors in Iran."

At the time, blogging was unknown in Iran. But Mr. Derakhshan soon sent it into overdrive by writing simple instructions that let Iranians blog in their own Persian language.

He also promoted new tools and technologies, linked to other blogs and bugged his journalist friends in Iran "to use this amazing technology to bypass the local editors and the limiting structure of the Iranian press."

When he started out, he hoped there would be 100 Iranian bloggers within a year. Instead, there were thousands. "I was very pessimistic," he acknowledges.

Today, Iran is one of the world's top blogging nations, with an estimated 800,000 blogs, though not all are active.

Though some bloggers have been arrested or harassed, the vast majority are left in peace, Mr. Derakhshan says. Even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a blog.

The regime tolerates blogging, Mr. Derakhshan says, because unlike technologies such as satellite TV, it is not primarily associated with secular, anti-government forces.

Most Iranian bloggers are neither secular nor opponents of the regime, he says. "That's why the government embraced it rather than rejecting it. They don't see blogs as a destabilizing medium or technology."

Blogging has helped expand Iranian civil society, he believes, at least among the country's wealthier, more educated urban residents.

"Within this small fraction of the whole population, the effect has been quite significant, because it has opened up a whole new space for public debate. It has significantly affected public intellectuals because it has helped them engage with a different sort of audience in a much more interactive and lively way."

Though Mr. Derakhshan initially blogged only in Persian, he added an English blog about a year later, in part to show the world how swiftly blogging was catching on in Iran.

But even as acclaim for his pioneering work poured in, Mr. Derakhshan's enthusiasm for his new western home was waning.

As a student in Iran, he says, "I never understood or had any kind of interest in Marxist theories. As soon as I arrived in Canada, after maybe six months and maybe three months of working full time in a company, I realized what he was saying."

As his critiques of western society have become more pointed, he has been heartened by supportive messages from some non-political ex-pats that echo his own journey. "They left Iran with the same hopes and dreams that when they came to Canada or the U.S., everything would be perfect there," he says. "You would have such a happy life.

"When they see the nuances and realities of things in the West, they realize it's not like what they were thinking. They start to question many of these presumptions and presuppositions."

Since emigrating to Canada, Mr. Derakhshan has returned to Iran only once, during the 2005 elections that chose Mr. Ahmadinejad as president.

As he was leaving the country, he was detained and interrogated by officials from the ministry of intelligence about things he had written in his blog.

Their concerns included disrespectful comments about Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, opinions about Iran's nuclear program that were "out of the government's line," and his irreligious views. His interrogators were also unhappy with him for helping Iranians bypass Internet censorship.

Officials ultimately forced him to sign an apology before allowing him to leave.

His trip to Israel in January 2006 appears to have cemented his status as persona non grata. When he appeared on an Iranian news channel recently, the producers received a call from Tehran "asking why did you invite this guy and please do not do it again," he says.

"This is very frustrating to me. They are so paranoid that they can't distinguish their friends from their enemies.

"The fact that I have been to Israel is just enough for them to rule out any possibility that I could be genuinely defending my people and the legitimacy of my government."

While he's a critic of Mr. Ahmadinejad, that doesn't mean he condones the way he's treated in the West.

"It's really, really unfair and wrong and unethical the way they treat him. At the end of the day, he's elected by my people and he represents Iran, for better or for worse."

Mr. Derakhshan's inability to visit his homeland gnaws at him. "I can never have the experience of talking to ordinary Iranians on the street," he laments.

He thinks the West is missing a golden opportunity to build bridges to the Muslim world by isolating and demonizing the Iranian regime, which he insists is not a threat to others.

If the West removed its existential threat to Iran, he's convinced its political discourse would broaden. Iran, he says, could be "an amazing role model for the whole Muslim world to stop being reactionary toward the West and start some sort of positive interaction."

Iran's Islamic republic is still a very new concept and remains a work in progress, he says. Given the chance, "the major force that could democratize the region is a successful Islamic republic rather than an oppressive, colonizing United States."

A year ago, Mr. Derakhshan was convinced an attack on Iran was likely. Now, he thinks the risk is minimal, mainly because western nations have invested so much time and energy in economic sanctions.

Western politicians also realize a military attack would be "counterproductive by any calculation," he says. "Even the most ideologically driven ones, like Cheney, have realized that they wouldn't gain anything from any kind of military clash with Iran at the moment."

As Iran's Blogfather struggles to gain purchase in a time of trouble, that, at least, is something to hold on to.

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FAST FACTS

The Event: A roundtable discussion on media and democratic government features Iranian-Canadian Hossein Derakhshan, known as the Blogfather for his role in kickstarting Iran's blogging revolution.

The Lawsuit: Mr. Derakhshan needs a lawyer, as he is being sued for $2 million by Iranian scholar Mehdi Khalaji, who accuses Mr. Derakhshan of defaming him.

The Context: Despite acclaim from human rights groups, and being unwelcome in Iran thanks to a 2006 trip he made to Israel, Mr. Derakhshan finds his enthusiasm for the West waning.

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BLOGFATHER BASICS

Bio: Hossein Derakhshan, a.k.a. Hoder. Born in 1975 in Iran to a religious family. Emigrated to Canada with his former wife in 2000. Settled in Toronto, where he started a Persian-language blog, Sardabir:khodam ("Editor: Myself") in 2001. Added an English-language version in 2002. Dual citizen of Canada and Iran. Now pursuing MA in media studies at University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

Claim to fame: One of the first people to blog in Farsi, the Persian language. Credited with sparking the blogging revolution in Iran by disseminating simple instructions on how to adapt free online tools to handle Persian characters.

Blogging in Iran: Estimates of the number of blogs range upwards of 800,000, though not all are actively maintained. Relatively few are political. Blogs about culture, the arts and technology are popular.

Prominent blogger: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Harassment: Iranian regime has blocked Mr. Derakhshan's blog since 2004. During visit to Iran in 2005, was detained, questioned about the blog's content and forced to sign an apology. Because he visited Israel in January 2006, can no longer enter Iran.

Shifting views: Has ceased external criticism of Iranian regime because of concern over western efforts to demonize Iran. Believes reform debate should continue, but internally. Outspoken opponent of military action against Iran; supports Iranian nuclear weapons for defensive purposes.

Legal troubles: Served with $2-million defamation suit by Mehdi Khalaji, an Iranian fellow at U.S. think-tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, for critical comments posted on his blog.

Appearance in Ottawa: Hossein Derakhshan will take part in a roundtable discussion on the media and democratic development from 1 to 3 p.m. today at IDRC's head office, 150 Kent St. Other panellists are Chilean journalist Alejandra Matus, South African journalist Mathatha Tsedu and Humaira Habib, who runs a women's community radio station in Afghanistan. Registration to the event is closed. For information, call 613-236-6163, ext. 2244.