Editor: Myself

What VOA's women show wants

Sometimes they give it to you so frankly and beautifully that you can't believe it. This is from the Voice of America's Persian section programme schedule for yesterday. Isn't it like poetry? I wish I had a rock band and I could use this in a song.

Today’s Woman features a profile with. Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, and Founder of American Islamic Forum for Democracy, regarding his views on Iranian women activists.

NED fellow, Jahanbegloo, defends NED's Tibet project

I'm not surprised to see Ramin Jahanbegloo, a former fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), coming out supporting the NED-funded and organized bogus Tibet protests and its fake leader, Dalai Lama. Are you?

Neith I am surprised that you can't find a single word of support or sympathy in Jahanbegloo's work for, say, Gazans who are living in the largest prison on the planet by the people Jahanbegloo never wants to anger. Or perhaps the universal rules of human dignity that Jahanbegloo praises, do not fully apply to anyone that the Israeli establishment doesn't agree with.

As the late Richard Rorty brilliantly explains, Europe and the U.S. have a very long history to define who is fully human so that those 'universal' rules could be applied to them.

The existence of the rights that the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century claimed for all human beings had not been evident to most European thinkers in the previous thousand years. That their existence seems self-evident to Americans and Europeans two hundred-odd years after they were first asserted is to be explained by culture-specific indoctrination rather than by a sort of connaturality between the human mind and moral truth.

To make our case, we anti-foundationalists point to unpleasant historical facts such as the following: The words of the Declaration were taken, by the supposedly democratic government of the US, to apply only to people of European origin. The American Founding Fathers applied them only to the immigrants who had come across the Atlantic to escape from the monarchical governments of Europe. The idea that native Americans – the Indian tribes who were the aboriginal inhabitants – had such rights was rarely taken seriously. Recalcitrant Indians were massacred.

Again, it was only a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence that the citizenry of the US began to take women's rights seriously – began to ask themselves whether American females were being given the same opportunities for the pursuit of happiness as were American males. It took almost a hundred years, and an enormously costly and cruel civil war, before black Americans were given the right not to be held as slaves. It took another hundred years before black Americans began to be treated as full-fledged citizens, entitled to all the same opportunities as whites.

NIAC's Hadi Ghaemi and Dokhi Fassihian held (likely) NED-funded workshop in Tehran in 2004

I think I now know about one of the NED-funded workshops that NIAC had done in Iran.

In 2004, with pretext of the earthquake in Bam, Hadi Ghaemi (a NIAC's founding member and now a Human Rights Watch senior officer) and Dokhi Fassihian (a then NIAC executive) held a two-day workshop in Tehran for a group of Iranian NGOs 'aimed at strengthening the ability of NGO’s to document and present their work to funders.'

NIAC's press release names Hamyaran, a capacity-building NGO which is founded and run by Baquer (or Bagher) Namazi (father of Siamak Namazi, a former NED fellow), as its organizer. It also quotes from Ghaemi as:

This workshop was a highly successful collaboration between NIAC and Hamyaran. It achieved two important objectives: Firstly, it provided the NGO community in Iran with concrete professional skills, enabling them to use digital video technology for documenting their work and articulating their message to a broad audience. Secondly, the workshop established valuable links between NIAC and Iranian NGOs. We were able to learn of their needs firsthand and we look forward to providing such effective capacity building tools in the future.

Interestingly enough, in November 2005, Baquer Namazi, was invited by Haleh Esfandiari to Woodrow Wilson Center to talk about the ' The State of Civil Society & NGOs Under Iran’s New Government .'

I might be wrong in stating that this particular workshop was funded specifically by NED, but perhaps NIAC can publisize and thereby clarify how exactly they have spent NED's funds.

NED funds NIAC: Trita Parsi must explain

I always thought of Trita Parsi, the president of National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), as a realist and progressive Iranian (I'm not sure if he is an American citizen yet) whose successful lobby group tries to convince the Americans that the Islamic Republic is here to stay and the U.S. eventually has to acknowledge the reality of this sovereign, democratic state which is built on a resistance against the Euro-American universalism.

But in the light of the events in the past few years, and despite my acquaintance with him and the admiration I generally have for most of things that he has done in NIAC, I would like to raise some doubts and I expect the progressive Iranian-Americans demand explanation from NIAC and Trita Parsi.

National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the bipartsian and sophisticated regime-change machine of the U.S. has awarded three grants to NIAC since its creation in 2002. I directly quote from NED's website:

National Iranian American Council (NIAC) - 2006
$107,000
To foster cooperation between Iranian NGOs and the international civil society community and to strengthen the institutional capacity of NGOs in Iran. NIAC will conduct a three-week training program on project design and grant writing for a group of 14 Iranian civil society leaders. NIAC will assist the trainees in designing a project to be implemented inside Iran and developing grant proposals for their prospective projects.

National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) - 2005
$64,000
To foster cooperation between Iranian and international civic groups and foundations, NIAC will translate resource materials on capacity building into Farsi and post them on its website. To strengthen the capacity of civic organizations in Iran, NIAC will hire a Farsi-English speaking expert to advise local groups on project development, proposal writing and foreign donor relations.

National Iranian American Council (NIAC) - 2002
$25,000
To design and implement a two-day media training workshop in Iran for forty staff members from five civic groups. The training will cover public education and outreach, video production, script writing, and graphics usage, and will help the Council gauge participants general receptiveness to civic activities. Participants will also be trained in project development and proposal writing and will be encouraged to identify their needs, develop a public message, and outline an appropriate publicity campaign.

I think Trita Parsi and NIAC owe an explanation why they have received nearly $200,000 of funds from the NED, what exactly have done with it, and what are the civil society groups in Iran who have been trained using this funding.

How can Parsi and NIAC claim to be against the US intervention in Iran and yet continuously be funded by a U.S. state-funded organization whose entire mission is to intervene in sovereign states' affairs in order to expand American interest and control?

NED et al.: The CIA’s successors and collaborators (Le Monde Diplomatique)

US: overt and covert destabilisation

When a scandal in the 1980s revealed the CIA’s 35 years of international manipulations, President Ronald Reagan established the National Endowment for Democracy as a more discreet and less controversial instrument. It had the same purpose – to destabilise unfriendly governments by funding the opposition.

By Hernando Calvo Ospina

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created in 1983, ostensibly as a non-profit-making organisation to promote human rights and democracy. In 1991 its first president, the historian Allen Weinstein, confessed to The Washington Post: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” (1).

Long before the NED was created, the same newspaper had revealed in 1967 how the CIA funded foreign trade unions, cultural organisations, media, and prominent intellectuals. As Philip Agee, a former operative with the Company told me in an interview in 2005: “The CIA used known American foundations, as well as other custom-made entities that existed only on paper.”

Under pressure, President Lyndon Johnson ordered an investigation, although he was aware that the CIA had been mandated to carry out such activities since its creation in 1947. Agee said: “In the aftermath of World War II, faced with threats to our democratic allies and without any mechanism to channel political assistance, US policy makers resorted to covert means, secretly sending advisers, equipment and funds to support newspapers and parties under siege in Europe” (2). They had to counter the Soviet Union’s ideological influence at the start of the cold war.

The funded organisations sometimes managed to weaken and even eliminate opposition to friendly governments, while creating a climate favourable to US interests. There were coups, such as the one in Brazil in 1964 that overthrew President João Goulart. The coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973 showed that the US government had not abandoned such methods. Agee claimed: “To prepare the ground for the military, we funded and channelled the forces of leading organisations in civil society and the media. It was an improved version of the coup in Brazil.”

The battle of ideas

In 1975 the CIA was investigated by the Senate, particularly its involvement in plots against political leaders throughout the world, including Patrice Lumumba, Allende and Fidel Castro. The success of revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America forced the US to recognise that although the strategy of infiltrating social organisations remained crucial, the tactics were counter-productive. So, “to wage the battle of ideas, the Johnson administration recommended the establishment of a public-private mechanism to fund overseas activities openly” (3).

The American Political Foundation (APF), established in 1979, was a coalition of the Democratic and Republican parties, union leaders and employers, conservative academics and institutions relating to foreign policy. It was based on a model developed in West Germany, where the four major political parties had set up government-funded foundations as a response to the cold war. The most important of these was the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, linked to the Christian Democratic Union (4).

In January 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed the secret directive NSDD-77 (5), the result of what he described in a speech to the British parliament as a process designed “to foster the infrastructure of democracy” and “to determine how the United States can best contribute… to the global campaign for democracy” (6). The directive called for “close collaboration with foreign policy efforts – diplomatic, economic, military – as well as a close relationship with sectors of the American society – labour, business, universities, philanthropy, political parties, press.”

Reagan kept quiet about the directive when he presented an APF proposal, the Democracy Programme, to Congress. An act of 23 November 1983 ratified the creation of the NED. At a ceremony at the White House in December he announced: “This programme will not be hidden in shadows. It’ll stand proudly in the spotlight. And, of course, it will be consistent with our own national interests” (7).

Anti-Sandinista dollars

The NED consisted of four core organisations responsible for its management. One already existed: the Free Trade Union Institute was a branch of the AFL-CIO trade union federation and was later incorporated into the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity. The others were the Centre for International Private Enterprise, an affiliate of the US Chamber of Commerce; the National Republican Institute for International Affairs; and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

Although legally an NGO, the NED was funded from the State Department budget, subject to congressional approval. As well as allowing the government to disclaim any formal responsibility, this offered a further strategic advantage. As former State Department official William Blum said: “Notice the non-governmental – this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have.”

In October 1986 the Reagan administration was shaken by the revelation that it had illegally funded the insurgency against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, using money from cocaine trafficking. By coincidence, the operation, coordinated by Colonel Oliver North and authorised by the National Security Council (NSC), was called the Democracy Programme. The NED played a key role. But the investigation was more interested in the funding of the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries, the Contras, than in the involvement of this “NGO”, although the NED was supervised from its creation until 1987 by Walter Raymond, a senior CIA officer and a member of the NSC’s intelligence directorate.

The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) was an extremist anti-Castro organisation set up by the NSC at the same time as the NED. The foundation’s president, Jorge Mas Canosa, said: “The NED inherited Ronald Reagan’s Democracy Programme and provided funding to many Latin-American groups, including the CANF.” Convinced that the road to Cuban freedom lay through Nicaragua, the CANF committed itself to the anti-Sandinista struggle. Mas Canosa said: “This collaboration began when Theodore Shackley, the CIA’s former deputy director of operations and head of its covert operations section, asked members of the foundation to support Central American policy.”

In 1987, during the Contra scandal, the NED funded a front of anti-Sandinista organisations, including the permanent human rights commission of Nicaragua. This support helped Violeta Chamorro, Washington’s preferred candidate and the owner of the “independent” newspaper La Prensa, to win the presidency in 1990.

A non-governmental crusade

The NED’s talent for channelling money, establishing NGOs, electoral manipulation and media brainwashing owed much to the long experience of the CIA, the State Department’s foreign aid agency USAID, and members of the conservative elite associated with US foreign policy (including John Negroponte, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Francis Fukuyama). Terrorism apart, the Reagan administration used the same methods in eastern Europe, where it conducted “a non-governmental crusade for human rights and democracy which avoided accusations of imperialism by presenting itself as a direct response to the needs of dissidents and reformers worldwide” (8). Here the gap between rulers and ruled made it easier for the NED and its network of organisations to use money and advertising to manufacture thousands of supposed dissidents. After regime change, most of these individuals and the groups to which they had belonged evaporated.

One of the most historic victories was in Poland. As early as 1984 the NED was distributing direct aid to set up trade unions, newspapers and human rights groups, all “independent”. For the 1989 parliamentary elections, the NED handed $2.5m to the Solidarity movement, whose leader Lech Walesa, a powerful ally of the US, was elected president in 1990.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a prelude to the NED’s global expansion. It mobilised its money and expertise to intervene in the social, economic and political affairs of 90 countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia and eastern Europe. As Gerald Sussman pointed out, “electoral interventions are critically important to US global policy objectives”. “Democracy building” by the NED and other US organisations has been refined: “Compared to the surreptitious and nakedly aggressive manner in which the CIA typically carried out its destabilising forays from the late 1940s through to the mid-1970s, current forms of electoral manipulation are conducted largely as spectacles of spin and moral drama” (9).

During the 1990 elections in Haiti, the NED invested $36m in the candidacy of Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official. Despite this, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected, only to be overthrown in 1991 after a media campaign funded by the NED and USAID.

In its first 10 years, the NED distributed $200m among 1,500 projects to support friends of the US (10). Since 1988 it has taken a significant interest in Venezuela. Philip Agee said: “There was a quiet operation against the Bolivarian revolution. It began under President Clinton and intensified under George Bush Jr. It’s like the campaign against the Sandinistas, but so far without the terrorism or the economic embargo: promote democracy, keep an eye on elections and support public life.” The US lawyer Eva Golinger discovered from official documents that between 2001 and 2006 the NED and USAID gave more than $20m to Venezuelan opposition groups and private media (11). On 25 April 2002 The New York Times revealed that Congress had ordered a quadrupling of the NED budget for Venezuela just a few months before the failed coup against President Hugo Chávez.

The campaign against Cuba

But the NED’s most consistent campaign has been against the government of Cuba, where it is believed to have invested some $20m over 20 years in an attempt to promote a “democratic transition”; $65m more has been contributed by USAID since 1996. Despite continued insistence upon the supreme necessity of democratic elections, official documents clearly specify that those elected must be to US governmental liking. Almost all the funds are in the hands of organisations based in the US and Europe. The governments of Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic receive a significant proportion of it in return for leading international pressure on Cuba. According to Laura Wides-Munoz (Associated Press, 29 December 2006), the NED paid them $2.4m in 2005.

Washington’s idea of democracy is elections and business walking hand in hand. In his January 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush announced that he would be asking Congress “to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy, and to focus its new work on the development of free elections, and free markets, free press, and free labour unions in the Middle East”; ideological work would accompany military action. Hitherto the NED’s involvement in the region had been minimal. It moved into Afghanistan in 2003. According to its website, it decided “to establish and strengthen business associations inside Afghanistan to ensure a more sustained and diversified effort to build democracy and market economy”. It funded emerging NGOs.

NGOs in occupied Iraq were funded with similar objectives, particularly in the north. Local organisations were supported by – and quickly became dependent upon – the NED. Under the banner of the struggle for democracy, they worked for a system whose interests seldom coincided with those of local people.

Uniquely for an NGO, the NED’s president must appear before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee every year to account for its activities. In June 2006 Carl Gershman (president of the NED since April 1984) made an emergency appeal for more funds to support democracy. He claimed that NGOs in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Venezuela and Egypt needed more to confront “semi-authoritarian” governments. He later made an identical speech to the European parliament during the conference, “Democracy Promotion: the European Way”.

According to William Blum, the NED’s basic philosophy is that societies “are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation… [and] minimal government intervention in the economy. A free-market economy is equated with democracy, reform and growth, and the merits of foreign investment are emphasised. NED’s reports carry on endlessly about democracy, but at best it’s a modest measure of mechanical political democracy they have in mind, not economic democracy; nothing that aims to threaten the powers that be.”

A weapon of global war

Addressing the UN General Assembly in September 1989, President George Bush Sr asserted that the challenge facing the world of freedom was to consolidate the foundations of freedom. In 1988, the Canadian parliament, encouraged by the US, had set up an NED clone, Rights and Democracy. In 1992 the British parliament established the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. Sweden followed with the Swedish International Liberal Centre, the Netherlands with the Alfred Mozer Foundation, and France with the Robert Schuman Foundation and the Jean Jaurès Foundation (linked to the Socialist Party).

As its network spread, the NED set up the Democracy Projects Database to coordinate 6,000 projects worldwide. It also created the Network of Democracy Research Institutes to bring together “independent institutions, university-based study centres, and research programs affiliated with political parties, labour unions, and democracy and human rights movements to facilitate contacts among democracy scholars and activists” (12). The NED hosts the Centre for International Media Assistance, which “brings together a broad range of media experts with the objective of strengthening support of free and independent media throughout the world” (13).

On the State Department’s official website, Carl Gershman declared that all these foundations, people and organisations were contributing to “building a worldwide movement for democracy”, a network of networks with the NED at its centre. Other foundations fell into step: the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Germany; the Olof Palme International Centre in Sweden; the Renner Institute in Austria; and the Pablo Iglesias Foundation, linked to the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party.

In 1996, to justify increasing the NED’s budget, an enlightening report was submitted to Congress: “The US cannot afford to discard such an effective instrument of foreign policy at a time when American interests and values are under sustained ideological attack from a wide variety of anti-democratic forces around the world… [They] remain threatened by deeply entrenched communist regimes, neo-communists, aggressive dictatorships, radical nationalists, and Islamic fundamentalists. Given this reality, the US cannot afford to surrender the ideological battlefield to these enemies of a free and open society.” (14). Three years later, Benjamin Gilman, the president of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, took the same line.

As Blum put it: “What was done was to shift many of the awful things [done by the CIA] to a new organisation, with a nice sounding name. The creation of the NED was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations, and of cynicism.”

Hernando Calvo Ospina is a journalist and the author of Bacardi: the Hidden War (Pluto Press, London, 2002). Translated by Donald Hounam

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Notes:

(1) The Washington Post, 22 September 1991.

(2) www.ned.org/about/nedhistory.h tml. On the CIA’s use of intellectuals see Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granta Books, London, 2000).

(3) www.ned.org/about/nedhistory.h tml

(4) The others were the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Social Democratic Party), the Hanns Seidel Foundation (Christian Social Union) and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (Free Democratic Party).

(5) http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd ...

(6) www.ned.org/about/reagan-060882.html

(7) www.ned.org/about/reagan-121683.html

(8) Nicolas Guilhot,“Le National Endowment for Democracy”, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 139, Paris, September 2001.

(9) Gerald Sussman,“The Myths of‘Democracy Assistance’: US Political Intervention in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe”, Monthly Review, vol 58, no 7, New York, December 2006.

(10) Guilhot, op cit.

(11) Eva Golinger, The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela (Pluto Press, London, 2006).

(12) www.wmd.org/ndri/ndri.html

(13) www.ned.org/about/cima.html

(14) James A Phillips and Kim R Holmes, “The National Endowment in Democracy: A Prudent Investment in the Future”, The Heritage Foundation, Executive memorandum 461, Washington DC, 13 September 1996.

State Department funded Freedom House's new research on iranian textbooks by Saeed Paivandi

The Freedom House last year commissioned a research, led by a Paris-based 'leftist' sociologist named Saeed Paivandi, on the Iranian school textbooks. I'm sure you don't even need to read the report to guess what the conclusions are: Iran is systematically teaching all its children and youth to basically be mysogonists, racists and Islamist militants. But what else?

The textbooks criticize the West (Europe, North America, and Russia) from four main angles:

1. Europe and the United States are portrayed as enemies of Iran's political independence;
2. the West conspires against the current Islamic regime and against Islamist movements generally;
3. colonial rule by Europeans was unjust to the Islamic countries of the Middle East, and the interests of Islamic countries conflict with those of Western countries; and
4. the Islamist discourse of the textbooks expresses opposition to the West as the birthplace of modern society and sees a clash of civilizations between the West and the Islamic world,

Obviously the Freedom House doesn't agree. But what has outraged the Jerusalem Post about the textbooks are not much different from the above paragraph in its refreshing truthfulness that I'm sure you can't find in any other country:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict also appears in the textbooks as a major issue for Muslim countries, with Israel portrayed as an enemy, and an agent of the US.

"The textbooks view Israel as an 'enemy' of Islamic countries and Muslims and an 'agent' of the US and other Western countries. In the textbooks, Israel is 'The regime occupying the Holy Land,' its land is 'occupied Palestine,' and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most important concern of Islamic countries.

For example, 'God willing, the day will come when Muslims will all be united and free Palestine and rescue the Holy Land from the clutches of the enemies of Islam.' (Grade 3 Social Studies textbook, p. 57),' the report states.

But if you wonder who has funded the research, I quote from the first pages of the full report (PDF Format):

We are grateful to the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) for their commitment to this project. Producing this report would not have been possible without their generous funding and unwavering support.

Here are the rest of the research team, just in case:

Freedom House also wishes to thank the project’s Advisory Board for their valuable editorial comments and feedback on the report, which improved the quality of the text. The Advisory Board was comprised of the following individuals:

• Antonia Cortese, Executive Vice President, American Federation of Teachers
• Hormoz Hekmat, Managing Editor, Iran Nameh, Foundation for Iranian Studies
• Sanam Vakil, Visiting scholar of Middle East Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Bologna, Italy

U.S. and NED endorse Iranian women's 'One Million Signature' campaign

What bigger picture would the following facts draw, if you were the Iranian government:

a) The infamous National Endowment for Democracy is going to endorse the Iranian women's rights campaign, namely 'One Million Signatures' to a gathering in Ukraine in May.

b) Last year, the Voice of America's website published an editorial promoting and endorsing the One Million Signature campaign in an editorial which, it says, reflects the view of the U.S. government.

c) In 2003 Mehrangiz Kar, one of the founders and leaders of the One Million Signature campaign, was given the NED's Democracy Award personally by Laura Bush.

Akbar Ganji: Against military attack, but for 'Western intervention' in Iran

Last week, Akbar Ganji received the annual award from Right and Democracy (or International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development), a Canadian government-funded organisation which is known to be the Canadian version of the American National Endowment for Democracy.

In his speech, he openly called for Western government's support to spread democracy and human rights in Iran, according to the Persian version of his speech, published by Dutch-funded 'pro-democracy' projects, Rooz Online and Radio Zamaneh.

The award was given to him by Saad Eddin Ebrahim one of the most avid supporters of the now-defunct Neo-conservative plans to spread democracy in the Middle East, who has also been the director of Rights and Democracy and now sits on its board of directors. (Ibrahim was previously the director of the American Islamic Congress and is still on its board, is on the advisory committee of the Journal of Democracy, published by the National Endowment for Democracy, and is exclusively represented by Benador Association. See where else he is or has been serving.)

The award was supposed to be given to Ibrahim. But according to Janice Stein, the chair of the Rights and Democracy board that also include Mr. Ibrahim, decided to award Ganji instead of Ibrahim. (Source: Rooz Online)

Before handing the award to Ganji, Ibrahim praised Ganji and talked about the many similarities between himself and Ganji. Ironically, among other things, both men have been previously praised and supported by George W. Bush.

When Ibrahim was arrested and eventually found guilty and sentenced to seven years of hard labour by the Egyptian state, Bush suspended a $150m aid package to Egypt, as a result of the verdict. He later met Bush in a 'democracy' conference in Prague in 2006 and recalled Bush telling him: "So don’t lose hope. We are supporting you, and we are with you."

Akbar Ganji, too, while spending the last months of his sentence in 2005, enjoyed Bush's unprecedented and firm support. "Mr. Ganji, please know that as you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you," he said in a statement published by the White House.

How do you think one should interpret all this?

Ganji has increasingly become outspoken against military attack and sanctions against Iran and I personally admire him for his courage to do so.

But one has to be quite naive not to see the obvious contradictions between his anti-war and anti-sanction stance and his justification and calls for foreign intervention in Iran with the usual pretext of 'human rights' and 'democracy'. (Interestingly enough, Ibrahim calls for Western help toward democratization in the Arab world in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.)

To me, Akbar Ganji's opposition to Bush and his administration's hardline stance against Iran doesn't mean he is in principle against foreign intervention. In fact, in his own words 'Western governments' should 'support human rights and democracy in Iran,' and that is exactly what the American Democrats think too.

Just wait and see how, with a change of administration in the forthcoming U.S. elections, Ganji and similar figures (such as Shirin Ebadi, Abbas Milani, Ali Afshari, etc.) would become proponents of the new policy toward Iran which, according to a friend, would try to buy the Iranian revolution, rather than bombing it.

Leader's name, enemy's name

I learnt a big lesson form my last month's visit to the United States:

A country whose leader's name (say, King Abdollah in Jordan) you can't pronounce loud in public is quite similar to one where you can't say the name of it's biggest enemy (say Osama Bin Laden in the U.S.) loud in public.

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?

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.

Mehdi Khalaji's $2 million lawsuit against me over my blog posts

Mehdi Khalaji, an Iranian 'expert' at the Washington Institute for the Near East Policy (WINEP) has now officially filed a libel and defamation lawsuit against me in Canada and has claimed $2,000,000 damages. َQuite a modest champion of free speech, isn't he?

Why? Because I've been very critical about him serving the likes of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woosley and the rest of those filthy warmongers at the Washington Institute for the Near East Policy (WINEP), which was established by and is strongly associated with the Israeli Lobby's in the United States, according to Mearsheimer and Walt. As a result, I have written that Khalaji, an advoacte of the economic warfare against Iran, is a traitor to his people and his country, as a result.

The new claims are again based on the same mistranslation of my writings on him which I exposed and refuted in length a while ago, when he threatened my hosting company (Florida-based Hosting Matters) that led them to promptly terminate the accounts I had with them.

Now apparently, with the backing of his friends at the Israeli lobby's think-tank, he is trying to bankrupt me by starting this silly legal procedure.

I would appreciate it if you could spread the word in your blogs or websites and also if you've got any tips on the right organisation or lawyer to approach. One way would be obviously Digging it.

Here is the full text of the claim if you like to see.

Here is also again his claims and my refutation. I wonder if the court had accepted the claim in the first place, had it known it was based on aa mistranslation of my writings:

These defamatory statements by Hossein Derakhshan directly and by innuendo:

a) state falsely that our client is a traitor to the government and people of Iran;

Mehdi Khalaji is hired by a think-tank, created by the Israeli lobbying group in the US (AIPAC)^[1] and has openly advocated for military action^[2] or economic sanctions^[3] to overthrow the government of Iran^[4]. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and James Woolsey, all strong advocates for regime change in Iran^[5][6], are on its board^[7].

Washington Institute for the Near East Policy (WINEP), Mr. Khalaji works for^[8], has a clear agenda against Iran and that makes Mr. Khalaji, an Iranian citizen, a 'traitor' based on the definition of the word. (The American Heritage dictionary defines 'traitor' as “One who betrays one's country, a cause, or a trust.”^[9])

b) state falsely that our client has worked for U.S. Vice-President Cheney's office; and by innuendo is a dupe or puppet of the U.S. government;

Mistranslated. The correct translation is that Mr. Khalaji “indirectly” and “through WINEP” gives advise to vice-president Cheney's office.

WINEP's director, Robert Satloff says that its products have been made accessible to “high-level Washington-based officials, prominent journalists, and senior diplomats.”^[10] Vice-president's office is surly where many “high-level Washington-based officials” work and therefore WINEP's products, that includes Mr. Khalaji's contribution, reach Mr. Cheney's office.

There are also strong ties between WINEP and Cheney's office. For example, John P. Hannah, a deputy director of WNEP now serves^[11] at a high position at the vice-president's office since 2001.

c) state falsely that our client has counselled the Vice-President of the United States of America to bomb our client's former offices in Iran;

Mistranslated. What I have written is that it is Mr. Cheney who wants to bomb Iran^[12], not that Mr. Khalaji advises him to do so. Mehdi Khalaji has worked ^[13] as a section editor in a newspaper, titled Entekhab run by Taha Hashemi, a cleric appointee^[14] of Ayatollah Khamenei in a government-funded organization related to the Qom's clerical school.

Mr. Khalaji wrote later in an article for the BBC Persian that the publishers of Entekhab had the personal support of Ayatollah Khamenei for the newspaper.^[15]

A military attack on Iran surly could also destroy the building of Entekhab newspaper in central Tehran, where Mehdi Khalaji was once working.

d) state falsely that our client has counselled the Vice-President of the United States of America to bomb our thousands of men, women and children;

Mistranslated. Again, what I have written is that it is Cheney who wants to bomb Iran, not that Khalaji advises him to do so. Obviously thousands of men and women and children would be killed in a military strike against Iran.

e) state falsely that our client counsels enemies of Iran and of humanity;

Based on its output, it's clear that WINEP does not have a friendly policy toward Iran and openly advocates for regime change. So they are enemies of Iran and Khalaji counsels them.

Given the grave consequences of the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, I believe those who supported and administered that invasion are enemies of humanity. At least two of these people, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle are on WINEP's board where Khalaji counsels and WINEP had repeatedly and openly supported the invasion.^[16]

f) incites others to follow the defamer Hossein Derakhshan's lead by spitting in our client's face;

Mistranslated. The correct translation reads “I don't know what name you want to give this conscious intellectual contribution by Mr. Khalaji to the most merciless and dirtiest enemies of Iran and humanity. But I know that if someday I face him in person, instead of saying hello, I will through a big spit on his face.” There is nothing inciting others to do anything here.

g) state falsely that our client holds and publicizes the belief that political change is not possible from within Iran;

This is not false. Mehdi Khalaji finishes his presentation at the AFPC meeting with the following paragraph in which he bluntly rejects the possibility of reform (5' 55 form the video)^[17]:

“The majority of people might not be [unclear word] to the political agenda of the government, but instead suffer from its policy and restrictions upon social freedom without possessing any concrete effective means for any change or reform. Idealism has been reconstructed not only in terms of government's perception of politics, but also in terms of citizens public ambitions. Thus, the regime seems to be more solid and stable as ever before. Therefore the prospect of the prospect for political change is dark.”

Moreover, in an interview with Radio Zamaneh he adds “well, for me the Islamic Republic is similar to Dariush Mehrjooie's film, 'Ejarehneshin-ha.' The owner of the building... doesn't permit any minor changes... Then what will happen? The whole building collapses.”^[18]

h) state falsely that our client struggles to converse and express himself in the English language;

Mistranslated. Correct translation reads “Mehdi Khalaji, while sweating to read smoothly from the English translated text of his article.”

But it is true that Mr. Khalaji has problems, at least in terms of reading, pronunciation and intonation. The recorded video of his speech (mentioned above) clearly shows that Khalaji mispronounces or struggles to read and pronounces many words including 'entirety,' 'unprecedented' and ' judicial.'

i) state falsely that our client counsels the government of the United States of America to choose military action and economic sanctions against Iran, over and instead of diplomatic talks;

Mistranslated. The correct translation reads that Khalaji “tried to show why political change from within is impossible in Iran and therefore the U.S., in order to remove 'the increasing threat by Iran against world piece' should not negotiate with Iran. Instead, through economic sanctions (or implicitly even through military invasion if its it was feasible.)”

Khalaji said these words in a conference to an audience at the AFPC, not to the government. I didn't quoted from him, but sumerised in my own words what could he ultimately mean by his speech.

The words in quotation mark ('the increasing threat by Iran against world piece') refers to a widely used theme by the media and the politicians and by doing so I'm trying to mock the sterotypical aspect of those words.

j) state falsely that our client's academic research paper are in reality thinly veiled instruction manuals on how to locate and attack the weaknesses of the legitimate government of Iran;

In May 2006, Mehdi Khalaji says to a Wall Street Journal reporter “Western countries must push the internal conflicts inside the Iranian government.”^[19]

In July 2007, in an article published on WINEP's website, Khalaji writes:

“For the West, there are many advantages if Iran's leadership is weakened by internal disputes. Such an Iran would be busier domestically and therefore less able to concentrate on foreign adventures. It would also be more aware of its weaknesses and therefore more likely to compromise. To be sure, a weak Supreme Leader would presumably have less authority to impose difficult compromises on objecting factions. That, however, seems like a price worth paying in order to see a less powerful revolutionary leadership.“^[20]

k) state falsely that our client is a proponent of, and openly supports, civil unrest, revolution and a regime change in Iran through the use of the military, and violence if necessary; and

Mistranslated. I never implied Khalaji supports violent change. It is Khalaji's employer, the Washington Institute, who has advocated regime change through violence.

In February 2007, Jeffery White, a defence fellow at the Washington Institute, writes^[21]:

“The choices for dealing with the Iranian challenge, both in and outside Iraq, are not clear, and the consequences of making the wrong choices are dire. But by the time the choices are clear, it will be too late for anything but acquiescence to the presence of a nuclear-armed Iran driven by hostility toward the West -- or a war to prevent it. “

But in his interview with Radio Zamaneh he explicitly advocates for a 'fundamental change', defining it as the removal of Ayatollah Khamanei, the Supreeme leader of the Islamic Republic, in a similar fashion to non-violent revolutions in Eastern Europe. He then adds that this fundamental change is “impossible without foreign assistance.”^[22]

l) clearly evidence a personal vendetta being waged by Hossein Derakhshan against our client, under the guise of alleged "commentary."

Before Khalaji started working for the Washington Institute, I had written positive posts about him and his writings. ^{[23] [24]}

But since he started working for the neo-conservative Washington Institute with its clear agenda to overthrow the Islamic Republic, even through military action if necessary, I have been critical about Khalaji's contribution to such entity. The same way I have been critical of Mohsen Sazgera who was a fellow there before Khalaji. ^[25]

I have never met Khalaji and never had anything personal against him, either in public or private and what I have written about him is only based on his work.

At the same time, I am a established commentator on Iranian affairs. Aside from my bilingual blog that I have written in the past six years, I am a columnist for The Guardian^[26], Washington Post^[27] websites. My writings have also appeared on The New York Times^[28], International Herald Tribune^[29],, BBC News^[30], Die Zeit^[31], etc. and I have been interviewed by various print or broadcast media on Iranian affairs. ^[32]

1. ^ http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
2. ^ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=2520
3. ^ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC04.php?CID=257
4. ^ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/download.php?file=Soref2006.pdf
5. ^ http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=4200
6. ^ http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3422.htm
7. ^ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC11.php?CID=133
8. ^ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC10.php?CID=33
9. ^ http://www.answers.com/topic/traitor
10. ^ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC11.php?CID=21
11. ^ http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/2926
12. ^ http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/18834.html
13. ^ http://news.gooya.eu/politics/archives/2007/04/058513.php
14. ^ http://www.shareh.com/new/persian/magazine/hawzah/61/01.htm
15. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/story/2005/08/printable/050803_mj-mkhalaji-qom-press.shtml
16. ^ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=1486
17. ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAhLUjGPJ8Y
18. ^ http://www.radiozamaneh.org/special/2007/04/post_188.html
19. ^ http://www.opinionjournal.com/wsj/?id=110008382
20. ^ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=2638
21. ^ http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=2567
22. ^ http://www.radiozamaneh.org/special/2007/04/post_188.html
23. ^ http://i.hoder.com/archives/2003/08/030805_007814.shtml
24. ^ http://i.hoder.com/linkdooni/2004_03.html
25. ^ http://i.hoder.com/archives/2005/03/050322_013794.shtml
26. ^ http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/hossein_derakhshan/index.html
27. ^ http://blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/hossein_derakhshan/
28. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/opinion/28Derakhshan.html
29. ^ http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/30/opinion/edhossein.php
30. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4947354.stm
31. ^ http://www.zeit.de/2005/27/Iran
32. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Derakhshan#References

'Free Haleh' and its links to 'pro-democracy' projects

Did you know that 'Free Haleh', the most active online campaign about Esfandiari's prosecution in Iran, is run by the pro-Bush, pro-Iraqi invasion, Zainab Al-Swaiji of the American Islamic Council? The other noteworthy fact is that Free Haleh is hosted by Middle East Youth (its staff), another neo-conservative-leaning 'pro-democracy' project.