Editor: Myself

Satrapi's 'Persepolis': Good versus evil, again (The Guardian)

Finally I sat down and wrote about 'Persepolis', Marjane Satrapi's anti-Iran's Spielberg-backed piece of propaganda. Here it is:

Good versus evil, again (The Guardian)

Persepolis is a black-and-white film which also adopts a very black-and-white view of Iran, Hossein Derakhshan writes.

May 15, 2008

Marjane Satrapi's film, Persepolis must have made George Bush and his new ally, Nicolas Sarokzy, quite happy. After all, despite Satrapi's rhetoric against the two leaders, her film's core argument is one that Bush and Sarkozy have long been busy constructing: the evil state versus the wonderful people.

Read the full article

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.

Radio Zamaneh commissions Abdee Kalantari's Orientalist prose, Kargozaaran republishes it

Looking deeper at the Dutch government-funded Radio Zamaneh's 'Andisheh' (or Ideas) section reveals an uncomfortable truth about what this project actually pursues.

Abdee Kalantari, a U.S.-based regular contributor to this section (and his friend Mehdi Khalaji) has for over the past year consistently recycled Bernard Lewis' arguments. He explicitly dismisses the entire idea of colonialism and advocates such a Eurocentric and Universalist inquiry that, if translated into English, could even be shockingly racist. (Example: Why is the West Afraid of the "Islamic Bomb"?)

The most interesting aspect of all this is that his shallow, racist, and Orientalist articles are not only being handsomely paid by Radio Zamaneh, but they are sadly republished in a reformist daily newspaper in Iran, called Kargozaran, which is run by allies of Hashemi Rafsanjani and is named after their political party, Hezb-e Kargozaran. They probably pay Kalantari for them too. (For instance, in September 2007, eight articles were published in Radio Zamaneh and Kargozaran in a series titled ''A critque of new-nativism'.)

This basically means that the Dutch government is directly funding and advocating a certain line of thinking in the mainstream Iran-based media, and yet it is being tolerated by the Iranian government.

But let's imagine if one wants to challenge Kalantari's prose, given that Radio Zamaneh has never commissioned any critique or counter view to these pieces, who could spend so much time and energy to continuously writing criticism of Zamaneh's articles without being compensated? And if one produces such critiques, how could he or she give it the same exposure that Kalantari's pieces get thanks to the wealthy publishers of his stuff in Amsterdam or in Tehran?

No wonder why Edward Said and other post-colonial thinkers are virtually unknown within Iranian intellectual circles in Iran. From the one hand, writings of the likes of Kalantari are being commissioned and published in Iran by the Euro-American public diplomacy machine, from the other hand the government in Iran doesn't get the necessity of challenging these ideas.

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

-----------------

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.

Roland Rich: NED's man at the UN

NED's Larry Diamond (who is also a senior fellow at Hoover Institute) has suggested that India should begin promoting democracy in the global South, in a recent article. Somewhere in the article, which is quite interesting and I'll discuss it again later, he proposes that the UN Democracy Fund should help India perform this function:

If India were to establish an institution to coordinate and organise exchanges with democrats around the world, richer democracies in the world would want to join with it and help to fund it. And in the near term, we have a ready potential vehicle. The UN Democracy Fund has recently been established, with a substantial budget that includes sizable contributions from India and the United States. It is a natural candidate to provide early support for such a new initiative.

Don't be too surprised. The only reason NED can possibly endorse anything from the UN must be that they have their own guy there; and it's true.

The UN Democracy Fund's executive head, Roland Rich, is a former NED fellow in 2005 and from 1989 to 2005 he was the Foundation Director of the Centre for Democratic Institutions at the Australian National University. In 1997, Louisa Coan, NED's program officer for Asia, called it a 'sister' organization to NED in a testimony at the U.S. congress.

The more you dig into this NED, the uglier and filthier it gets. No wonder they say it is a front for the CIA. But they have now even infiltrated the UN. This is appalling.

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

Washington Post rejected Reza Pahlavi's opinion piece?

They say Reza Pahlavi has published an op-ed in the Washington Post. But I can't find the tiniest trace it on their website. Maybe it was his April Fool's joke? Or maybe the Wp has actually rejected his submission (which is in quite a lame style and has nothing new in it), but Reza Pahlavi just doesn't want to lose face. Poor little thing.

Nowrooz with Kiarostami's 'Iranian Carpet'

Let me wish you a wonderful Iranian new year (Nowrooz) by presenting you a lovely little video, made by Abbas Kiarostami, as part a film titled 'Iranian Carpet', produced by the Farabi Foundation. Watch it and think of Dick Cheney or Hilary Clinton in comparison with the nation that has produced both this carpet and this filmmaker. A little pathetic our American friends look like, don't they?

This year, we will see how those Iranian carpet flowers are going to win over those American bunker-busters.

Iranian Carpet, by Abbas Kiarostami

Mossadegh plays with fire, says New York Times in 1953

The New York Times published the following editorial in 1953, literally two days before the CIA coup against Mohammad Mossadegh. You just need to replace Mossadegh's name with Ahmadinejad and turn the context from nationalization of oil to nuclear programme in order to see how little has changed the way the Americans see those who resist:

Mossadegh plays with fire

Source: The New York Times, Editorial

August 15, 1953

The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye, on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier Mossadegh.

Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry, personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own people. We have seen this onetime chamption of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.

His power would seem to be complete, but he has alientated the traditional ruling classes — the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes. There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russian and the Russians. The peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.

All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer’s apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.

Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians because she has nothing to fear — and there the West has nothing to fear. Thanks largely to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.

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.

Abbas Milani: 'Talk to them-but with the purpose of overthrowing them'

Read the following paragraphs from an article,('Exiles: How Iran's Expatriates are Gaming the Nuclear Threat'), published in the New Yorker in 2006, if you want to know who is Abbas Milani and what he is up to:

Hamid Moghadam, a San Francisco businessman who is a co-founder of the Iran Democracy Project, is delighted that a distinctly different political voice has joined the cause. "I thought the groups that were talking to the Administration had an axe to grind," Moghadam said. "I think the problem in this Administration is that it doesn't know much about how things work in that part of the world, so it is misled by people who appear to know what they're doing. There's an absolute vacuum of ideas and thoughtful analysis. That's why we started this thing-and not just with Iranians." He meant McFaul and Diamond. "The only solution to all of this is democracy, but it cannot be dictated, Iraq style, or it will backfire. It can only be encouraged, through dialogue and open economic activity-it sheds light on all the creepy, crawly things. The youth are the key. Once they get used to economic activity and dialogue, they will expect it." More than two-thirds of Iran's population of seventy million is below the age of thirty-five.

"We hope to have some influence," Moghadam continued, referring to the Hoover project. "Condi, after all, is from the Farm." He meant Stanford. Indeed, what Abbas Milani refers to as Hoover's "conservative cachet" has provided considerable entree in the Bush Administration.

[...]

In early fall, Abbas Milani met privately with a number of officials at the State Department and the N.S.C. Milani sees himself as a pragmatist. ("Abbas represents purity of ideology-he's been persecuted by everybody!" Moghadam said.) Milani often remarks that he got to know leading officials in the Islamic Republic quite well when they were all political prisoners together, during the Shah's regime. (Milani was affiliated with a Maoist underground group, and, in 1976, he went to prison for a year. Later, he was purged from a university teaching job by the mullahs.) In contrast to some advocates of engagement, Milani has an antipathy for the regime so visceral that even hard-liners tend to hear him out. He repeatedly told U.S. officials, "The only solution is to get rid of these guys-but, counter intuitively, you have to soften the position." (He exhorted one senior official, "Do as Israel did! In 1980, there were signs all over Iran that said, 'Qom, 230 miles; Jerusalem, 2342 miles.' Yet Israel was helping Iran, sending arms.") Milani was advocating good-will gestures, such as the donation of earthquake-prediction centers, ending the embargo, exerting pressure on the regime for its violation of human rights, establishing diplomatic relations. "Talk to them-but with the purpose of overthrowing them," he urged.

The officials asked Milani what he thought was the best way to proceed on the nuclear track. He told them that he considers Iran's possession of nuclear weapons inevitable, and he is convinced that military strikes against the nuclear sites would rouse Iranians' nationalism and extend the life of the regime for many years. Moreover, he pointed out, allies of the regime-Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt-have risen to new power through the spread of democracy in the Middle East, which had been championed by the Bush Administration. "If there is a military attack on Iran, it will play into the narrative of the West as the aggressor, and all of these radical Islamists will be strengthened." He also urged that the U.S. abandon the idea of anointing anyone as the future leader of Iran, pointing out that the Shah had never lived down the fact that he owed his throne to the C.I.A., which engineered a coup against Iran's nationalist Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. "Why would you think anything has changed?"

Mehdi Khalaji: Ahmadinejad promotes chaos, Khamenei approves of WMD against civilans

In order to know more about Mehdi Khalaji and why the infamous Israeli-lobby's think-tank, WINEP, has hired him, here is a paragraph from his latest Policy paper, published online by WINEP:

For the president, the Hidden Imam sanctions his aggressive and defying policy toward the West. More worryingly, certain Shiite traditions state that the Imam’s return will come at a time of world chaos, and Ahmadinezhad seems at times to promote chaos for that end. Meanwhile, for the Supreme Leader, there is no theological or ideological restraint for producing weapons of mass destruction or waging offensive wars. While Iranian diplomats repeat that according to Islamic law it is prohibited to kill innocent civilians or produce nuclear weapons, the theological views of the Supreme Leader are not consistent with this claim.

Transsexuals in Iran: Another BBC Two anti-Iranian propaganda that doesn't exactly work how it should

If you are a Jewish Iranian, living in the U.S. from the age of 6, it is very likely you don't like Ahmadinejad. So of course you would like to show how you hate him and how he is such a liar and how evil the entire government he represents is, in any way you can.

So you decide to attack one of the only positive angles Iran has been reported: Sex-change. And why not connect it to Ahmadinejad's speech in your city's university, Columbia, where he said in Iran homosexuality doesn't exist the same way it does in the U.S. (We all know the united Republican/Democrat anti-Iran front translated that to a denial of homosexuals in Iran.)

Tannaz Eshaghian's 'Be Like Others' (or 'Transsexual in Iran,' as BBC titled it) is a well-made documentary, but it is dishonest and unfair.(Watch it on iPlayer) It basically try to say being gay in Iran is so hard that forces gay men to go through the brutal process of sex-change. So even though the Islamic Republic look surprisingly cool with transsexuality on the surface, it is actually killing scores of gay men by separating them from their family, forcing them into a constant struggle of identity, inflicting physical and psychological pain on them -- and turning them into prostitutes, in the end.

But this is not exactly what every viewer would see in the film. They might ask, for instance, if being gay is so hard, how come Ali (Anoush's boyfriend) doesn't feel marginalized, isolated, or even under any kind of pressure?

Ali likes Anoush even before Anoush does the sex-change operation and while he still has male sexual organs. So if Iran is so cruel to homosexuals and hangs them, how come Ali is still not only walking, but working as a hairdresser and even is so comfortable with his name, face and identity be revealed by the film?

Ali's character, in my mind, is the most important one in the film and he is the one that undoes the main message of them film. He is a living evidence of how homosexuality exists in Iran and how and why it is tolerated, and Eshaghian fails to bring it into her core message of the film.

He shows how homosexuality, as a social phenomenon, doesn't exist in Iran because the lines between being straight and gay has historically been blurred in the Iranian culture. Sexuality has never been forced into strict categories in Iran and this could be quite related to what Judith Butler argues in her work.

But the film is also dishonest in details. The most important part, which is also central to the core of the message, is when she shamelessly mistranslates the young cleric who defends sex-change operations. He says transsexuality has nothing to do with homosexuality which is "immoral and irreligious". But guess how it is translated by Eshaghian to twist his logic: "something unnatural and against religion." Wow!

I don't want to get into the list of funders and producers of the film. But I can't resist the temptation of raising two questions. Especially given the continuous anti-Iran propaganda the BBC Two has produced and showed in the past few years.

a) Why Alexandra Kerry's name (Yes, John Kerry's daughter), as a co-producer is missing from the BBC credits?

b) Why the name of another co-producer, Ilan Ziv, an Israeli film-maker and producers with such films as Human Weapon (on the history of suicide bombing traced back to Iran), People Power (on 'non-violent revolutions around the world' with insight from Gene Sharp, 'a leading expert on non-violent struggles') is also removed from the BBC credits?

NED's Carl Gershman on VOA TV Persian

Just for your information, President of National Endowment for Democracy, Carl Gershman, was on VOA's Persian TV last week and he 'discussed NED's mission and the prospects for democracy in Iran.'

Here is the full-length video:

Reviving the Iranian revolt (The Guardian)

Here is my latest column fro The Guardian's Comment is Free website:

Reviving the Iranian revolt

For sixteen years, Iranian government was in the hands of the Euro-American educated bureaucrats who were gradually departing from the specific subjectivity (rejection of the universals, in Foucault's term) which brought about the Iranian uprising of the 1979. The spectre of modernity slowly started to dominate everything, from the economy to the politics, and the two consequtive administrations picked up a similar project of modernisation which the shah had previously failed to continue, and with it, the gloomy consequences started to wane in too: corruption, incompetence, and socio-economic inequality.

Read the rest and leave comments

Does Chomsky know that Ganji calls for foreign intervention in Iran?

I am really surprised how those, like Noam Chomsky, who are so strongly against any type of American intervention in other countries, can support Akbar Ganji's blatant -- and shameless -- call for intervention in Iran. Can someone just show Ganji's recent article in the Newsweek, titled 'The Fight For Iran's Freedom', to these people who put their valuable signatures under whatever nonsense that Ganji's colonized mind produces?

In this struggle, as in the general fight for democracy and human rights, Iranians need the support of the international community, including the American people. At this moment, the best thing Americans could do for us would be to prevent their own government from launching another war in the Middle East and to urge it to desist from threatening Iran with military strikes and regime change. Such rhetoric only strengthens the Iranian regime and makes our work more difficult.

Iran's pro-democracy movement is rooted in the country's moral, cultural and spiritual values. The fight for freedom is our own responsibility, not that of the Bush administration. Iranians need the American people to support us by lobbying their government to adopt policies that will help the forces of democracy and civil society. The Middle East desperately needs peace, not another war.

Freedom House publishes regime change manuals in Persian

Freedom House's Dutch-funded Persian project, Gozaar, has published two new manuals: One to teach Iranians how to organise and manage urban riots to destabilise the Iranian government, called 'Non-Violent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points'; and another on how to disrupt the upcoming parliament election in Iran, titled 'How Domestic Organizations Monitor Elections.'

Ironically, Gene Sharp, the U.S. government's favourite regime change guru, appeared on a one-hour evening call-in show on Voice of America Persian and taught his techniques and strategies of disruption in Iran. The first caller asked him about the possibility of 'velvet revolution' in Iran and of course, Dr. Sharp was very positive.

Read more about Gene Sharp and his Albert Einstein Institute (What does Einstein have to do with regime-change, I have no idea.) in the wonderful SourceWatch.

And here is the full-length video of his guest appearance that I just uploaded to Google video.

Haroon Siddiqui and the death of Canadian independent journalism

As I was expecting, even the supposedly "progressive" Toronto Star, and even its well-known "progressive" columnist, Haroon Siddiqui, failed to mention anything about Ramin Jahanbegloo's continuous co-operation with the infamou National Endowment for Democracy which was the main reason he was arrested in Tehran in 2006.

To me this is a sad sign of the death of critical and independent journalism in Canada.

Ramin Jahanbegloo and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

The Iranian darling of the American regime change project (soft or hard) in Iran, Ramin Jahanbegloo, is back in Canada and being praised left ad right by the utterly appreciative and polite Canadian journalists.

I took this photo of him in 2002 when, as a former friend, I had no idea what he was up to those days. Doesn't it just work perfectly now?

But not a single one of them has even mentioned the main reason behind his arrest that was his one year service and continuous close ties with the National Endowment for Democracy, which is described by its own first president, Allen Weinstein, as an organization which is doing what "was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." (The Washington Post, 22 September 1991)

I haven't lost all my hope in Canadian media yet, but I really wonder which Canadian newspaper or magazine is going to upset Jahanbegloo's publicists at the University of Toronto (where he is on various scholarships now) and talk about the very reason behind Iran's treatment of him.

He is going to give a lecture on Monday, Jan 28, 2008 from 07:30 pm to 09:30 pm in Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles St. W. I wonder if there is at least some progressive Canadians left in Toronto who would dare and challenge him publicly about his NED connection and why he is trying to hide it.

By the way, is it just me or you are also thinking Canada is now gradually becoming the main hub for the US regime change plans in Iran? You know that Akbar Ganji is already working with the Canadian version of the NED, Rights and Democracy, and living in Toronto now.

We'll enjoy seeing you Mullah pimp in prison, a reader writes to me

I just received this gracious email from a reader, whose name I keep to myself. It's quite telling about the dominant discourse among the Iranian opposition (Pahlavists, Rajavists, and Rafsanjanists):

Hossein Jendeh,

I've just been talking to a group of university students from Rome and Florence who have been reading all about you. Apparently EVERYONE in Italy knows that you're a psycho pimp whose daddy is a servant of the akhounds. Ha Ha. You're the only one who's in a coma kosou boy.

The first thing they asked me is, are you Iranian? Do you know this guy who calls himself Hoder? What's wrong with this guy....he thinks people are stupid and don't know how to recognize a liar? So I laughed and told them that everyone now knows that you're a Mullah pimp and that your daddy is one of the regime's biggest pimps.

By the time we're all done with you (oh yes, there are hundreds of people out there exposing you and if you only knew just who knows about you, you'd have a heart attack). Keep up the good work because you're the only one who has NO IDEA what is being dug up out there and who is doing the digging. By the time we're done with you, your bosses back in Tehran will have to drag you back to Tehran for having made a bigger mess of your mission and you'll be in Evin's 209 for a little slap and tickle. I'll enjoy the news of you in those dungeons.

[signature]

Robert Tait should have been fired by The Guardian's editors much earlier

Even though it is sad he has to leave Iran, to be honest with you, I'm quite happy to see Robert Tait leaving his job as The Guardian's Tehran correspondent.

He is a great example of a lot of journalist who were painting a rosy picture of Iran under the reformist government and after they favourite candidate, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, unexpectedly lost the election, suddenly started to rediscover Iran as the most brutal and dangerous theocratic dictatorship in the world.

In the past two years, Robert Tait's reporting not much different from any given Fox News reporter, except that Tait always kept his faith in and loyalty to Rafsanjani and his allies.

Gareth Smyth, Financial Times' correspondent, who sadly was forced to leave Iran recently described the type of journalism that the likes of Tait were doing in a recent article, titled "Breaking eggs in Iran":

[T]here was a strong western view that the reformists (popular, goodies) were confronting the conservatives (unpopular, baddies) over social freedom and women's clothes. Everything had to fit that model...

[O]nce Ahmadinejad was elected, the real circus began in such haste there was no time, even had there been the inclination, for any rational media post mortem. American and Israeli officials - and some news editors - questioned the new president's sanity
and intelligence.

Ahmadinejad came to power as a fundamentalist but then ordered sports authorities to lift the ban on women attending top football matches. By then Syast-e Ruz, a newspaper close to the President, had scoffed at election-time rumours that he would segregate men and women on pavements and in cemeteries. Those who knew Ahmadinejad best were least surprised. They said his religion was closer to the organic faith of the mass of Shia Iranians than to the learned ayatollahs.

I personally remember at least two occasions where Tait was lying outright about which I blogged:

• "Iran hangs 30 over 'US plots'"

• "Censorship fears rise as Iran blocks access to top websites"

I guess any fair observer would agree with me that if Mr. Tait had filed such false and baseless reports about any other country, he would have been sacked by his own editors. But when it comes to Iran, Cuba, Syria and now Russia, every deviance from basic codes of journalism is tolerated, even by a supposedly progressive The Guardian.

Is this piece going to cost me my regular columns at The Guardian? I hope not, and I wish The Guardian replaces him with someone who would be a journalist this time, not a shameless Foreign Office propagandist.

Ultimately, perhaps, Mr. Tait should go to his previous job as the Jerusalem correspondent for The Times. There he would fit rather perfectly.

Ramin Jahanbegloo's articles for NED's Journal of Democracy

Ramin Jahanbegloo is one of the best known Iranian comprador intellectuals who, predictably, was a fellow at The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 2001-2002. He was arrested last year by the Iranian intelligence ministry and freed on bail a few months later.

Now he is apparently off to Toronto as the Dean's Distinguished Visitor in Human Rights at the University of Toronto. Again quit predictably. (I'll soon write about the recent of pres articles being published about him.)

If you are interested in his and other Iranians contribution to NED's Journal of Democracy, here is a list I've produced:

• Jahanbegloo, Ramin. "PRESSURES FROM BELOW." Journal of Democracy 14, no. 1 (January 2003): 126.

• Jahanbegloo, Ramin. "THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUALS." Journal of Democracy 11, no. 4 (October 2000): 135.

• Afshari, Ali, and H. Graham Underwood. "THE STUDENT MOVEMENT'S STRUGGLE." Journal of Democracy 18, no. 4 (October 2007): 80-94.

• Kar, Mehrangiz. "CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS." Journal of Democracy 14, no. 1 (January 2003): 132.

• Esfandiari, Haleh. "OBSERVATIONS ON ELECTION DAY." Journal of Democracy 11, no. 4 (October 2000): 108.

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.

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.

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 newspa