Editor: Myself

Polls: Stong majority of Iranians are against Israel

From Terror Free Tomorrow's recent poll on Iran (Full report in PDF):

63 percent of Iranians oppose any peace treaty recognizing the State of Israel and favor all Muslims continuing to fight until there is no State of Israel in the Middle East.

Only less than a quarter of Iranians favor a peace treaty recognizing the State of Israel, even if an independent Palestinian state is established.

Likewise, more than 60 percent support the government of Iran providing military and financial assistance to Palestinian opposition groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

45 percent of Iranians would, however, favor recognizing the State of Israel as part of a deal with the U.S., though this is down from the 55 percent we found in June.

59 percent of Iranians also support the government of Iran providing military and financial assistance to Iraqi Shiite militias (33 percent oppose), while 61 percent back such assistance to Hezbollah in Lebanon (32 percent oppose).

From World Public Opinion's 2007 poll on Iran: (Full report in PDF)

A large majority of Iranians have a negative view of Israel’s influence in the world, while nearly half of Americans concur. Iranians and Americans have largely opposing views about the influence of a number of countries and actors in the Middle East, with Iranians having mostly positive views and Americans having chiefly negative ones.

Asked about the influence of Syria in the world, a majority of Iranians (61%) said it had a “mainly positive” influence, while a majority of Americans (71%) said “mainly negative.” Similarly, a large majority of Iranians (73%) said the Palestinians’ influence in the world was positive, while the exact same majority of Americans (73%) said it was mainly negative.

These divergent views extend to non-state actors in the Middle East. A majority of Iranians (56%) said the influence of Hamas was mainly positive, while 77 percent of Americans said its influence in the world was mainly negative.

The contrast in views of Hezbollah, a Shiite organization, is even more striking: 75 percent of Iranians thought HEzbollah's influence in the world was mainly positive, while 80 percent of Americans believed it was mainly negative.

Iranians also had a positive opinion of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. A large majority of Iranians (81%) had a favorable view of Nasrallah, inclusing 59 percent very favorable.

The pattern of diametrically opposed Iranian and American evaluations of Middle Eastern actors is broken in the case of Israel. While an overwhelming majority of Iranians (83%) said they believed Israel had a mainly negative influence in the world, a plurality of Americans (48%) shared that view. Forty-four percent of Americans said Israel had a mainly positive influence.

Challenging pro-Israel bias on the BBC World Service show

I was a guest last week on the BBC World's Have your say programme, talking about Iran, Syria and Israel's nuclear programmes. Predictably, the other guests were all Pro-Israel Jewish Americans, but I think I didn't do that bad in challenging their usual self-fulfilling prophecy. Does anyone know if a transcript is available?

Here is the official BBC description of the show:

Does every country have the right to be nuclear? (Listen to the entire show - MP3 file)

25 April 2008

America has accused Syria or developing a reactor with North Korea's help. If it was there, it's not anymore as Israel bombed the site. Syria says the accusations are nonsense. But what of the principle here... Why shouldn't Syria or any other country develop nuclear facilities whether for weapons or energy? 45 african countries have expressed their desire for nuclear power... Would you oppose them getting it?

Duration: 51mins | File Size: 24MB

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.

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.

Global Voices, angry on Tibet coverage by media, does the same to Iran - sadly

Founders of Global Voices, a project I was involved in it first few months, Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon are outraged by how the Euro-American media is misrepresenting, twisting and even fabricated the facts of the recent incident in Tibet.

I left two comments under their related posts in which I tried to say how all this is similar to the way Iran has been treated for almost 30 years by the same media. There are clues on why I have distanced myself from the Global Voices in the past couple of years.

I left this for Ethan:

Great post, Ethan. But I wonder why the Global Voices coverage on Iran is so terribly biased against the Iranian state and is so similar to what you read everyday in the mainstream media? Why is everything so one-sided?

Frankly, I think there is need for more editorial care when it comes to Iran. No one can trust an anonymous section editor with a pseudonym who can easily hide his or her politics behind a mask of anonymity. And this is worse when there is only one person or view that is covering a huge blogosphere.

And this for Rebecca, who is actually the drive behind this coverage since she lives and works in China:

Great job and great observation, Rebbecca. I'm glad you moved to China, because now you can understand what people like me have been saying for a long time about how the Euro-American media easily twists the facts and gets away with it.

What is happening to reporting on China is actually very similar to the coverage on the Iranian elections, anything that Ahmadinejad says, women, student and workers protests, etc.

I'm affraid to say even the Global Voices' coverage on Iran follows the same pattern in just reproducing the Israeli-American propaganda against Iran, by heavily quoting from a small group of opposition bloggers.

Just take a look at the coverage yourself and compare it to the Chinese coverage. It's quite one-sided and not balanced at all, especially in terms of the topics that are selected and also the blogs that are quoted. Can you for example find anything positive about Ahmadinejad or the state in general, while there is a big chunk of the Iranians blogs now who are supportive of the state and even Ahmadinejad.

Russian, Syria, Iran, Venezuella, Cuba and now China are being misrepresented and demonised on a daily basis in the Western press and sadly Global Voices more or less repeats the same type of coverage.

The good thing is that you are now in China and can see the ugly reality of such propaganda. But what about the rest?

I'm sure by living in Iran for six months and being able to speak the language and hang out with people outside the Northern Tehran bubble, you'd reach to the same conclusion.

Ahmadinejad made Bush show respect to Iran, people say

So the White House has officially celebrated Nowrooz, the Iranian new year, by setting up a Haft Sin table in the State Dining Room. Another example of public diplomacy? Maybe. Does it fool Iranians to understand how much the U.S. government cares for them? Mmm, I'm not sure.

A random comment I found the other day on an Iranian website would give the White House an idea about how their attempt is being read in Iran.

The commentator basically said when Khatami was appeasing the Americans and talked of dialogue with the U.S., Bush called Iran evil and put it in an axis along with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Now that Ahmadinejad is aggressively standing up against the Americans, the same Bush has started to finally show some respect for the Iranian culture and Nowrooz and have even set up a Haft Sin table -- and even explicitly acknowledges Iran's right for civil use of nuclear energy.

If Iran continues to be defiant and doesn't give up its rights, an average Iranian would argue, the next step would be for the U.S. to acknowledge the right of the Iranian state to exist and accept that the Islamic Republic is a government that a strong majority of Iranians (Not of the type Bush usually gets to meet or get advice from) have chosen and have given legitimacy.

Another term for Ahmadinejad will convince the Americans that the Islamic Republic is Iran is here to stay.

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.

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.

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

Michel Foucault: - The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt

by Michel Foucault

Published in Corriere della Sera, November 26, 1978

Tehran – Iran's year-long period of unrest is coming to a head. On the watchface of politics, the hand has hardly moved. The semi-liberal September government was replaced in November by a half-military one. In fact, the whole country is engulfed by revolt: the cities, the countryside, the religious centres, the oil regions, the bazaars, the universities, the civil servants, and the intellectuals. The privileged rats are jumping ship. An entire century in Iran – one of economic development, foreign domination, modernization, and the dynasty, as well as its daily life and its moral system-- is being put into question.
I cannot write the history of the future, and I am also rather clumsy at forecasting the past. However, I would like to try to grasp what is happening right now, because these days nothing is finished, and the dice is still being rolled. It is perhaps this that is the work of a journalist, but it is true that I am nothing but a neophyte.

Iran was never colonized. In the nineteenth century, the British and the Russians divided it into zones of influence, according to a pre-colonial model. The came oil, the two World Wars,and the Middle East conflict,and the great confrontation in Asia. At one stroke, Iran moved to a pre-colonial position within the orbit of the United States. In a long period of dependency without direct colonization, the country's social structures were not radically destroyed. These social structures were not completely overturned, even by the surge of oil revenue, which certainly enriched the privileged, favoured speculation, and permitted an over-provisioning of the army. The changes did not create social forces, however. The bourgeois of the Bazaar was weakened, and the village communities were shaken by the agrarian reform. However, both of the survived enough to suffer from the dependency and the changes that it brought, but also enough to resist the regime that was responsible for these changes as well.

This same situation had the opposite effect on the political movements. In the half-light of dependency, they too subsisted, but could not sustain themselves as real forces. This was due not only to repression, but also to their own choices. The Communist Party was tied to the USSR, was compromised by the occupation of Azerbaijan under Stalin, and was amphibious in its support of the 'bourgeois nationalism' of Mossadeq. With respect to the National Front, Heir of this same Mossadeq, it has been waiting for fifteen years, without making a move, for the moments of a liberalization that it did not believe to be possible without the permission of the Americans. During this time, some impatient cadres from the Communist Party were becoming technocrats for the regime. They were dreaming of an authoritarian government that would develop a nationalist politics. In short, the political parties had become victims of the 'dependent dictatorship' that was the shah's regime. In the name of realism, some played the card of the independence, others that of freedom.
Because of, on the one hand, the absence of a colonizer-occupier and, on the other, the presence of a national army and a seizable police force, the political-military organizations, which elsewhere organized the struggle for decolonization and which, when the time came, found themselves in a position to negotiate independence and impose the departure of the colonial social phenomenon. This does not mean that the rejection is confused, emotional, or barely self-conscious. On the contrary, it spreads in an oddly effective manner, from the strikes to the demonstrations, from the bazaars to the universities, from the leaflets to the sermons, through shopkeepers, workers, clerics, teachers, and students. For the moment, however, no party, no man, and no political ideology can boast that it represents this movement. Nor can anyone claim to be at its head. This movement has no counterpart and no expression in the political order.

The paradox, however, is that it constitutes a perfectly unified collective will. It is surprising to see this immense country, with a population distributed around two large desert plateaus, a country able to afford the latest technical innovations alongside forms of life unchanged for the last thousand years, a country that yet languishing under censorship and the absence of public freedoms, and yet demonstrating an extraordinary unity in spite of all this. It is the same protest, it is the same will, that is expressed by the doctor from Tehran and a provincial mullah, by an oil worker, b a postal employee, and by a female student wearing the chador. This will includes something rather disconcerting. It is always based on the same thing, a sole and very precise thing, the departure of the shah. But for the Iranian people,this unique thing means everything. This political will years for the end of dependency, the disappearance of the police, the redistribution of oil revenue, an attack on corruption, the reactivation of Islam, another way of life and new relations with the West, with the Arab countries, with Asia, and so forth. Somewhat like the European students in the 1960s, the Iranians want it all, but this 'all' is not a 'liberation of desires.' This political will is one of breaking away from all that marks their country and their daily lives with the presence of global hegemonies. Iranians also view the political parties – liberal or socialist, with either a pro-American tendency or a Marxist inspiration – or, it is better to say, the pontifical scene itself, as still and always the agents of these hegemonies.

Hence, the role of this almost mythical figure, Khomeini. Today, no head of state, no political leader, even supported by the whole media of his country, can boast of being the object of such a personal and intense attachment. These ties are probably the result of three things. Khomeini is not there. For the last fifteen years, he has been living in exile and does not want to return until the shah has left. Khomeini says nothing, nothing other than no – to the shah, to the regime, to dependency. Finally, Khomeini is not a politician. There will not be a Khomeini party; there will not be a Khomeini government. Khomeini is the focal point of a collective will. What is the unwavering intransigence seeking? Is it the end of a form of dependency where, behind the Americans, an international consensus and a certain 'state of the world' can be recognized? Is it the end of a dependency of which the dictatorship is the direct instrument, but for which the political manoeuvres could well be the indirect means? It is not only a spontaneous uprising that lacks political organization, but also movement that wants to disengage itself from both external domination and internal politics.

After I left Iran, the question that I was constantly asked was, of course, 'Is this revolution?' (This is the price at which, in France, an entire sector of public opinion becomes interested in that which is 'not about us.') I did not answer, but I wanted to say that it is not a revolution, not in the literal sense of the term, not a way of standing up and straightening things out. It is the insurrection of men with bare hands who want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of the entire world order that bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them, these oil workers and peasants at the frontiers of empires. It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane.

One can understand the difficulties facing the politicians. They outline solutions, which are easier to find than people say. They range from a pure and simple military regime to a constitutional transformation that would lead from a regency to a republic. All of them are based on the elimination of the shah. What is it that the people want? Do they really want nothing more? Everybody is quite aware that they want something completely different. This is why the politicians hesitate to offer them simply that, which is why the situation is at an impasse. Indeed, what place can be given, within the calculations of politics, to such a movement, to a movement through which blows the breath of a religion that speaks less of the hereafter than of the transfiguartion of this world?

Climate change: The convenient escape

Is it just me or you also think the climate change has become a convenient escape for many celebrities who are under social pressure to get involved in public activism, but can not afford the risk of antagonizing certain sources of political power?

I mean, don't you think for, say Paris Hilton, it is much less risky to fight for the cause of climate change rather than the Iraqi occupation?

Ultimately, the responsibility for climate change is so distributed that it almost doesn't bear on anyone's shoulders, and at the end of the day, you can always blame God or nature, anyway.

Just a thought, while I'm supposed to finish four essays until the first week of January. :)

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.

New Israeli poll: The impossibility of 'media controling the masses'

Three months in the wonderful SOAS' MA programme as the Film and Media centre, I can say the most important thing I've learned so far is summarised in two readings:

• Impossibility of the Society, by Ernesto Laclau (1983)
• The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media, by Jean Baudrillard (1985)

Both are challenging the notion of the society as a systematic, coherent and total(ised) entity, as well as demystifying the concept of masses, as a de-historised, finalised, totallised, passive and easily controllable concept.

Basically, unlike what a lot of media theories constitute, media can't simply control the masses, even though the elite who runs the media tend to think so.

A great recent example to me is a new poll (I know that polls are not reliable for the same reason that there is no such thing as masses, accorind at least to Baudrillard) that shows two third of the Israelis are not yet bought into the idea of the necessity of attacking Iran; and all this despite such severe and ongoing propaganda against Iran in Israel by almost all the media outlets.

That doesn't mean activists should not resist the process of hegemonic articulation according to the interests of the rich and the powerful in any given society. But they (or maybe I should say we here) should all be aware that putting all our energy in countering these processes of articulation is as ineffective on the public opinion as the attempts by those who run the media.

Roger Hardy's dillema: Working for Foreign Office or the British public

Roger Hardy was at SOAS last week. He has been a Middle East expert and analyst for the BBC for the past two decades. (So either he has started with the BBC when he was a teenager, or he is actually older than what appears.)

I wanted to ask a question that I didn't get a chance for and I'm raising it here now.

A lot of stuff that Hardy and many other journalists at the BBC doing is also being used by the BBC World Service. In other words, their salary must come from both entities as their service is used by the both.

Now, given that the BBC World Service is wholly funded by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, unlike the rest of the BBC that is funded directly by the British citizen's license fees, How can Roger Hardy and other journalists in the same situation reconcile these two sources of funding and thereby control? What are their mechanisms to guarantee their indepndence, while they are actually on the payroll of the UK government?

The other side of the question, which is even more important, would be that how this question of independence from the government is perceived by the world wide BBC audiences? What effect such perception, right or wrong, would have on they way the people see the BBC journalists?

I would suggest to rethink and review the kidnapping of Alan Johnston a while ago in this light. Maybe things would look a bit differently.

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?

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

Gary Sick: Ahmadinejad emerged unscathed.

Here is Gary Sick's take on Ahmadinejad's Columbia performance and its surrounding events:

Ahmadinejad gave mostly his usual exposition. He did make several points that have been made before but are always ignored or lost in the noise: (1) The way Israel is to be "wiped off the map" is by a referendum in Palestine, not a nuclear holocaust; and (2) Iran is not interested in, and is not producing, nuclear weapons.

Columbia President Lee Bollinger opened the proceedings with a bill of particulars about Iran that had its own small errors of fact but, more important, was pitched in a deliberately insulting tone, descending almost to the level of schoolyard taunts. (I hope students did not take away the lesson that this is how international politics should be conducted.) The dias was draped in black crepe, almost like a funeral, with no school emblems or names.

Ahmadinejad scored a few points. He maintained his composure. When asked what he hoped to accomplish by a visit to Columbia, he replied "I was invited here." In response to Bollinger's challenge to let a Columbia delegation visit Iran, he replied that they would be welcome, that they could visit any of Iran's more than 400 universities, that they could say whatever they liked, and "We will even be polite" to them.

He also persisted in all of his most egregious comments. Just as science never declares any subject finally closed, he intoned, so the Holocaust should remain a topic of research, i.e. Holocaust denial is legitimate. To this he added the amazing news that there are no homosexuals in Iran, which brought snorts of derision from the otherwise polite audience. In my experience, Ahmadinejad always plows ahead on the utterly mistaken notion that his audience can be persuaded by even his wildest flights of fancy. It says something about the private universe that he inhabits.

The biggest applause was for Bollinger's remarks, which were clearly aimed more at his NY audience than at Ahmadinejad. But Ahmadinejad got a pretty good round of applause as he finished up with a call for Palestinian self-determination.

In the short term, I suspect that Bollinger will have disarmed some of the virulent criticism of Columbia from the right (though I will wait and see -- they are not easily put off). Ahmadinejad, in turn, will probably improve his Third World credentials as someone who is not afraid to venture into the Lion's den (literally, since Columbia teams are the Lions and there is even a terrific statue of a lion on campus) and emerged largely unscathed.

To me, the most interesting factoid was that the CU student body fought desperately to get admitted into the auditorium (the largest on campus and totally packed), suggesting that they were at least interested in the novelty of the event -- but perhaps even the substance. Demonstrations started early in the day and were still going strong by the time I came home in the late afternoon. From my casual observation, demonstrations were primarily expressing opposition to Ahmadinejad and his visit to the campus, followed by expressions of opposition to war with Iran. There were also a few pro-Iran demonstrations.

Although I was not involved in setting up this particular event, I absolutely supported the idea and I have not changed my mind. There were a lot of different signals emanating from this event, and there was a lot of substance and symbol for students (and faculty too) to chew on. I'm not sure that free speech was the winner, but even the questions about free speech were more complicated and worthy of serious thought than one might have expected from this kind of encounter.

I'm sure that there are intense discussions underway in every campus hangout tonight, and Columbia students will not be the worse for having chewed over the larger issues that were raised here -- intentionally or inadvertently.

Source: Gulf 2000 forum

Israel lobby in France?

To be honest, with Bernard Kouchner's Cheney-style remarks, I suspect Sarkozy has paved the way for some sort of Israeli lobby to the French foreign policy machine, which I think is unprecedented.

This blog post, that I just found, gives more detail: Bernard Kouchner: Israel Got Lucky

Woodrow Wilson Center works with NED and Hoover Institute on Iran

I just found this paragraph from the statement by Lee Hamilton, the president of the Woodrow Wilson Center in a report titled 'Budget justifications for the fiscal year 2008, submitted to the Committee on Appropriations at the Congress of the United States:

[The Woodrow Wilson Center] is continuing to engage in joint venturing with other institutions around the country and overseas – joint venturing that is mutually beneficial and that extends the reach and the effectiveness of the Center’s work.

Examples include:

• numerous Latin American Program conferences co-hosted with a variety of Latin America-based institutions on such topics
  as Haiti, Cuba, US-Mexican relations, and peace building in Colombia;
• The Kennan Institute working with four major American foundations on a conference in Russia on civil society and its important role;
• Middle East Program conferences with the Hoover Institution on Iran, with USIP for Iraqi women, and with the National Endowment for Democracy on Islamism and democracy in Muslim countries;
• and the convening of a number of university groups, business groups, and nongovernmental organization representatives with government officials from several agencies to assess the balance between access and security and to discuss current visa issues and a myriad of problems getting foreigners into the United States.

Even Israel prepares to live with a 'Nuclear-Enabled' Iran

Reports on an increased possibility of a US attack on Iran are raising some serious concerns. But I don't think it is anything but a psy-op, possibly this time by the liberals to frighten and provoke the Iranian government either to give up the enrichment or to do something stupid that could become a pretext for the more severe UN sanctions.

There is absolutely nothing Bush could gain from such attack and this is not something that only the liberals are saying. But even the most radical but realistic anti-Iranian policy makers in Israel, such as Avigdor Liberman, or in Washington, such as Patrick Clawson, acknowledge the fact that military attack is neither going to stop Iran from its nuclear programme, nor will it weaken or destabilise the government in any way.

And then it's also the Iranian response that could actually destabilise the markets everywhere leading to a serious energy crisis that could anger the EU, China and India and widen the split between the U.S. and the rest of the industrial world.

Knowing all this, Iran has carefully been censoring any news about an imminent attack to undo the psy-op and at the same time, all Iranian opposition, even Reza Pah