IRAN WATCH CANADA

Tuesday, October 31, 2006






News in brief-
News source: ISNA (Iranian Students News Agency)
http://www.isna.ir/Main/NewsView.aspx?ID=News-815673&Lang=P


Rail Road crosses on " Naghshe Rostam"* !
They have no compassion even to the site of "Takhte Jamshid"*(Parseh)!
* Is one of the historic site
*A legendary Persian King's throne- A historic site

One of the research foundation member of the "Pasargad" has emphasized that : The passage of a rail road in front of " Naghshe Rostam" in "Tkhte Jamshid" collection based on the hight of its foundation will not allow to view the site and will destroy the landscape.
Mr. Ali Asadi in speaking with ISNA's reporter have added:The soil that is needed for construction of this rail road will have 5-8 meters hight and this problem will destroy the landscape and wont allow the people to see the historic site . The distance between the rail road and the historic site is around 250-300 meters and the vibration of the ground and the noise will also bring unpleasent effect on " Naghshe Rostam". The rail road is going from Isfahan to Shiraz . Both citys known for its many historic site .

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Monday, October 30, 2006














Source of the news : ILNA
http://www.ilna.ir/shownews.asp?code=361051&code1=15

Monday Nov. 30/2006


Hajarian and Kadivar have been ousted from political & philosophical coucil of "Tarbiat Modares" University !

Kadivar : Political motive is limiting the activities of professors whose thoughts differ from the regime .
Both Mr. Said Hajarian from political science and Mr. Mohsen Kadivar from philosophy council of the college of litrature and humanities of "Tarbiat Modares" university are expelled .
According to a report by ILNA , In continuation to confrontation with university professors the contract of Mr. Hajarian have not been renewed for the coming new school year but Mr. Kadivar can still stay and teach. Mr. Kadivar said: from among one hundered scientific board member only me and Mr. Hajarian were chosen as undesirable elements .I do not know wether these measures are coming from inside the university or outside and there are pressure on ministry of science . Four months ago the university president have told me that he is under pressure ,but i dont know wether this is correct or not?
Mr. Kadivar then said : They also in a way put pressure on Dr. Sorush so that he won't be able to have scientific activity in universities or Mr. Mojtahed Shabestari with 19 years teaching was asked to retire while the university need them .

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

















Autumn sky
Oakville ,Ontario
Photo by: Morteza A.

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

More arrest from the party in "Gilan" province !

News source: The site of "Baztab" :
http://www.baztab.ir/news/51850.php
News code: 51850
Oct.30/2006

The general manager of the " fight with social mischiefs " in Gilan province, has presented statistics on the number of people arrested in a "pleasure party" in Gilan province and said: Unfortunately the number of people arrested in the first seven months of this year compared to the same time of last year has shown an increase of 44% and the number of individuals arrested are 974 .

Colonel Bahadorian in speaking with ISNA have said : The reasons for these anti-cultural phenomenon are; unemployment, increase in expenses for marriage , increase in number of girls, "cultural aggression" and families are not paying attention to religious issues. He has also said in order to fight back with these anti-cultural and social phenomenon the local government must organize different meeting with " office of the Islamic Culture and Guidance " , "Islamic Propaganda Organization " and " Setade Amre be Maruf va Nahy az Monker " ( A women and men group in the citys to fight back with social mischiefs like dress code violation, using makeups, hair covering violation, boy-girl hand holding and .......) and at the same time to organize exhibition in schools , distribution of pamphlet and television programs.
End/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Sunday, October 29, 2006

The Smell of Death In the Press Room

Roozonline -Babak Mehdizade
30 Oct 2006

“Roozegar” daily was shut down after publishing only five issues. It received a warning earlier last week from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for not having a permit to publish political stories. The daily removed its political pages but was shut down after publishing two more issues.
“Roozegar” daily was shut down after publishing only five issues. It received a warning earlier last week from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for not having a permit to publish political stories. The daily removed its political pages but was shut down after publishing two more issues.
A number of Roozegar’s prominent writes including Mohammad Ghoochani, Ahmad Zeidabadi, Reza Khojaste Rahimi, Mohammad Javadrooh and Abdolreza Tajik left the daily after the ministry’s warnings. However, Roozegar was still shut down and the “smell of death permeated in the press room” once again, according to Farid Modaresi.
Although the Islamic Republic cannot tolerate professional publications such as Roozegar and Shargh, there are other avenues for doing journalistic work. As Mohsin Armin tells Rooz, “Things can be said on the internet or satellite instead of newspapers.” Some Roozegar workers – those who had blogs – did just that.
Mohammad-Javad Rooh writes in his blog Samimanetar, “Apparently prior to Roozegar’s publishing, one of its editors had a meeting with Mokhtapour, deputy minister of culture. Mokhtapour tells him in that meeting that he cannot work with the Shargh people. He said he will have enough oversight on them. But Mokhtapour responded, no matter how much you try, Ghoochani, Khojaste and Rooh will do their own thing!”“Although this semi-warning did not prevent us from working with Roozegar,” continues Rooh, “Even in the first three issues [which did not have important political stories anyway] the officials smelled Shargh’s footsteps and ultimately, without finding a smoking gun, shut down the newspaper.”
Akbar Montajebi, political correspondent for Shargh and Roozegar writes in his blog Doran-e Emrooz, “Who would have thought that the Ahmadinejad government would give this kind of present to journalists on the eve of Ramadan’s holy end? The argument was that Roozegar resembled Shargh too much. But that is not important, since a lot of newspapers that are being published now have copied Shargh’s style after its success. Aftab-e Yazd, Hambastegi, Seday-e Edalat, Etemad and a number of other newspapers have copied Shargh’s style. So why didn’t anyone confront them?”
In Montajabi’s view, the real reason for confronting Roozegar is the upcoming city council elections. He adds, “They don’t want an influential paper to be published on election time. It is not a secret that tensions have increased recently between the conservatives and supporters of the president. Amidst these tensions prominent reformists such as Mohammad Ali Najafi, Masjed Jameii, Ebtekar, Jahangiri… have announced their candidacy. This has added to the concern of many that the reformists have come this time, organized, united and ready to conquer the city councils without any divisions. In their view, Roozegar’s existence was dangerous because it helped bring this coalition and unity into being.”
Farid Modaresi, the other political correspondent for Shargh and Roozegar writes in his blog Azar, “People are moving their belongings out of the room and the smell of death has permeated in the press room of Roozegar. Only hopelessness towards the current situation is present in the room. Dying at the hands of despicable rulers is so abominable. Those who did not pay a price for neither the revolution nor the war nor anything else are telling us today that our hands should be clubbed and our pens be broken.”

Link to this news in Roozonline:
http://r0ozonline.com/english/018309.shtml

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin



An evening in autumn - Oakville, Ontario- Photo by : Morteza A.

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Friday, October 27, 2006

Democracy- Human rights-Election -Vote

See the video below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaEECHjWptU

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Thursday, October 26, 2006

An informative documentary film about early bankers , tax system and taxation in US .

See the film here:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15399.htm

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

IRAN: Government bans daily
IRAN: "Rouzegar": retour sur un quotidien mort-né
IFEX - News from the international freedom of expression community
___________________________________
ALERT - IRAN
26 October 2006
Government bans daily
SOURCE: Reporters sans frontières (RSF), Paris
(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has said it was appalled by the Press Surveillance Commission's decision to ban the pro-reform newspaper "Rouzegar" ("Time"), which had just increased its print run and expressed a desire to cover political issues after being reinforced by an influx of journalists from the banned daily "Shargh".
"The ban on 'Rouzegar' is absurd," the press freedom organisation said. "Not content with censuring newspapers when they are slightly critical, the Iranian government has now established prior control. 'Rouzegar' did not have a chance to upset the regime, but it is viewed as a potential threat, especially at election time."
A social and cultural daily with a small circulation, "Rouzegar" had shifted its editorial line in a pro-reform direction by including journalists from "Shargh" on its staff. After its 16 October 2006 issue included political articles, it was seen as a new moderate publication that could fill the gap left by the banning of "Shargh" in September.
But the culture ministry targeted "Rouzegar" on 18 October 2006, expressly banning it from covering politics on the grounds they did not come under the range of subjects it specified when it originally requested its licence from the Press Surveillance Commission.
"Rouzegar"'s reaction was to provisionally suspend publication the same day. But it reappeared two days later, on 20 October, with an issue that had its political section replaced by general-interest and cultural articles.
Nonetheless, it was finally banned altogether on 23 October. Culture ministry spokesperson Alizera Mokhtapour said the decision was based on article 33 of the press law, which provides for "an immediate ban on the publication of a newspaper that replaces a banned newspaper with a name, logo and format that is similar." In other words, the Iranian authorities saw "Rouzegar" as "Shargh" in disguise.
But it was clearly "Rouzegar"'s new editorial team, rather than its format or logo, that scared the authorities. In this case as in many others, the Press Surveillance Commission and the culture minister usurped the role of the courts in controlling the media. In July 2004, the moderate dailies "Vaghayeh Ettefaghieh" and "Jomhouriat" were shut down in a similar fashion (see IFEX alert of 20 July 2004).
At the time, "Vaghayeh Ettefaghieh" was employing many journalists that had come from the daily "Yas-e No", which had been banned at the start of 2004. The order closing down "Vaghayeh Ettefaghieh" mentioned that fact that most of its editorial staff were from "Yas-e No".
Before closing "Jomhouriat", the authorities unsuccessfully pressured its publisher to fire the editor, Emadoldin Baghi, a figurehead of the Iranian pro-reform press and a keen defender of free expression. The daily was finally shut down on 18 July 2004.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are on the list of press freedom predators, which Reporters Without Borders compiles each year.
For further information contact Hajar Smouni, RSF, 5, rue Geoffroy Marie, Paris 75009, France, tel: +33 1 44 83 84 84, fax: +33 1 45 23 11 51, e-mail: moyen-orient@rsf.org, Internet: http://www.rsf.org/
The information contained in this alert is the sole responsibility of RSF. In citing this material for broadcast or publication, please credit RSF.
______________________________
DISTRIBUTED BY THE INTERNATIONAL FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
EXCHANGE (IFEX) CLEARING HOUSE
555 Richmond St. West, # 1101, PO Box 407
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5V 3B1
tel: +1 416 515 9622 fax: +1 416 515 7879
alerts e-mail: alerts@ifex.org general e-mail: ifex@ifex.org
Internet site: http://www.ifex.org/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Wednesday, October 25, 2006



Iran on the bottom of the list of media freedom in the world!

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

The Swedish TV has produced a program on the kidney market in Iran.

People coming and going to an office which arranges the buy and sell of kidney. The price of each
kidney according to the office employees is 3 millions and five hundered thousands Tuman ( Each Canadian dollar is equal to 900 Tuman ) , of this money 2 millions and five hundered thousands comes from the reciever and one million comes from the government. The possible seller must be preferably young and 23 years and not old . In 2 cases that you see in the video , one reciever is a young boy and the seller is a young woman and in the other case the young man with goatee is the seller who recieves the money while laying on the bed and then tells to her wife that this is the last money we have and we must organize our spending. All of them say they sell their kidney because of the need to pay the rent, debt and other means to continue their lives in a pretty expensive living condition in big citys.

See the video here:

http://svt.se/content/1/c6/67/48/80/reapanjure.ram

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

News in brief-

Iran Emrooz online repoting from ISNA ( Iranian Student News Agency ) :

Three stdents are summoned !

Three students from "Amirkabir University " on October 21 were summoned to the diciplinary committee.
These students are : Mr. Mohammad Salmanpoor, Mr. Ebrahim Rahmani and Mr. Saman Khosravi .
Mr. Salmanpoor in speaking with ISNA have said : I, together with Mr. Ebrahim Rahmani and Mr. Saman Khosravi on Saturday were summoned to the diciplinary committee, my session with committee was held yesterdays evening and i was charged with: "disturbing the university's order " , " participation in an illegal gathering " and " disrupting the program of the Islamic Association.
As well, the diciplinary committee approved the primary sentencing of " prevention from continuing education " for Mr. Abbas Hakimzadeh . Mr. Hakimzadeh in speaking with ISNA have said:" Before i recieve the sentencing, i recieved a letter from the committee that we are not allowed to publish the publication ( "Vazhe Nou" publication) ( Fresh diction). He also added : The "Herasat" office ( Regim's watch dogs ) in university does not permit me to enter to the university .These verdict was the result of ten days unrest by students of this university on June of this year.
In response to a question that why this student have no right to enter to the university, Mr. Ataei the deputy of student affair in Amirkabir University said: We are not allowed to explain about the verdict , the verdicts are completely secret".

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://www.iran-emrooz.net/index.php?/news2/10685/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Sunday, October 22, 2006

News in brief-

The former site of the "Student Committee in Defense of Political Prisoners" was banned and it's new news reporting site in Iran has been also filtered.

The former site of the "Student Committee in Defense of Political Prisoners" with this address www.komitedefa.blogfa.com was banned and its new new site with this address www.komitedefa.mihanblog.com has also been filtered .
In the past, there were news that the site have been filtered inside the country but in the last few days the people visiting the site have reported that it is impossible to use the site.
"Student Committee in Defense of Political Prisoners" is the first organization that started to defend the rights of political prisoners and students who were under presecution .It was established in 1998 and since then, did its outmost effort to defend the rights of the political prisoners in the frame work of laws and as a result, its members were the target of security organizations and judiciaries, and its members were imprisoned or recieved suspension sentences. At present the "Student Committee in Defense of Political Prisoners" is trying to establish new news, article and human rights reports site and its address will soon be announced .

Signed by:
Student Committee in Defense of Political Prisoners
komitedefa@gmail.com

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

News in brief-

Mr. Kurosh Zaim is arrested !

According to "Advar news " , engineer "Kurosh Zaim" member of the central council of "Iran's National Front" is arrested .
Dr. Parviz Varjavand in speaking with Advar news reporter have said : On Friday security agents attended in the house of Mr. Kurosh Zaim and after confiscating his personal belonging and computer arrested him.
Mr. Varjavand also said : On Saturday night Mr. Kurosh Zaim contacted with his family by phone and said that he is been detained in Evin prison.

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://www.iran-emrooz.net/index.php?/news2/10667/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

News update:

Student publications activists are going to strike!

Amirkabir bulletin: In protest to wrongful policy of university management in dealing with student publications, the student publications activists are going to hold strike on Sunday!

It is needed to say that; the participants in this strike are student publications activists from all groups and different mind set of university (except "Basij") (Pro-regime militia students).

The reason for protest are : Closure and removal of independent and critical publications to the regime and university management by the securities , stoppage in payment to the publication's printing expenses , censorship and creation of watchdogs .

These student activists warned university management and announced that: " in case of no response to the students demand , the university will face actions by the publications activists" .

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://www.iran-emrooz.net/index.php?/news2/10665/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Thursday, October 19, 2006




News update-
Follow up on Zahra Kazemi's case.
German Radio (DW)
An interview by : Behnam Bavandpoor

Interview w/ Mr. Mohammad Ali Dadkhah about assigning the case file of Zahra Kazemi to supreme court !
"Ms. Zahra Kazemi have been murdered and there are enough witness,evidence and reason which could help easily identify the murderers".

ISNA on quoting from Dr. Seifzadeh one of the lawyer for the family of Zahra Kazemi reported that; the case file have been assigned to branch number 15 of suprem court .
Zahra Kazemi is the Canadian - Iranian photojournalist who, while taking picture from the family of the political prisoners in front of Evin prison in Tehran on June 2003, was arrested and according to her lawyers at the same time in prison was beaten up and later murdered.
does assingning the case file of Zahra Kazemi to suprem court means a sign to clarify the file which have been in court for many years ?
Interview:
Mr. Dadkhah , does assigning the case file of Zahra Kazemi to suprem court means reopening and following of this file?
Mohammad Ali Dadkhah: Yes, almost can be coceived that the file is now going to be looked at , although legally its been happening with delay, but we hope based on legal measures of reasons and understandings that we put forward for the suprem court , we will arrive to a positive result.
Mr. Dadkhah , Was this a result of pressures and efforts by you and other lawyers of Kazemi's family or it was a move by judiciary power itself ?
Mohammad Ali Dadkhah: No, the file was not going anywher in the court , i should say that ; our demands and the rights of the family members was the force behind reopening the case again.
Dr. Seifzadeh another family lawyer of Zahra Kazemi have announced that : This file was given to a council in suprem court for study and preparation of report, Mr. Dadkhah, what will be clarified by this report ?
Mr. Dadkhah: This report will identify the past process of the file and also it will be a start for the suprem court to make a decision.
From the legal stand point , when a file like the death of Zahra Kazemi's can become closed or be called as closed?
Mr. Dadkhah: the verdict must be the final one or peremptory , meaning, the file will arrive to a point that there won't be possibility to follow further or it will come to a stage that we won't be able to protest to a higher body , but so far this file havn't been arrived to both of these points.
Mr. Dadkhah , that means in judiciary power's stand point , the file of Zahra Kazemi is not yet closed?
Mr. Dadkhah: Correct, I must tell, based on the law over the file , this file is still open and the judiciary power must decide about it.

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://news.gooya.eu/politics/archives/2006/10/053901.php


Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

News in Brief-

After three days and three numbers , "Roozgar" newspaper was ordered to stop it's publication !

According to ILNA's reporter a letter was sent by the ministry of culture & guidance ( internal media office) to Mr. Farzaneh Kharghani the manager in charge of " Roozgar " newspaper that " Roozgar " should publish it's paper without political page. This letter was signed by Mr. Alaedin Zahurian the general manager of ministry of guidance ( internal media) , the letter emphasized that since the license given to Roozgar had no permission for political page , therefore this newspaper is not allowed to publish Iran's political news .
Roozgar started it's publication since last monday ( Oct. 16/2006).

Right after this news went on ILNA's wire , ILNA news agency asked from its readers not to use the above news.
It is needed to say that; Roozgar is using the editorial of Sharq newspaper . There have been alot of questions that why Roozgar can't have political page while many other newspapers with the same license can write political news.
Journalists who are working for Roozgar have written on their blog that ; Roozgar have been closed for some changes and may resume its publication after " Ramadan " ( The month of fasting) .
The Media Watch Dogs from Ministry of Culture & Guidance banned the publication of Roozgar because they believe the paper is a social newspaper and not political and based on the law only 20% of its written matterial can be political .
From tomorrow Roozgar is not going to be published . Roozgar is ended with the same destiny as Sharq , someone does not like Sharq to be published with any other name.

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://www.iran-emrooz.net/index.php?/news/more/10636/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Tuesday, October 17, 2006













In the Fifth Month of Mousavi Khoeini’s Arrest
Omid Memarian o.memarian@roozonline.com
18 Oct 2006

Five months have passed since the “temporary” detention of former reformist Majlis deputy (MP), Mousavi Khoeini. He was arrested on June 12 while participating at a peaceful gathering to protest discriminatory laws against women. Mr. Khoeini was in fact one of the sixty people arrested when the gathering took a violent turn after security forces stormed the area.

Five months have passed since the “temporary” detention of former reformist Majlis deputy (MP), Mousavi Khoeini. He was arrested on June 12 while participating at a peaceful gathering to protest discriminatory laws against women. Mr. Khoeini was in fact one of the sixty people arrested when the gathering took a violent turn after security forces stormed the area. Mousavi Khoeini, who is now spending time in the infamous 209 ward of Evin prison, had visited this very prison many times as a member of parliament and the National Security Council. The irony of life around us is that his efforts to bring secret detention centers under the open legal jurisdiction and protect prisoners’ rights have now sent him to jail. Above all, he has now personally experienced what it means to spend time in solitary confinement.
Unlike other political prisoners, Mousavi Khoeini is neither in touch with his lawyers nor able to meet his family members. Even for a humanitarian event such as the funeral and burial ceremony of his father, he was escorted out of prison for just one night.
Despite the efforts of many local and international human rights organizations, no one is taking responsibility for Khoeini’s condition. Many human rights organizations and some of the most prominent human rights activists in Iran later condemned the unprecedented level of police violence at the gathering in which Khoeini was arrested. More than 100 of the most prominent social, cultural and political activists in Iran wrote an open letter one day after the event. It stated, “Reverting to violence instead of protecting the security of citizens’ gatherings is in violation of human rights, national security, and the mission statement of the police force. Hence, the responsibility of such violations and inappropriate measures rests with the Ministry of Interior, and the person of the minister, as the chief of police, is required to look into these issues and restore the rights of the victims as well as punish the offenders. Undoubtedly, this bitter event is an important test in gauging the level of the government’s affection for its citizenry.”
When Khoeini was attending his father’s funeral, he shouted to the audience that he was being tortured: “I am in solitary and being interrogated four times a day. I am woken up in the middle of the night for interrogation. They want to turn me into a mental patient, constantly pressuring me to denounce my beliefs, regret my actions and ask the Supreme Leader for forgiveness. I resist but they have placed me under very severe pressures.” A few of those present at the funeral told Amnesty International, “Khoeini’s escorts did not let him meet his wife when he entered the mosque. In reaction, Khoeini began speaking in a loud voice and asked people for help.” But even these remarks were not enough to convince judiciary’s officials to conduct an independent investigation over the matter. One of those present at the funeral also told Amnesty International, “bruises on his neck and signs of broken bones were visible on his head.” Khoeini had also lamented the psychological and physical tortures that he was subject to, “I sleep at nights with chains to my hands and feet and do not have access to any amenities.”
Officials have banned Khoeini from meeting with his lawyers. The judiciary has not yet announced any formal charges against him. This has worried many of Khoeini’s friends and colleagues. Ironically, the judiciary released a document entitled “Citizen’s Rights” earlier to boast about its treatment of prisoners.
Khoeini is entering his fifth month of detention while his condition has worried many civil society activists in Iran. Each day more voices are heard protesting such of treatments and arrests, reflecting the negative effects of the arrest of man, who although alone in prison, is celebrated and awaited by his friends more than ever before.
Link to this news :
http://r0ozonline.com/english/018188.shtml

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin



















Student's movement in Iran is not easy to suppress !

Shah's regime couldn't & Islamic Republic won't be able too.
Photo shows students protest in Amirkabir university on Tuesday October 17/2006.

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin


















News update-

2nd day of confrontations in Amirkabir University !

Amirkabir University bulletin reported that : Yesterday the Association of Islamic Students of Amirkabir University ( Polytechnic ) had a protest gathering and demanded for the release of doctor Keyvan Ansari and knowing of his situation and on Tuesday again the students gathered for free speeches in university theater.
Doctor Rahaei is the representative of islamic leader in university . He has interfered in the free Islamic students election and as a result there was 10 days of unrest in this university , then 2800 students participated in the election and elected new central council of the association. Dr. Rahaei then in an illegal action during the summer holiday and at midnight ordered his agents to break and enter to the association's office and remove and transfer all the documents and equipements to an unknown location , Mr. Rahaei in another action gave the association 's license to small group of " Basiji " (pro-government ) students . From the begining of classes again in october he brought an atmosphere of heavy security and banned the disribution of student publications in the campus.
Knowing all these, in this week on Tuesday the appointed "Basiji" student group organized an event about the " khebregan leadership " election, this brought protest by the majority of the students and in a protest action the majority of students warnned that they won't allow any activities to this group under the name of Association of Islamic Students.
The students staged a protest rally in front of Theater where the " Basiji's were holding their events inside the theater they sang songs and chanted slogans in suppoert of Islamic Students Association, the security forces were unable to stop students from entering into the theater .
The students were chanting " Basiji get out " , " security get lost " , " We support you the elected association" and " the appointed association must be abolished ". .
The small group of Basiji students were forced by the majority students to go out of the theater, after they have left the theater the students oppened their general meeting , this session ended with free speeches and dialogues.
Will be continued.......

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://1384.g00ya.com/politics/archives/2006/10/053849.php

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

News in brief-

Islamic Republic's court sentenced a student to lashes !

with the order of branch number one of the court of revolution and branch number 102 of the general court division of Yazd city Mr. Mohammad Reza Rahimirad former member of the Republican Students Association of Yazd University was sentenced either to pay 10 million " Tuman " cash to the court or spened six months in jail and recieve 30 lashes.
This student activist was charged with : " Insult to the leader of the Islamic Republic " and " Insult to the university guard " .
The Republican Students Association of Yazd University was dissolved by the control board at the end of the reformist government.
Mr. Rahimirad said: These charges are baseless and i'm going to appeal to one of the court during the legal time that i have .

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://www.iran-emrooz.net/index.php?/news2/10615/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

News in brief-

A journalist recieved one year prison sentence !

The lawyer of one of the journalist from " Zanjan " who was also a member of the Islamic Student Association of Zanjan University reported that his client recieved one year prison sentence on the charges of " propaganda against the system and insult to officials".
Mr. Said Khalily the lawyer in speaking with ISNA have said : My client Mr. Reza Abbasi was charged with " propaganda against the system and insul to officials " in Zanjan court of revolution and at the end he was given six months prison sentences for each charges" .
He addaed that : He will protest to the sentences in appeal court.

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://www.iran-emrooz.net/index.php?/news2/10614/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin



"Polytechnic" students protest !

Tehran Polytechnic students in protest to three weeks detention and not knowing the situation of Mr. Keyvan Ansari staged a protest gathering and demanded for his immediate release .

Link to this news in Farsi:

http://r0ozonline.com/01newsstory/018167.shtml

"IWC" will bring you more news about this gathering.

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Sunday, October 15, 2006




Iran & Environmental issues .

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Saturday, October 14, 2006




Ganji Wins Prestigious Martin Ennals Award

Roozonline-
Maryam Kashani m.kashani@roozonline.com
13 Oct 2006

Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji was awarded the prestigious 2006 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. In the ceremony held in Geneva, Ganji noted that Iran’s democracy movement faces two obstacles: an unfair international structure on the one hand, and an oppressive regime on the other.

Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji was awarded the prestigious 2006 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. In the ceremony held in Geneva, Ganji noted that Iran’s democracy movement faces two obstacles: an unfair international structure on the one hand, and an oppressive regime on the other.
Praising the positive role of human rights organizations all over the world, Ganji said, “the international structure is such that human rights issues are subordinated to economic and business relations, and forgotten altogether during times of crisis.”
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, Geneva’s mayor, and representatives from international human rights organizations attended this ceremony. The screening of a documentary depicting Ganji’s life aroused the emotions of the guests at the ceremony. It included interviews with Ganji’s wife, Masoumeh Shafii, pictures from Ganji’s hunger strike, and his speeches on the necessity of fighting for freedom and democracy.
After the documentary a forum was set in which Ganji was asked what he expected from international organizations in furthering his cause. Ganji responded, “We only need the spiritual and ethical support of these organizations, since we face two kinds of tyranny from governments. The first comes from the unfair international structure and the second from a tyrannical government that oppresses Iran’s democracy movement.”
“In fact,” added Ganji, “the international structure is such that human rights issues are subordinated to economic and business relations of governments. Within this framework, not even the United Nations can help human rights, because it is composed of countries that themselves violate human rights. In the newly formed Commission on Human Rights there are countries that themselves undermine human rights and vote for one another. It can’t be that human rights violators themselves be judges on those violations. We have objections to this structure and think that this commission must be composed of countries and independent organizations that would denounce any kind of human rights violations by any country. Such behavior is not possible within the current framework.”
We spoke a little with Ganji after the ceremony. Acknowledging the symbolic importance of such prizes in demonstrating international support for Iran’s fight for democracy and human rights, Ganji said, “These prizes show that the attention of international organizations has been focused on Iran. All of them, including the 11 organizations that attended the ceremony are monitoring the condition of human rights in Iran. Moreover, with such prizes the people of the world will look at Iran from a different angle. Also these prizes give hope and encouragement to those fighting for freedom and human rights in the country.”
“However,” said Ganji, “we cannot expect the international community to bring us democracy. A successful transition to democracy comes only through struggle and paying the costs by the Iranian people. How can the West bring democracy for Iran? A military attack would only destroy our country, not lead to democracy. And giving money to traitors and ‘Chalebi’s’ also will not lead to democracy.”
Talking about the nuclear crisis and the militarization of the world, Gani said, “Because of these issues human rights have been forgotten, even though we are asking for a fundamental change in the structure of international organizations such as the UN, so they can object to human rights violators with power and use different mechanisms to prevent oppression by government.”
In this respect Ganji recalled that UN human rights reporters traveled to different countries such as Iran regularly in the past, but not anymore.
At the end, Ganji commented on the increasing restrictions being imposed in Iran: “This situation too results form both internal and foreign causes. On the one hand, Bush’s militaristic foreign policy and the threat of a military attack have led to the growth of fundamentalism in Iran. On the other hand, the weak performance of the reformists has taken away people’s hope and trust. In effect, during the reform era (1997-2005) the reformists did not stand by their promises and this resulted in the loss of people’s trust – which is, once lost, very hard to gain back. Ayatollah Montazeri’s (leading dissident cleric) credit today results from years of struggle, standing up to the government and defending the rights of the oppressed. Today the Iranian society recognizes Ayatollah Montazeri as a symbol of resistance and trusts him. If the reformists are serious and honest about their slogans they must compare themselves to Ayatollah Montazeri, who is neither revolutionary nor a supporter of violence, but has not lost a moment to fight for freedom and human rights in Iran. The reformists must judge themselves by Ayatollah Montazeri’s standards.”

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Friday, October 13, 2006

News in brief-

News statement by the family members of three journalists of "Rozh-he-lat" weekly on their arrest !

Report by :Khosrow Kurdpoor - Journalist, Kurdistan

Three Kurdish journalists from " Rozh-he-lat" weekly were arrested and there names are as follows: Mr. Farhad Aminpoor, Mr. Reza Alipoor and Mr. Saman Soleimani . The parents of these journalists are demanding from the authorities to let them meet their childrens.

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://news.gooya.eu/politics/archives/2006/10/053701.php

www.mukrian.blogsky.com
srow_kurdpoor@yahoo.com

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

News in brief-

Unprecedented restriction in providing high speed internet services to the people !

According to a report by ITNA, from now on the internet users can not have hands onto internet with high speed (128 k ) services.
PAP companies recieved order not to provide high speed internet services. This is the first kind of restriction on internet speeds. The order aparently was given to internet service providers on October 4/ 06.

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://www.iran-emrooz.net/index.php?/news1/10568/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Thursday, October 12, 2006

News in brief-

The managing editor of the banned " Asia " newspaper Ms. Saghi Bagherinia was summoned to the court.

According to ILNA reporter and after the approval for six months prison term for the managing editor of the Asia newspaper by the branch number 27 of the supperior court Ms. Saghi Bagherinia was summoned to attend to this court.
She has been charged with propaganda for opposition group ( Mojahedin) and publication of a subject which was aimed to damage the system by printing the picture and writing about the freedom of Maryam Rajavi .
Her lawyer Mr. Mohammad Torabi has requested for the suspension of the sentence. In a separate letter to the head of judiciary power, she also demanded suspension of the sentence and the review of her case again.

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://www.iran-emrooz.net/index.php?/news2/10549/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

All we needed was this one?! Islamic Republic regime in Iran is digging its grave?

The spkesperson for the " Hezbollah of Iran " Mr. Mojtaba Bigdeli has announced that the Hezbollah of Iran started its news reporting from Wednesday October 11/06.He said that : "Since last year the Hezbollah of Iran had plan for publishing its news and views and the increase of its media activities.He said : In the early of this year the newspaper "Hezbollah" started its test paper which is now being distributed all over the country.He added : The news site of Hezbollah was started from last year but from last Wednesday this site will start its activity as News Agency . He said that the News Agency in addition of reporting the official news from Hezbollah, it will also report the latest political, cultural,,economical and social news from Iran and the world. The spoksperson for the Hezbollah of Iran said : In the first step the newspaper of Hezbollah ( Organ ) was published, in the next step the "Hezbollah News Agency" with professional members in an appropriate plce in the city of Tehran has started its activity. He Said : We have prioritized to establish " Kheibar " station and we have started the project and certainly in an appropriate time the programe for this channel covering Europe, America and Middle East will be aired.The reason for the delay he said: is because of Zionist influence for preventing the contract with satelite networks , but the Hezbollah TV will soon overcome on this problem.

Link to this news in Farsi :
http://www.iran-emrooz.net/index.php?/news2/10545/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

A Collision of Prose and Politics
A prominent professor's attack on a best-selling memoir sparks debate among Iranian scholars in the U.S.

Excerpt: From Reading Lolita in Tehran

Like many Americans of Iranian descent, Hamid Dabashi read an article in the April 17 issue of The New Yorker with anxious dismay.
In that article, Seymour Hersh reported that President Bush's administration was preparing an airstrike against Iran, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.
The president himself dismissed the report as "wild speculation." But Mr. Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University who has been active in the antiwar movement since the attacks of September 11, 2001, heard a call to action.
The article prompted him to dust off an essay that he had written a few years before and publish it in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English-language newspaper Al-Ahram. His target? Not President Bush or the Pentagon, but Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran and a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington.
Ms. Nafisi's memoir, published by Random House in 2003, blended a harrowing portrayal of the life of women in post-revolutionary Iran with a powerful personal testimony about the power of literary classics. The book found a wide audience, and its success made Ms. Nafisi a celebrity.
Gazing at the book through the lens of literary theory and politics, Mr. Dabashi had a much less favorable reaction to it. His blistering essay cast Ms. Nafisi as a collaborator in the Bush administration's plans for regime change in Iran. He drew heavily on the late scholar Edward Said's ideas about the relationship between Western literature and empire and the fetishization of the "Orient" to attack Reading Lolita in Tehran as a prop for American imperialism. He also pilloried Ms. Nafisi personally for what he described as her cozy relationship with prominent American neoconservatives.
"By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire," wrote Mr. Dabashi, "Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when, for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: 'We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.' Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project."
In an interview published on the Web site of the left-wing publication Z Magazine on August 4, Mr. Dabashi went even further, comparing Ms. Nafisi to a U.S. Army reservist convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. "To me there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi," he told the magazine.
"The reason that I decided to publish [the essay] was fear," says Mr. Dabashi over a cup of tea in his office at Columbia University. "Fear of another war."
Ms. Nafisi has not directly answered the attack. "I don't consider his recent writing worth responding to," she told The Chronicle.
But prominent scholars in Iranian studies have taken notice of Mr. Dabashi's essay and the Z interview, which have spread quickly over the Internet and are now even attached as external links to Ms. Nafisi's entry on Wikipedia. While many feel that he stepped over a bright line of civil discourse in his attack, scholars also say that his polemic reveals the tremendous stress that bellicose exchanges between two political republics — Iran and the United States — have placed on Iranian-American scholars and writers in the Republic of Letters.
"It is a minefield," says Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, founding director of the Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. "The whole volatile zeitgeist is on every scholar's mind."
"This is a time of crisis," says Mehrzad Boroujerdi, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. "It tests your soul and your moral fabric."
Caught Between Republics
Mr. Dabashi's provocative statements coincide with a period of intense turmoil in U.S.-Iranian relations. They had improved slowly since the election of reformers in Iran in 1997, led by President Mohammad Khatami (see "Iran: A Century of Turmoil," Page 14). But President Bush placed Iran in an "axis of evil," with Iraq and North Korea, in his 2002 State of the Union address. Ever since then, his rhetoric has been matched with both words and actions in Iran.
In August 2005, Iranians elected a conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has begun to roll back eight years of cautious reform and intensified his nation's dispute with the U.N. Security Council over Iran's nuclear program. Iran has arrested numerous human-rights activists and researchers in the past year, including the noted scholar Ramin Jahanbegloo. (He was released conditionally in late August.)
"Respect for basic human rights in Iran, especially freedom of expression and opinion, deteriorated considerably in 2005," stated Human Rights Watch, an international humanitarian group, in its annual report.
Those developments have left Iranian scholars in a difficult position. "The majority of Iranian scholars here [in the United States] were positive about the changes in Iran in 1997, after the election of President Khatami," says Maziar Behrooz, an assistant professor of history at San Francisco State University. "The majority of them were interested in fostering dialogue. The election of Ahmadinejad — and 9/11 and the axis of evil — has, of course, made the situation for us very different."
Whether it be the status of women (which the noted Iranian human-rights activist Akbar Ganji has referred to as "gender apartheid"), or the new mass arrests, or President Ahmadinejad's recent call for Iranian students to oust liberal professors in the country's universities, Iran has provided many reasons for scholars of its diaspora to speak out.
Mansour Farhang, a professor of international relations and Middle Eastern politics at Bennington College, observes that there "is little controversy about the repressiveness of the regime. There is a consensus on that."
The conundrum, say these scholars, is how to voice opposition to the actions of the Islamic Republic without being co-opted by those who seek external regime change in Iran through a military attack.
"All of us are mortified about the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran," says Janet Afary, an associate professor of history and women's studies on Purdue University's main campus and president of the International Society for Iranian Studies.
The invasion and chaotic occupation of Iraq, the debate over the use of torture by the United States, and incidents of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere have further complicated the picture, scholars say.
"I am critical of the Iranian regime," says Mr. Farhang. "At the same time, I am opposed to the Bush administration's confrontational policies. It is a thin line to walk on, but that's where Iranians [in the United States] are at the moment."
A few moments later, he quips: "If you put a gun to my head and said choose between Ahmadinejad and Bush, I might say, 'Shoot.'"
Books on Trial
Among the most powerful scenes in Reading Lolita in Tehran is the mock trial of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby that Ms. Nafisi holds in her classroom at Tehran University in autumn 1979, amid the violence and chaos of the Iranian revolution.
One of her students has complained to her that The Great Gatsby is immoral and "representative of things American, and America was poison for us." So Ms. Nafisi holds a "trial," appointing the student as prosecutor, two other students as defense lawyer and judge, and herself in the role of the novel to be tried.
Among the defenses that she offers in that role is that "a great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. ..." While the class never renders a decision, Ms. Nafisi writes that "the excitement most students now showed was the best verdict as far as I was concerned."
Her knack for dramatizing literature's transcendent values brought robust sales for her memoir. It also drew raves from the stalwarts of the Republic of Letters — literary luminaries including Margaret Atwood ("A literary life raft on Iran's fundamentalist sea") and the late Susan Sontag, whose blurb for the book declared, "I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied, and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against women."
Yet such interpretations of the book were a key reason that Mr. Dabashi subjected Reading Lolita in Tehran and its author to another sort of trial.
Scrape away Mr. Dabashi's vitriol and his main complaint is that the book's elevation of Western "classics" (like Nabokov's Lolita) and its often slighting references to Iranian culture and politics combine to belittle Iran and its people and reduce them to stereotypes.
In such a reading, it is no accident that Ms. Atwood and Ms. Sontag explicitly juxtapose Ms. Nafisi's celebration of liberal Western literature and its values with high regard for her damning portrayal of a retrograde and fundamentalist Islamic regime. The cumulative effect of Ms. Nafisi's book, argues Mr. Dabashi, is to create a portrait of a nation that is backward and tribal — and thus worthy of regime change by all necessary and exigent means.
Mr. Dabashi, who has written extensively on Iranian film, takes particular note of Ms. Nafisi's portrayal of film in the book, including the use of a blind Iranian film censor as a metaphor for Iran's culture. ("Our world under the mullah's rule was shaped by the colorless lenses of the censor," Ms. Nafisi writes.)
"It irritated me because of its fundamental betrayal of the cosmopolitan culture of Iran," says Mr. Dabashi. "Iran has not just produced one of the most fascinating national cinemas of the last half-century, but these people did not come from nowhere. There is a tradition — a literary tradition and poetic tradition."
Mr. Dabashi accuses Ms. Nafisi of "selective memory." The awful history of the Iranian revolution and the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in its aftermath — including the Iran-Iraq war — is fleshed out with vivid writing; the history of previous British and U.S. intervention in Iran, the repression of its people by the shah before the Iranian revolution, and the era of reform after 1997 are elided or excised.
"I was in Iran in 1979," he recalls. "In 1979 there was a legitimate fear of a coup d'état. The fact that Khomeini's people abused that fear is a different matter than people having that fear."
Mr. Dabashi argues that if he is correct in seeing memoirs such as Ms. Nafisi's as fodder for those who wish to whip up outrage in America against Iran, then the searing and abusive tone of his attack — even that comparison of Ms. Nafisi to a convicted Abu Ghraib prison guard — is not out of line.
"I have absolutely nothing personal against her," Mr. Dabashi insists. "But these sorts of books are dangerous. They are dangerous in creating and manufacturing a communal consensus about the demonization of cultures of which we need to have more sophisticated and nuanced views."
Mr. Dabashi is no stranger to controversy. Last year he was one of three Columbia professors cited in a documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, which was produced by an off-campus Jewish group called the David Project. The film, which never received a general release, purported to detail a pattern of anti-Semitism and unfair treatment of Jewish students at the university.
In response to the clamor, Columbia convened a faculty committee, which issued a lengthy report stating that it had found no evidence of such a pattern.
Mr. Dabashi was outraged by the episode, during which he received numerous abusive and threatening e-mail and voice-mail messages. But he does not seem displeased by the ruckus he has kicked up with his essay on Reading Lolita in Tehran.
"An Iranian writer said to me, 'Why are you so angry with Nafisi? All she did was write a book,"' he deadpans. "But all I did was write an essay. She wrote a book. I write an essay."
Conservatives and Radicals
Ms. Nafisi did indeed write a book. But she is determined not to engage with Mr. Dabashi in a debate about it.
"This kind of behavior, it cuts off debate," she told The Chronicle in an interview.
She was more expansive when it came to discussing her views about the often fraught relationship between literature and politics.
In particular, Ms. Nafisi resents any attempts by the left or the right to pigeonhole her personal politics or place her in a political camp. She dismisses the notion, for instance, that one can label her as a neoconservative by invoking her friendships with the noted historian Bernard Lewis and the World Bank president, Paul Wolfowitz. (Mr. Wolfowitz was dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins when Ms. Nafisi was hired there. In his role as deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005, he was a key advocate of the invasion of Iraq.)
"I resent the fact that they create guilt by association," says Ms. Nafisi of her critics. "I will never denounce my friends. I have conservative friends. I have radical friends. I have more radical friends in my acknowledgments to the book than conservatives. ... I can definitely disagree with their politics. That's one reason I am in this country, so I won't be stigmatized for conversing with people who are politically different from me. So I feel a great anger that I come here and I face the same dilemma."
Ms. Nafisi does drop certain facts that suggest she may have been misrepresented by her critics. She did, in fact, oppose the invasion of Iraq. Her relationship with the neoconservative speakers bureau Benador Associates — which represents prominent neocons including Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer, and James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence — ended more than three years ago. (She is now represented by the Steven Barclay Agency, which also represents the poet Adrienne Rich and the novelist Michael Chabon, among others.)
"I didn't want to be with an agent who is political. I wanted to be with an agent who is literary," says Ms. Nafisi.
Ultimately, however, she argues that the best path to discovering her politics and principles is through her writing. "The one way that you can see where people stand is to go and read them," she says. "All you have to do is read."
He Said, She Said
Most of Ms. Nafisi's colleagues who study Iran have read both her book and Mr. Dabashi's attacks. The consensus appears to be that his rhetoric is too extreme.
"It makes me very sad," says Ms. Afary, of Purdue. "I have a lot of respect for Hamid Dabashi's work. But Azar Nafisi's work is a literary work."
Reading Lolita in Tehran also has the virtue of being a true account of a bleak time in Iran, she says: "These were the harshest years. They were executing girls of 12 and 13. The stories are true. These things really have happened."
Others agree with that assessment but see some merit in Mr. Dabashi's argument, underneath the blistering personal attack.
"Mr. Dabashi is a distinguished scholar," says Bennington's Mr. Farhang. "His article on Reading Lolita in Tehran is perceptive in many ways, and the article is worthy of serious debate. But his polemical style completely overwhelms his discourse, so as to make debate difficult."
Some scholars see a particularly rich vein of discussion in Mr. Dabashi's use of Edward Said's theories to criticize a book that explicitly rejects the late literature scholar's work.
Indeed, Mr. Dabashi and others are quick to point to a character in Ms. Nafisi's book named Mr. Nahvi, who spouts crude reductions of Said's critical reading of Mansfield Park, including the notion that the Jane Austen novel "was a book that condoned slavery."
In the next paragraph, Ms. Nafisi writes: "It was only later, in a trip to the States, that I found out where Mr. Nahvi was getting his ideas from when I bought a copy of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. It was ironic that a Muslim fundamentalist should quote Said against Austen. It was just as ironic that the most reactionary elements in Iran had come to identify with and co-opt the work and theories of those considered revolutionary in the West."
Her explicit link between Said and "a Muslim fundamentalist" provoked Mr. Dabashi to turn the full weight of Said's theories — on the connections between imperialism and fiction (found in Culture and Imperialism) and on the use and misuse that empires make of knowledge about colonial culture (most notably in his groundbreaking 1978 book Orientalism) — back onto Ms. Nafisi's book.
"If Edward Said dismantled the edifice of Orientalism," he wrote in his essay, "Azar Nafisi is recruited to reaccredit it."
Mr. Boroujerdi, of Syracuse, credits Mr. Dabashi's essay with raising "the relevance of postcolonial literature" in interpreting Reading Lolita in Tehran. "Whatever book is put out there these days," he observes, "has to intellectually wrestle with the points Said raised about postcolonialism."
Scholars in the field reject Mr. Dabashi's argument that Ms. Nafisi is a willing agent of American imperial ambition, but some of them do echo his concerns about how her book might be used for political purposes (see "Peeking Under Cover," page 16).
For example, in one chapter of his 2005 book Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and Its Aftermath (Soft Skull Press), Paul Berman (who supported the invasion of Iraq) uses Reading Lolita in Tehran as a case study in how writers respond to totalitarianism — and specifically, he writes, to "Islamism as a modern totalitarianism." But Mr. Berman also plumbs Ms. Nafisi's biography (she was a leftist student at the University of Oklahoma before returning to Iran, in 1979) to illustrate a transformation that he sees many leftists of that generation making to anti-totalitarianism. It is a transformation that has echoes of the classic neoconservative trajectory: frustration with the political left leading to a lurch rightward.
"Here, then, in Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, is the story of someone who enlisted in the leftism of circa '68, and then went on to discover moral and political failures in the left-wing movement, and came to adopt a different attitude altogether — an attitude of respect for the imagination," writes Mr. Berman.
That is, of course, one reading of the memoir. But it is such readings of Ms. Nafisi, linking her work and personal story to views of Islam as totalitarian, that do alarm some observers.
"A person like Dabashi is worried about the U.S. pampering and preparing people for Iran," says San Francisco State's Mr. Behrooz.
Mr. Farhang agrees. "What neoconservatives and right-wing people want to portray is a view of an Iran that is beyond redemption, that cannot be reformed, and where internal voices cannot make progressive change," he says. "Her book has been used. This is not what she intended. But the book lends itself to an interpretation of Iran as a country beyond the pale."
Generation Gap
Many of the scholars who talked with The Chronicle for this article — including both Mr. Dabashi and Ms. Nafisi — would be at risk of arrest if they returned to Iran in the current climate. But Roxanne Varzi, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine, performed fieldwork in Iran for her new book, Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran (Duke University Press) in 2000 , after being awarded the first Fulbright grant for research there since 1979.
She argues that the controversy over Mr. Dabashi's essay "seems empirically removed from Iran. It's not about Iran as much as it is about the diaspora."
How that diaspora of Iranian scholars should engage with the broader world in an era of poisonous relations — and perhaps warfare — between the United States and Iran is a subject of heated debate.
"I feel torn," says Mr. Boroujerdi. "My philosophy is that I need to keep a critical distance from both sides." While that is "an uncomfortable position," he acknowledges, it also "has an edge, a comparative advantage, engaging both poles in discussion."
Some scholars, including Mr. Farhang, argue that they should be outspoken in seeking to influence policy. "We need to expose the idea of using force to bring about regime change," he argues. "It will be a disaster for Iran and the United States."
Others, like Mr. Behrooz, agree that while speaking with the news media, policy makers, and the wider public is crucial, there are boundaries within which scholars can be most effective. "Academics can advocate for academic rights," he says. "There are limits to what they can do. The goal is to be frank and to be precise."
"We have to be very careful about the way we write here," says Ms. Afary. "Americans are quite ignorant about the Muslim world and the history of U.S. interventions."
There is general agreement, however, that precision and care include remaining within a certain notion of civil discourse. "The urgency in the discussion has increased," particularly since the New Yorker article that set off Mr. Dabashi, says Mr. Karimi-Hakkak, of Maryland's Center for Persian Studies.
"But the answer is not shrill voices prophesying war," he continues. "Attacking or invading Iran is not a viable response. Pulling an essay out of the drawer after three years is the wrong response. We must be loud and clear in our opposition to these designs. But the style in which we respond is important."
Defending Domain
Both Mr. Dabashi and Ms. Nafisi will certainly be part of that discussion, but on their own terms. Mr. Dabashi says he plans to continue on a dual track, producing both scholarly work and essays like his attack on Ms. Nafisi for Al-Ahram. The latter forum is important, he adds, because he sees the Washington think tanks usurping the hard-earned sphere of influence held by peer-reviewed scholars and universities in debates on Iran and other public issues.
"We have become publicly irrelevant, we as scholars, and then the public domain is empty, open, vacant," he says. "And in come very pestiferous people, deeply ideologically motivated, extremely adept in fund raising and pushing the soft spot of fear in people."
Ms. Nafisi is working on two books — a memoir reflecting on her mother's life and the role of women, to be titled "Things I Have Been Silent About," and a new book about the liberating power of literature, called "The Republic of Imagination." In a time when two political republics are at odds, she says, the Republic of Letters "is far more important than at any other moment. Because this is a time when politics is swallowing us all up. One of the most positive political acts is not to give up our domain."
As she does in Reading Lolita in Tehran, Ms. Nafisi calls upon Scheherazade, the fabled storyteller who uses literature to outwit the vengeful king in the tales of The Arabian Nights. "When she is confronted with violence," says Ms. Nafisi, "and the king is very violent, killing a virgin every night, she doesn't confront him on his turf. What she does, which is very clever, is to bring him to her turf, which is strange ground, and by telling stories she provokes his curiosity and shows him that the world is not black and white."

IRAN: A CENTURY OF TUMULT
1906: Driven by internal resistance to corrupt rule and foreign interventions in Iran's affairs, the Constitutional Revolution culminates in the adoption of a constitution and the formation of an elected assembly, or Majlis.
1921: Riza Khan, a military officer, seizes power in a coup d'état. Four years later, he declares himself Riza Shah Pahlevi.
1941: The shah is forced to abdicate by British and Soviet forces in favor of his son, who becomes Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi.
1953: The Nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, is overthrown in a coup designed and abetted by the British and U.S. intelligence services. Two years earlier, Mossadeq had nationalized the nation's oil industry, plunging relations between Britain and Iran into crisis. The shah, who had fled in the turmoil, was restored.
1963: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is expelled from Iran after serving a jail term for criticizing the shah. In exile, he moves through Turkey, then Iraq, and at last to France.
1975: The shah eliminates opposition political parties.
1979: The Iranian Revolution: Street protests of increasing intensity lead the shah to flee on January 16. Khomeini returns from exile on February 1. An Islamic republic is declared on April 1. The U.S. Embassy is seized by militant students on November 4, and 66 Americans are taken hostage.
1980: Iraq invades Iran on September 22, sparking a war that lasts almost eight years.
1981: The last 52 American hostages from the U.S. Embassy takeover are released.
1988: A truce between Iran and Iraq is signed on August 20.
1989: Khomeini announces a religious decree against the British author Salman Rushdie on February 14, demanding the novelist's death for the publication of his book The Satanic Verses.
1997: The reform presidential candidate Mohammad Khatami is elected president of Iran on May 23, ushering in a mild thaw in U.S.-Iranian relations. Abbas Kiarostami's film, A Taste of Cherry, wins the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
2002: President Bush includes Iran in an "axis of evil" with Iraq and North Korea in his annual State of the Union address on January 29.
2005: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who campaigns on a conservative and anti-U.S. platform, becomes Iran's president on August 3.
http://chronicle.comSection: Research & PublishingVolume 53, Issue 8, Page A12

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Monday, October 09, 2006



Save me ! I'm scared of death and the gallows rope !

These are the words of "Kobra Rahmanpoor" the newly wed girl who is under death row.

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

News in Brief:

The managing editor of " Ravanshenasiye Jameh" (The psychology of society ) in court : I'm not a misdemeanant but i'm proud of what i have written about intricate questions .

Mr. Alireza Khoshandam the managing editor of " Ravanshenasiye Jameh " was summoned to court because of complaint was filed against an article in his magazin , the title of the article was :
" Ogling is a part of unhealty sexual habit" .

Mr. Khoshandam in his defense have said: "The magazin is completely specialized and does not blong to Iran's yellow magazin , in this magazin we write as an expert in psychology , we have even reader in places like polices force, army, Tehran University students , ' Emdad Committee' , ministry of education , medical centres and consultation " .

Mr. Khoshandam : The magazin is completely scientific and specialized and does not carry any political activity , I believe this magazin should recieve the award for boldly writing the problems in the society.
In his last defense in the court Mr. Khoshandam said: "One day these believe must be defeated and sometimes i decide by my silence to answer the court ".
The judege of this court hearing was Mr. Sarami the judge of branch number 76 of Tehran penal court.at the end of the court hearing , the judge together with his assistants and "press watch dogs" reviewed the case and found the accused not guilty and the judge after giving a lecture on Islamic ethic to the editor closed the case.
---------------
*** In another news the review of the bill of indictment against managing editor of " Jayezeh ( Jadval) " publication which was supposed to take place in the branch number 76 of Tehran penal court was adjourned due to the absence of its managing editor.

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://news.gooya.eu/politics/archives/2006/10/053548.php

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

News in brief-

Mr. Behruz Karimizadeh student of Tehran University is suspended for one semester from continuing his education.

Mr. Behruz Karimizadeh student of economy from Tehran University is suspended for one semester by the university disciplinary committee.
In speaking with "Advar News" Mr. Karimizadeh has said: Disciplinary committee has charged me with "creating revolt & riot " during student protest in last spring and as a result i'm suspended to continue my education for one semester.
Mr. Karimizadeh has added that : Many of these students who have been suspended are not political activists but only spoken for the rights of students.

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://news.gooya.eu/politics/archives/2006/10/053551.php

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin



Cartoon by : Nikahang Kowsar , it reads:

Years after sanction,

It is our indisputable right to have nuclear energy !

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Friday, October 06, 2006

It’s Right-wing Journalists’ Time

Roozonline -Esfandiyar Saffari
06 Oct 2006

The official media organ of the Political Office of the Passdaran Revolutionary Guards Corps announces the “possibility of doctrinaire journalists and news agencies falling prey to foreign intelligence agencies.”

The official media organ of the Political Office of the Passdaran Revolutionary Guards Corps announces the “possibility of doctrinaire journalists and news agencies falling prey to foreign intelligence agencies.” Sobh Sadegh publication published by the Political Office of the Passdaran writes in its last issue, “We have received fresh reports and news of plans by foreign embassies in Tehran to establish relationships with and enlist journalists who work for doctrinaire media (associated with the ruling hardline factions).” Doctrinaire or ideologue media or journalists are those that pursue a hardline and extremist Islamic view on a range of issues and consequently support the current administration.
The publication attributes the news to sources inside the Ministry of Intelligence of Iran and points out that Minister of Intelligence Mohseni Ejhei had warned media managers in a recent meeting he had with them. It should be noted that in recent months there have been some arrests of “media managers” belonging to the doctrinaire press, all of whom except one were released immediately. It is reported that television program producer Pooryanejhad Veisi is one of the detainees who continues to be behind bars.
The Passdaran publication writes this about how journalists may be trapped by foreign intelligence organizations. “Invitations extended to media managers on the pretext of attending national celebrations, meeting the elite of the foreign countries, cultural exchange programs, language training, provision of academic scholarships, etc are the means that foreign embassies have recently engaged in their goals.” The publication points to the recent allocation of a budget in the United States for the expansion of media activities against Iran claims that foreign embassies in Tehran have expanded their activities and now target journalists in the pro-government media.
This is the first time that journalists in the pro-government media are warned of being targets of foreign espionage. During the past 8 years of the reform period in Iran, Sobh Sadegh publication had made such accusations against journalists associated with the reform media, accusing them to be agents of foreigners. “In their new analysis, foreign intelligence services have concluded that there is not much use any longer to invest in reform-minded journalists who are controlled by domestic security forces, lack close contacts inside the regime, and despite having some inside sources for original news, have no utility because they have been exposed and are considered un-original sources.”
In the article the publication claims that foreign intelligence agencies have embarked on establishing clandestine or open relations with some journalists who may not be ideologue minded themselves, but work in the pro-government media. Sadegh writes that “invitations to Western and East Asian countries on the pretext of showing them news and media centers, at which some ideologue journalists currently are on visit, are among activities that have been given new prominence.”
Over the past year when tensions and difference inside the hardline camp have increased, some media managers belonging to what are known as doctrinaire media have come under suspicion and accusations. For example Ali Shokuhi who was a Keyhan Havaii manager a decade ago and currently runs the Farda news website was arrested a few days ago by agents from the office of intelligence of the Joint Chief of Staff. The next person to be arrested was the manager of Aref News website which was closely tied to the government, whose name was not published. The manager of the site subsequently denied that he had been arrested but stated that he had been invited to a “supervisory agency for consultations and awareness,” and wrote that his future activities would be “coordinated” with the supervisory agency.
The most recent case in this regard is the arrest of Pooryanejhad Veisi. Former political prisoner Siamak Sanjari had recently stated that according to a source inside Evin prison a Pooryanejhad Veisi was in prison on charges of spying for Israel. News reports had earlier reported that he was the author of the scandalous reports about the sale and distribution of polluted meat in Iran, which enjoyed the support of rightwing circles, while others have said that he was an associate of right-wing editor Hossein Shariatmadari in Keyhan hardline newspaper.

Link to this article:
http://r0ozonline.com/english/018019.shtml

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

News in brief-

The lives of political prisoners in Iran is in great ganger !

"ISNA" reported that : While the lawyer of Ahmad Batebi based on Batebi's wife comment, is worried about his clients situation, the deputy public prosecutor of Tehran said: Today i was in prison and there is nothing to worry about Batebi's situation.

Mr. Khalil Bahramian the lawyer for Batebi in speaking with ISNA said : It is close to three months that Mr.Ahmad Batebi is incarcerated in cell number 209 in Evin prison and up to now i had no meeting with him, i won't have meeting with my client if he is being kept in cell number 209. Batebi's wife have had a meeting with her husband and announced that she is worried about her husbands situation and apparently there was a confrontation between prison agents , Batebi and his wife.

Mr. Khalil Bahramian who is also lawyer of Mr. Khaled Hardani, about his client said that : "My client is charged with " action against national security" and because of this he is sentenced to death , but i have protested to the suprem court and the file is under review ". He added : "Mr. Khaled Hardani was a witness to the death of Mr. Akbar Mohammadi ".

Mr. Akbar Mohammadi is one of the student leader who in a few months ago went on hunger strike in Evin prison and died mysteriousely in Evin prison.

Link to this news in Farsi:
http://www.iran-emrooz.net/index.php?/news2/10476/

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Thursday, October 05, 2006

News in brief-

Two moslems who have converted to christianity are arrested !

Ms. Fereshteh Dibaj daughter of Iranian priest father Mehdi Dibaj who was brutally murdered in 1994, is arrested in the city of Mashhad together with her husband Mr. Reza Montazemi.
Since Wednesday when this news was aired by the French Association in Defense of the Rights of Christian's ( Portes Ouverts) until now there is no news about these couple.
According to the officials from this association , Ms. Fereshteh Dibaj is 28 years old and Mr. Reza Montazemi is 35 years old . Mr. Reza Montazemi converted to christianity when he was 20 years old,both of them were arrested on September 26 at 7:00am by secret agents from the Ministry of Information.
According to "Portes Ouvertes" association Ms. Fereshteh Dibaj and her husband were in charge of a church in the city of Mashhad, this is the church were the regime murdered another priest by the name of Mr. Hossain Sudmand ( He was a moslem who converted to christianity ).
Father Mehdi Dibaj converted to christianity from Islam when he was 19 years old and was murdered in 1994 when he was 59 years old. In 1993 he was sentenced to death, he was charged with apostasy, but because of international pressure he was released , and in a short time after freedom was brutally murdered.
The French association ( Portes Ouvertes ) have claimed that :" Iran is one of the countries in the world that bring harm and harassment to the christians more than others " .

Source : France Press September 4/06

Link to this news in farsi:
http://r0ozonline.com/01newsstory/017992.shtml

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

The situation of 209 former members of the "Mojahedin e Khalgh" organization who are trapped in the American camp in Iraq (also known as TIPF in Iraq ). They need international support to leave Iraq for a safe third country to settle.

Summary report:

1- the section of TIPF (Temporary International Presence Facility) that is assigned to so called "defectors" of the MEK is a dry and barn piece of land twice the size of a football field that is protected by barbwires as high as 3 meters. The area has watch towers and looks and functions exactly the same as a prison and most accurately as we call it 2nd Guantanamo. Currently 200 people are kept in this camp.
2- The TIPF camp was originally established to accommodate US forces who are in charge of Camp Ashraf but after many members of the C.A.(Camp Ashraf) insisted to leave the camp, and due to the absence of legal documents/status they assigned a section of it to them. Currently in addition to the Americans there are Bulgarians in the charge of that camp as well.
3- The original group who were allocated in TIPF are those who came out of the C.A. prisons when Americans first took over the camp in 2003. Before that date the MEK leadership would send those who wanted to leave the organization either to Abu Gharib or lock them inside the camp.
4- In the past 3 years and as a result of their own perseverance as well as the actions of HR advocates 90% of the residents of TIPF have been granted the refugee status by the UNHCR. The interviews were conducted by video/phone system and no delegate actually visited this camp. The same goes for the Red Cross and likewise organizations. However, there have been visits to C. A. from many organizations including Red Cross.
5- Unlike C.A., TIPF lacks the basic amenities that is needed for day to day life. For example:
i) People have been living in the plastic tents for the past 3 years and so. Each tent has 3 occupants and no one has a moment of privacy. There is also the issue of the exposure to natural element such as heat, cold and sand storm.
ii) The quality of the food is the most basic/undesirable and the quantity is insufficient.
iii) There is no proper bathing facility in this camp and the 200 people have 2 hours a day to wash themselves with hoses that are attached to water tanks. Considering there are 3 females in this camp you can imagine how difficult this is for them.
iiii) They do not receive hygiene products or toiletries. That applies to the feminine hygiene products that causes serious problems for them.
iiiii) They did not receive any clothing items in the past year or so and only last year the received a pair of pants and shows each.
iiiiii) Smokers do not receive cigarettes and there is no money or access to a source to obtain them. This has a serious effect on those who are used to smoke.
6- There is no medical facility though there are people with serious health problems. The most they get in a good day, after days of waiting, is a soldier distributing painkillers. Even that does not happen regularly.
7- there is no access to the outside world and none of these people set foot outside of this camp from the day they were moved in.
8- There is no routine access to phone/e-mails for the detainees. There is a 15 minutes access to the phone once a month for each person and routinely they have to wait in line for 7-8 hours before they have their turn. There is no access to the internet except that they give their letters to the Americans to scan and forward. In my own experience it takes them minimum of a week to send out those letters. By delaying them they let the momentum of any incident at the camp die out before the outside world hears about them. There is also the belief that these letters are being checked before they go out, or don't for that matter.
9- There is no mail box or postal address hence no connection to family members back home who do not have access to computers.
10- The Americans have their own prisons including solitary cells. Currently there are two people, who tried to escape, in the solitary confinement.
11- The insult and beating by Americans are an ordinary issue in this camp. They claim that since U.S., or for that matter Iraq, are not a signatory to the 1951 4th convention they are not obliged to follow the codes.
They claim that only the law of war zone applies. In addition to all this and after they put a violent end to the peaceful sit-in strike by the residents of TIPF they have imposed Martial Laws and the life condition became even more intolerable.
12- In the recent attack on the residents by the Americans they broke the hand of Hussein Blujani but medical staff, though acknowledged the beatings, were not able to provide the required attention. He is still in pain and urgent need of professional help.
13- The ban on all kind of visits from outside world makes it very difficult for these people to express their concerns and explain their situation to the international organizations who may be able to help them. This becomes more problematic when compared with the freedom of the commanders in charge of C.A. and
all they have access to through money and connection with the outside world.
14- The level of desperation and depression is so high among the TIPF residents that there are occasional attempt of suicides which is being monitored by the others and so far they were under control.
15- Since the 2 camps are adjacent, there are constant attempts of destroying the Morales of the people in TIPF by spreading rumors of them being handed over to the IRI agents and so on.
16- The Americans use all kind of threats and punishments against the residents of TIPF in order to keep them under control and also prevent more people to join in from the main camp. shutting off the water and cutting electricity, as well as physical assault, is a common practice in the camp. Though they keep denying it who should believe those who created the Abu Gharib situation.
This list can go on forever but the bottom line is that these people need to come out of that prison. There is no logic in keeping part of this organization inside an unsafe country in prison while labeled as "Terrorists" and at the same time host the majority of the members of the same organization, including their leadership, in the Western countries with total freedom to lobby their agendas and live a safe and free life.
The people in TIPF and ultimately Ashraf are kept in a very inhuman condition that is bellow any imaginable standard. Their rights and dignities as well as their physical and psychological well being is violated every second. Since UNHCR have been involved with their cases and accepted them as qualified for the refugee statues they should try to move them out of that TIPF/Iraq immediately.
Considering the efforts of the Iranian government agents to make deals to take these devastated people back to Iran and knowing the extension of abuse and violation of human Rights in Iran we should agree that any delay could result in a human catastrophe.

In case you need further information regarding this matter please email your question to:
Niaz Salimi [NSalimi@standardparking.com]

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

A New Women’s Movement Paradigm in Iran
Roozonline -By Mehrangiz Kar
04 Oct 2006

Iranian women are using new methods to confront discrimination and violence. In the course of their past struggles, they have learned that a society with deeply entrenched anti-women beliefs does not change quickly.

Iranian women are using new methods to confront discrimination and violence. In the course of their past struggles, they have learned that a society with deeply entrenched anti-women beliefs does not change quickly. They have learned that they must take small steps, that they must not try to push every struggle towards achieving a specific aim, a “total war.” Now, with these lessons, the women’s rights movement in Iran is slowly coming together as a coherent whole and realizing its vast potential.
The latest instance of this shift in methods is demonstrated by the campaign to repeal the stoning laws, which is spearheaded by forty individuals under Ms Shadi Sadr’s leadership.
Stoning is a violent form of punishment prescribed by various religions. Due to the separation of church and state, however, it is no longer practiced in non-Muslim societies. This is because principles of secularism forbid lawmakers to turn rules that belong to previous millennia into modern law.
The supporters of legalizing traditional forms of punishment argue that stoning and similar acts are necessary to deter sinners and prevent crime. And while the measure is not necessarily Islamic, but more fanatic and insensitive to human values, its contenders claim the act does not constitute violence. In their view, stoning is a punishment similar to capital punishment that is practiced in many Western societies where it is not characterized as violence.
I have witnessed myself a Sharia (Islamic jurisprudence) judge who asked a person accused of incest to step outside the courtroom three times, asking her to come back each time and confess again. Why? Because the judge wanted to pass his sentence quickly and without any trouble. This way he could write in his judgement that the defendant had confessed four times. The unfortunate defendant did not know what was going on. He thought that the judge wanted to help him. As a result, he did what was equivalent to confessing four times on four different occassions under normal circumstances.
The discussion is not about whether stoning, if implemented correctly and accurately, is a good form of punishment. Rather, the discussion is about the fact that murderers, even mass murderers and perpetuators of genocide, either do not go to jail, or if they do, they are ultimately punished by death. So why is it that a man or woman who has not murdered anybody should get stoned? Does this not contradict Islam? Many believe that it does. Ayatollah Mojtahed Shabestari, for instance, writes in “A Critique of the Official Interpretation of Religion” that not only does a person have the opportunity to reform Islamic penal codes, but that such a reformation is essentially necessary.
Regardless of its specific manifestations, stoning has often been used to undermine the credibility of Iranian governments. Every time someone wants to undermine Iran’s national interests, a documentary or fictional movie about stoning is screened somewhere. And it is not easy for the Iranian people to change these laws. So long as people cannot freely elect their lawmakers, and the Guardian Council continues to screen candidates, it is not easy to repeal the stoning law. Only through free elections would Iran’s laws get in synch with the necessities of the time. But one cannot wait until that happens. Something must be done.
The campaign to repeal the stoning law, which has been organized by forty lawyers, is a step in the right direction. A fresh issue that this campaign has picked up on is the fact that, according to Iran’s laws, stoning as a punishment applies to both men and women. As a result, the organizers of this campaign have framed their struggle in terms of defending values of human existence, and not just women’s rights.
The campaign’s organizers are motivated mainly by a desire to reduce ordinary people’s pains and sufferings. To this end, they have called on the public as well as the government for help. They do not claim to spearhead a total war in order to enact bring about a fundamental change. Rather, the campaign’s organizers are experienced and modest enough to tackle the problems step by step, and not in a hurried fashion either. Let us help them, not just because they want to defend human values and remove a thorn from a country’s pride, but also because they have, out of wisdom and experience, started a gradual but united move.

Link to this article :
http://r0ozonline.com/english/017979.shtml

Send Me A Message | | | | Balatarin