Hossein Derakhshan

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Hossein Derakhshan
Hossein Derakhshan

Hossein Derakhshan (in Persian: حسين درخشان; born January 7, 1975), also known as Hoder, is an Iranian-Canadian journalist and weblogger based in Toronto.

His weblog is blocked in Iran by the government[1]. He is also credited with starting the blogging revolution in Iran [2] and is called by many journalists as the father of Persian blogging[3]. He also helped to promote podcasting in Iran.[4]

He has a degree in Sociology from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran and has spent some time at the Department of Sociology in University of Toronto.[5] He is currently finishing a post-graduate programme at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

Contents

Early journalism

Derakhshan started out as a journalist writing about Internet and digital culture for a popular reformist newspaper, Asr-e Azadegan in 1999. Later, when this paper was closed down by the judiciary system, he moved to another newspaper, Hayat-e No, in which he continued to write about the same topic. His column there was called Panjere-i roo be hayaat (A Window to the Yard, a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window), and later expanded to a weekly page on digital culture, Internet and computer games. [6]

Blogging fame

In December, 2000, Derakhshan moved to Toronto, Canada. On September 25, 2001, he started his weblog in the Persian language, using Unicode. It was titled Sardabir: khodam, or "Editor: Myself".

He later moved his manually maintained weblog to Blogger.com, which was not supporting Unicode at the time. He also prepared a step-to-step guide in Persian[7] on how other Persian writers can start their weblogs using Blogger.com and the Unicode standard.

Harassment by Iranian officials

On leaving Iran, he was shortly detained and summoned to the Ministry of Intelligence. A few days later he was interrogated by an intelligence official over the content of his blog and was forced to sign an apology before being allowed to leave Iran.[8] But after leaving Iran, he published a report on what happened on his website. He later provided a personal account on what happened to him and responded to critics, some of whom had accused him of lying about the incident[9]

As reported by Newsweek and AP later, I was detained by an official from the Ministry of Intelligence at the airport for a few hours, missed my return flight to London, threatened to stay or I'd be dragged out of the plane by a legal warrant, summoned to the Ministry of Intelligence building in Tehran, Serah-e Zarrabkhaaneh, interrogated for 5, 6 hours, and ultimately forced to sign an apology to be able to leave the country...

For the cynical minds, there are enough people who can testify on what I was going through those days. Among them, My father, my cousin Hamid, and a Mehrabad Airport official who was a friend of my cousin and there to help, saw the guy from the Intelligence Ministry. I was also in constant contact with Mohamad Ali Abtahi, Zahra Eshraghi, Solana Larsen, as well as James Corrick from the Canadian embassy in Tehran.

I met James at the Tehran embassy's main building in Abbas Abad and he kindly offered me a safe place to stay and take care of my Canadian passport.

Ultimately, if the cynics are so persistent on their claim that I'm making all this up, I'd encourage them to contact my mother so she explains why she was praying and crying when I got back from the interrogation session unharmed and why she hugged me and kissed me as if she had seen my revival from a sudden death.

However, his account of events were contradicted in an October 2006 interview.[10] In this interview Hossein said his experience with the secret police "was quite friendly and professionally".

Censorship

His weblog, like some other political Persian blogs and websites, has been blocked (or filtered) by the government in Iran, since 2004.[11][12]

In December 2003, he founded Stop censoring us, a blog to watch the situation of internet censorship in Iran.[13] He's also appeared a few times on a VOA Persian TV show to talk about Internet censorship and methods to get around filters.

Israel visit

Derakhshan visited Israel as a Canadian citizen in January 2006. He stated that he went to Israel as a personal attempt to start a dialogue between Iranian and Israeli people.[14]

This might mean that I won’t be able to go back to Iran for a long time, since Iran doesn't recognize Israel, has no diplomatic relations with it, and apparently considers traveling there illegal. Too bad, but I don't care. Fortunately, I'm a citizen of Canada and I have the right to visit any country I want.

I'm going to Israel as a citizen journalist and a peace activist.

As a citizen journalist, I'm going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there. The Islamic Republic has long portrayed Israel as an evil state, with a consensual political agenda of killing every single man and woman who prays to Allah, including Iranians.

I'm going to challenge that image.

His visit was covered by some Israeli media, including Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, Ynet News, Ha'ir, Time Out Tel Aviv, Israeli Radio and its Persian service, and Israel's English TV news:

Iran's Nuclear program

In August 2006, he published an article in the Columns & Blogs section of The Washington Post in which he supported Iran to pursue nuclear weapons as a deterrent to possible invasion by global powers, after normalising relations with the U.S. and Israel:[15]

But the events of the past two years -- most notably with what's happening in Iraq, along with last year's presidential election and other unfortunate events in the region -- has left no doubt in my mind, and in the minds of lots of secular Iranians, that the U.S. is behaving more and more like a reckless imperial force in search of new sources of energy and new markets to expand to economically. Therefore, even if Iran becomes the most peaceful, secular and progressive, yet still independent state on the planet, the U.S. would be unable to tolerate it. The U.S. would seek new excuses to topple Iran's government and install their favorite instead.

For this reason, I believe Iran needs to produce nuclear weapons as a defensive mechanism, to deter the U.S. today and the ever-expanding and equally energy-hungry China tomorrow.

But making nuclear weapons even for totally defensive purposes is not easy now. Iran could only get away with it by stopping enrichment now, voluntarily normalizing relations with Israel and the U.S., and withdrawing from the NPT. Then it could start making the weapons -- secretly or maybe even publicly. It's only then that the world would tolerate a nuclear Iran.

Defending Iran against U.S. attack

Derakhshan wrote in his blog in December 2006: "If the US attacked Iran, despite all my problems with the Islamic Republic, I'd go back and fight these bastards... I can't let myself sit down for a moment and watch them make a Baghdad out of Tehran."[16]

He later published a commentary on The Guardian, titled Stop Bullying Iran [], in which he elaborated on his short blog post on why he defends Iran.[17] Some excerpts:

The more the clash between the west and Iran escalates, the more convinced I become that the west's real problem with the Islamic Republic of Iran is not its nuclear activities, its level of democracy, its human rights record, or its support for "terrorist" groups. Pakistan, followed closely by Saudi Arabia, easily beats Iran on all these fronts.

The real problem is that the Islamic Republic has decided to be independent in a region saturated with fossil energy resources, and at the same time run by American puppets. Iran has posed the biggest continuous challenge to the American hegemony in the whole world, and so it has to pay a price.

Increasingly, a lot of secular Iranians, like myself, are figuring that even if Iran is turned into the most democratic, secular, fair and peaceful state on earth, there is no guarantee the US won't find another excuse to try to overtrow its government. It will start bullying Iran for its "devastating role" in climate change, or animal rights, or - who knows? - for obesity.

I'm not saying this as a fervent religious man with sexy Ahmadinejad's posters on my wall. In fact, I am an atheist and this can easily get me into serious trouble in any Islamic country. I did not vote for Ahmadinejad and I would do anything to democratically bring him down.

I have also risked my life and future in Iran by becoming the first Iranian after the revolution who has publicly visited Israel. Why? To counter both countries' nasty and demonising propaganda against each other and to save my grandmother, postman or university professor from being compared to Nazi soldiers who must be nuked tomorrow.

A a matter of fact, I am even a victim of the paranoid state of Iran that censors criticism and punishes dissent for fear of foreign-backed revolt. (Remember the CIA had commissioned newspaper articles and cartoons to discredit prime minister Mossadeq before bringing his democratically elected government down by a coup in 1953.) My own blog is blocked in Iran and I was detained and forced to sign an apology for my writing before being allowed to leave Iran in 2005.

And of course I do have the dream of an open, free, fair and secular Iran, run by competent and representative officials, and in peace with the whole world, obviously including Israel.

However, I believe the Islamic Republic is a valuable cause, worth defending and, at its worst, is way better than anything that the United States or anyone else can bring to Iran.

If the US waged a war against Iran, I would absolutely go back and defend Iran.


Khalaji vs. Derakhshan defamation lawsuit

In November 2007, Mehdi Khalaji, a fellow at a neo-conservative think-tank called Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), filed a $2 million libel and defamation lawsuit[18] against Derakhshan, over one of his blog posts[19] in his Persian blog, in which he criticizes Khalaji for his service to the 'enemies' of his people and humanity.

Eariler in August 2007, Derakhshan's Florida-base hosting company, Hosting Matters, had terminated his hosting account as a result of intimidation by Khalaji. [20]

Other activities

Derakhshan spoke at the Wikimania 2005 conference in Frankfurt, Germany regarding the use of wikis in Iran to aid political reform and the growth of democracy.[21].

Derakhshan runs a collaborative news website Sobhaneh (literally breakfast).

References

  1. ^ The filtering matrix
  2. ^ Weblog heaven
  3. ^ Building Blogs
  4. ^ Persian blogging round the globe
  5. ^ Can a blogger bring political change to Iran?
  6. ^ One sample of his columns in Asr-e Azadegan, dated back to 1999
  7. ^ Guide to blogging in Persian from hoder.com
  8. ^ Associated Press
  9. ^ E:M | My last year's trip to Iran wasn't that easy
  10. ^ Iran, I blog., CBC News, October 2006>
  11. ^ Help Iranians fight Net censorship during the Geneva Summit - hoder.com
  12. ^ King of the Iranian bloggers haaretz.com
  13. ^ stop.censoring.us
  14. ^ Article from his blog
  15. ^ Article from Washington Post
  16. ^ Hossein Derakhshan, Between Khamenei and Bush, hoder.com, December 24, 2006
  17. ^ Hossein Derakhshan, Stop bullying Iran, guardian.co.uk/commentisfree, February 23, 2007
  18. ^ http://hoder.com/images/khalaji_court_claim.pdf
  19. ^ E:M | Mehdi Khalaji is the only person on the planet who has indirectly worked for or given advice to both Khamanei's office and Cheney's in less than five years. His recent work for the right-wing American think tanks and his shameful endorsement and help to American Foreign Policy Council's disgusting anti-Iran campaign has made him the filthiest traitor I have ever seen in my life. I love to see his face (and that of similar traitors such as Mohsen sazegara, Ali Afshari and to some degree Akbar Ganji) when the U.S. has no choice but to finally accept that its time in the Middle East has passed. (in Persian)
  20. ^ Global Voices Online » Hossein Derakhshan’s blog is suspended
  21. ^ link to video file, abstract

Profiles

Publications

External links