Liberal Iranian

Channel 4 (UK) asks: How do you mark the 30th anniversary of the revolution in Iran?

2009-02-10T10:22:00.003-05:00

I don't mark this 30th anniversary of the 1979 revolution in any particular way except for a deep sigh. Having lived outside Iran for a while, I am relieved not to be bombarded by a constant stream of deafening propaganda on TV, radio, work, school and elsewhere in the public.

The sigh then is one of relief as well as grief. Grief for those who perished in the years leading to the revolution. For those whose idealistic hopes were dashed by the Islamic Republic, including the ones of those who actually supported it back then.

For those who were executed, jailed or forced into exile by the Islamic Republic since its inception. And for those whose lives in Iran today consist mostly of a seemingly futile struggle to lead what is considered a basic, normal life in the free world.

I just hope that the unrealistic world views and the intellectual clutter 30-some years ago that led to all of this now, and the yoke of theocracy, go away soon and my countrymen can one day live freely.

The monstrosity of ideas

2008-11-07T09:57:00.004-05:00

technorati tags: US society politics media democracy

Here is a comment I left on Paul Krugman's post, "The monster years". It hasn't appeared there yet, and I wonder if the moderator will find it "on-topic and not abusive". So here it goes:

Mr. Krugman,

I read your post with shameful quiet a few times. I was saddened by your de-humanizing tone and insensitive idea but having read many of your public writings at least I was not surprised. However, I was astonished to see not even a single commenter call you on the cruelty and senselessness of your words.

To demonize the people we don't like or disagree with is the way of hatemongers. When done systematically, its logical conclusion throughout history has been banishing the citizens from their society, putting them away in jail en masse, and ultimately the killing of millions of people. Some of your commenters have already begun on this frightening path. One even calls Ronald Reagan, whose legacy is seen by many an inspired freedom fighter around the world as facing down the biggest tyranny of modern times, in your hateful terms.

Such strong terms must be reserved for the very worst of situations, or else they risk losing any useful meaning. Even then, one must be careful in using them. Even Hitler or Saddam Hussein had a human dimension. For you to de-humanize the likes of Karl Rove and Cheney, however much you dislike or disagree with them, while at this very moment youngsters are hanged and women are stoned to death in my homeland, is beyond any reason. If Tom DeLay is a monster, then what is Kim Jung Il?

That you use the occasion of Obama's win, supposedly a victory for hope and tolerance, to put forward such an intolerant idea only adds to the irony. It perhaps shows your own inner demons. I hope that you reconsider these shameful words. Otherwise, the shame will forever remain on you.

President Obama?

2008-11-03T01:10:00.009-05:00

technorati tags: politics US

With Obama leading in almost all national and state polls, he seems set to be the next President of the Unites States. For a man whose middle name is the same as Saddam Hussein's last, with mixed racial and ethnic background, and who was virtually unknown at the beginning of his campaign, this is a great moment. It is an historic moment for America as a whole. The world looks at him favourably and so his presidency will be welcome internationally more than John McCain's. The Economist, a rational, analytical magazine and an advocate of liberal values (some of you may know them as neo-liberal or libertarian values, but let's not quibble over the name) has just endorsed him (with some reservations); a significant step for a journal that supported Bush and the war in Iraq.

I know and can guess some of you are also very excited about Obama. If and when he wins, I will be happy with you -- but I have come to the conclusion that Obama, taken at his own words, will be an overall set-back to free life in America and the principles that underpin it. As America has historically been the torch-bearer of freedoms in the world, this would have negative effects for liberties in the world in general, though over a longer time period. With the current economic situation and international resurgence of anti-west, anti-liberal powers, this could even turn into a disaster. I know some of you disagree with me on this statement and on the reasons for it, but at this point I feel I should let them known -- at least for future reference.

The reasons are long and I try to limit the list. In brief, Obama's world view seems to feed from a deeply held conviction about the political and economic organization of the society, and more importantly, the role of government in it that is essentially socialist. Now, of course, he is not a Socialist, and his advisors are probably wiser than thinking flat-out socialist programs are either good or viable. But given the economic situation, and the fact that the Democrats will likely control both houses of Congress, I believe he will have a great chance and an open hand to infuse whatever programs he or the Congress shall draft with this world view. And in politics and economic policy, the spirit and overall design of a program is what ultimately matters the most, much more than the original intentions or specific problems originally meant to be solved.

For instance, he believes "we must not only reward wealth, but the workers who create that wealth," as he just said again in his crowd-packed rally in Cincinnati, Ohio. That sounds good, but it is also the textbook example of a core idea leading to "socialism". It is, in fact, the basis of Marx's theory of economic value, the "surplus value". He also believes we must "spread the wealth around" (this is what started the Joe-the-Plumber Act) because income inequality has deepened. That is also fine at first sight. The tax system already does that to some extent, especially in its current progressive form. The question is, how else? How can a president, the government, spread the wealth around? One can think of changing the tax system to do so. Milton Friedman suggested replacing the welfare system with a negative-tax system. But is that what Obama intends to do? I don't believe so, not least because that proposal is an essentially libertarian idea, designed to further limit the extent of government. He also constantly riles against "economic theories" that did not work, the "trickle-down effect", etc. He doesn't mention their names, but these "economic theories" are the free-market theories. In opposition stand "socialist" economic theories, with the opposite emphasis, namely the "bottom-up effect" that he openly advocates.

On the issue of powers of government, he comes out as a somewhat authoritarian figure. The most memorable quote of the first debate for me was Obama's "No U.S. soldier ever dies in vain because they're carrying out the missions of their commander in chief." That sounds inspiring and grand, like Obama's many other phrases, but it places the value of a soldier's (read a citizen's) effort, not in its intrinsic truth or the broader mission, but in his following the Leader's commands. Couple that with his belief in "community organization for actual coalition of powers" and his view that the constitution's constraints to "negative liberties" are a tragedy of the "court focused" civil rights movement, for which we are "still paying the price", etc. (this is his radio interview of 2001 when he was a state legislator) and we are almost at the full picture. It is this: we must throw away our current, free-market, economic theories, start from the bottom up, spread the wealth around, reward the workers who create the wealth, expand our negative concepts of freedoms to positive rights to be provided by the government, and coalition the power by organizing the communities (the masses) to carry out the missions of the commander. In these hysteric economic conditions programs based on these principles will very likely become deeply entrenched and won't easily go away, just as the Great Depression led to the New Deal, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac descended to shake the financial markets 70 years later.

So why did the Economist, a journal definitely not supportive of socialism, support Obama? Simple: because John McCain ran a placid, unfocused, unconvincing campaign. In contrast, Obama has consistently cloaked his campaign on a single, focused slogan: "change". The Economist Leader article was remarkably thin on actual analysis of the content of the ideas put forward by the candidates. One plus they counted for Obama was this: "It would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein"!! I was left speechless by this wishful thinking. Examples to the contrary abound, but just as a sample, how difficult was it to kill, imprison or exile many mullah's -- not only fellow muslims -- with longer names full of saints' names in Iran's Islamic republic?

Maybe nothing bad will happen. Maybe. But it is distressing to see the comeback of, and a "change" laden with, bad ideas.

Rhetoric as Thinking

2007-10-26T05:07:00.000-04:00

Ganji, Iran's most famous dissident, has substituted rhetoric for thinking.

technorati tags: iran democracy US Ganji

Akbar Ganji, "someone who spent six years in Tehran's Evin Prison on a bogus charge of endangering national security," has published a column in the Washington Post (translated from Farsi) to clarify "why Iranian pro- democracy forces oppose the $75 million the U.S. government provides to aid civil society in their country."

But even the very title and the starting point is presumptuous. First, why should Ganji think he can represent such a vast group of people as "Iranian pro-democracy forces"? Second, why is being an Iranian democrat taken to be synonymous with "shuning foreign aid"? What, then, are Akbar Atri, Ali Afshari, and countless other activists? Ganji also claims that in any Middle Eastern country other than Iran people would choose fundamentalists in a free and fair election. Why? This is pseudo-intellectual nonesense! In fact, this statement has already been proven wrong in Iraq. But the problems with Ganji's piece are much deeper than this.

After a string of incongruous expressions of facts and opinions-dressed-as-facts about the situation in Iran and the Middle East and what people want or don't wan't, he reaches the following culminating point:

So here is our request to Congress: To do away with any misunderstanding, we hope lawmakers will approve a bill that bans payment to individuals or groups opposing the Iranian government.

This rhetorical request has a deeply sensational tone. But it is a foolish thing to say, void of any logic. Why should anyone hoping to help a group of people (Iranian pro-democracy forces here) ban transactions with them? How could such outright blocking of aid possibly help?

But it gets even worse. Ganji charges the (collective) West of helping Iran's government to restrict and filter the Web. (This, of course, confounds private companies with governments, but that's a minor offense.) Then, he proceeds to say that all Iranians really need is free media and TV,

The support we need at this point has nothing to do with funding the regime's opposition but with aiding Iranians in the quest for independent media and accurate information.

Mr. Ganji's piece is apparently in response to an earlier op-ed by Michael Rubin. But he seems not to have read it:

The congressional appropriation has grown from $1.4 million in 2004 to $66 million this year. Of this, $36 million disappears into the coffers of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. The State Department applies an additional $5 million each to visitor exchange programs and to translation of its Web sites into Persian.

VOA Persian and Radio Free Europe (Radio Farda in Persian) are perhaps the closest things accessible in Iran to free media with wide coverage through their radio and TV programs. Mr. Ganji has used VOA's platform several times already to reach his fellow Iranians. Now, he wouldn't want them off, or would he?

Atri Hits the Nail on the Head

2007-10-16T02:46:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran US democracy

Akbar Atri, an Iranian activists now living in exile in the US, writes in the Wall Street Journal,

As I write this, close friends of mine are sitting in cells of Evin prison in Iran. They are suffering from torture, solitary confinement and denial of medical care. Despite their suffering, they write and smuggle out of prison essays about the brutality of Iran's government and about how the democracy movement can stay resilient despite mounting repression.

Here in America, where I have been living since 2005 as an exiled activist, a controversy has emerged over the Bush administration's pledge to provide $75 million in democracy and human-rights assistance to Iranians. Critics of the funding, among them some Iranian-Americans, say the money endangers the lives of activists and gives pretext for the Iranian regime to crack down on their activities. Supposedly speaking on behalf of the Iranian people, these critics claim Iranians do not want and do not need America's help in their fight against oppression.

Then he mentions that similar opinions are expressed by Iranians, such as Akbar Ganji, another activist who is living in the US at this time. (See this related piece.) Mr. Atri continues,

I respectfully disagree. There are many sides to this debate, but one thing is clear: Those in Iran who favor receiving foreign assistance and consider international solidarity essential to the success of Iran's homegrown civic movements cannot speak freely. If they do, they will be subject to immediate retaliation by the regime. The lack of robust, transparent appeals for outside help by civic leaders should not be confused with a lack of need or desire for such help.

Prominent activists in Iran, and even activists recently exiled, fear the repercussions of open appeals for outside support, so they color their statements about American democracy funding in order to protect themselves and their families. This is understandable as a strategy and self-preservation tactic by otherwise brave activists against a regime that prohibits free and open interaction with the outside world.

Criticism of American support for Iran's democracy movement is not defensible when made by those who have barely seen Iran, much less been a part of its struggle for freedom. Despite being an elected leader of the Iranian student movement and an active participant in university politics for 10 years, I do not purport to represent Iranians or even the Iranian student movement. I speak for myself. Yet when Iranian-Americans who have no standing in Iran, and who have received no backing from Iranians, claim to represent the will of all Iranians, I feel I need to speak up.

Those so righteously opposed to funding might have us believe that if it were not for American support, Iranian activists would not be facing intimidation, imprisonment and torture. But since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iranian regime has been systematically imprisoning, killing and otherwise silencing civic actors -- particularly secular, liberal democrats -- under bogus charges of espionage and collusion with foreign agents. Just this year, Iranian authorities have executed without due process over 100 people, yet none were said to be connected to U.S. democracy funds. There is not much new in the Iranian government's strategy of repression, but what is promising and hopeful to Iran's democrats -- and threatening to the Iranian leadership -- is that there is finally real support from the outside.

And how does the funds get spent anyway?

Iranians have already benefited immeasurably from democracy funding, especially from the Persian-language broadcasts by Voice of America television and Radio Farda ("Tomorrow"), for which a majority of the $75 million at issue now is allocated. These broadcasts offer news and perspectives to the Iranian public that they would not otherwise have, including news regarding developments inside their own country. The broadcasts are popular with millions of diverse Iranians and have successfully broken the Islamic Republic's attempt to isolate the country from external sources of information. The Iranian regime could not be happier to see its popular nemeses -- VOA television and Radio Farda -- exterminated by Iranian Americans and others purporting to do good.

America's best civil-society organizations have also been developing successful links and activities -- independent of the U.S. government and in collaboration with international partners -- to support democratic awareness and civil society inside Iran. To cut Iranians off from the transfer of lessons and experiences gleaned from civic movements globally only strengthens the Iranian government.

And the necessary conclusion is:

American lawmakers and Iranian-Americans who would eliminate financial support for Iran's democrats need to understand the following: Supporting Iranian civil society and the nonviolent struggle toward democracy and human rights is likely the most cost-effective means to prevent a future conflict with Iran or an armed struggle within its borders. Democracy is difficult to achieve. But with its remarkably young, educated population, and a long-stifled yearning for the fruits of modernity and liberalism, Iran has many of the key ingredients for success.

With some help from their American allies, Iranian democrats are brave enough and capable enough to achieve for their country what the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Vaclav Havel achieved for theirs.

Very well said!

Hypocrisy and Human Rights

2007-10-05T00:26:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran US UN freedom Ganji

Akbar Ganji, the Iranian dissident who spent 6 years in jail and more than 2 months on hunger strike, has written a letter to the UN Secretary General, endorsed by more than 300 intellectuals. In it, he appeals for the human rights in Iran. But he also uses the opening half of the letter to criticize America's policy in the region, writing for instance:

The Bush Administration, for its part, by approving a fund for democracy assistance in Iran, which has in fact being largely spent on official institutions and media affiliated with the US government, has made it easy for the Iranian regime to describe its opponents as mercenaries of the US and to crush them with impunity. At the same time, even speaking about "the possibility" of a military attack on Iran makes things extremely difficult for human rights and pro-democracy activists in Iran.

A Reuters correspondent, Alistair Lyon, informs us that similar opinions are shared by other activitst in the region. We read that

"(U.S.) money is not going to help the democratization process here," said Ebrahim Yazdi, Iran's first post-revolution foreign minister and leader of the banned Freedom Movement.

and that

"The United States has lost a lot of its credibility on human rights because of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and renditions," said Nadim Houry of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch group.

But are these true? Has America lost its credibility with Mr. Yazdi or Mr. Ganji? That question supposes that these people once believed the US was a credible force of good and now they don't. But did they? In reality, the answer is no! These same people, long before "Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and renditions," indeed long before George Bush Sr. and Jr. were ever in power, were hostile to the US. Mr. Ganji joined at a young age in a revolution whose mantra was "we crush the US!" and took more than a decade to go through a change of heart about its worth. Mr. Yazdi is a subtler type: while he and his cohorts in the Freedom Movement decry political repressions in Iran, they were happy to take power in the revolution that ousted their once close friend and last Prime Minister of the Shah, Shapour Bakhtiar of the National Front (a true believer in freedom), and that eventually assassinated him in exile in Paris. They are simply failed politicians after regaining their lost power.

Old habits are hard to kick.

Perhaps it is easy and convenient to blame our shortcomings on outside powers and expect them to be saints who uphold our rights and act for our freedoms even more steadfastly than we do ourselves. But the fact of the matter is that Iranian (and other Mideast) activists have consistently made far more serious mistakes and are far more responsible for their conditions than any outside power. The constant blaming of the US, whether to distance themselves from the West for domestic reasons or to please their idelogical prejudices, is just another one of those mistakes.

The Economist: On Iran, Higher risks

2007-08-11T00:36:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran politics

An edited version of my brief letter to the editor on the leader of July 21st and the accompanying survey in The Economist has been published.

Economist: Men of Principle

2007-07-19T18:33:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran politics media

The Economist has a fresh "special report" on Iran's politics and nuclear crisis. It gives the so-called "pendulum theory" of Iran's politics, which states that it swings from the conservative to the reformist side with elections in the nation's quest for democracy, a well-deserved beating. But as it seems to be the habit of The Econmist when it comes to Iran, it comes short of, though it gives a hint at, articulating what is its most important factor (even in the nuclear crisis): the rationale of tyranny.

Iran's Record Worsening

2007-07-18T19:15:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran human rights

In the past few weeks, Iran's regime has added several new violations of human rights to its record. (See, for instance, Amnesty International's report.) Eighteen students belonging to the central council of Tahkim-e Vahdat, the main elected student political body, have been arrested on the anniversary of the attacks on Tehran University dormitories on July 9, 1999. Their office and homes were raided. Prison and other sentences were issued for women's rights campaigners. Bahareh Hedayat has been a member of both targetted groups. Human Rights First has more info and is asking for your support.

Today, Iran's state-run TV broadcast the first part of a program titled "In the Name of Democracy", which is nothing more than a televised "confession" of two Iranian-American academics, Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh, who were arrested a few month ago on (bogus) national security charges. They "confess" to having been involved in a "velvet revolution" project. The move is part of a well-coordinated propaganda campagin with well-rehearsed Goebbelsian tactics. The broadcast was advertised in advance. When it was met with criticism from human rights activists in Iran and the West, an additional "analysis" segment was aired that "questioned" why the program is being criticised -- "could it be that they are afraid of what it shows?"

So, where is this wicked charade going to end up?

Arafat, Castro and Che ...

2007-07-10T17:19:00.000-04:00

... "stand tall in their worldwide stature and inspiration" for dictators, suppressors of freedom and revolutionary murderers:

technorati tags: human rights UN

Psychological Impact on Economy

2007-06-26T18:05:00.000-04:00

There is no such thing as the psychological impact on economy.

technorati tags: economy iran

I always find it baffling when I hear or read about the psychological impact of an event on economy. I don't understand what is really meant by the term. Does it mean that the event in question somehow affects the psychology of the people in some unkown but pathological way and then this unhealthy state of mind impacts the economy? What I usually suppose they mean is that the said event either falsely signals a particular, non-existent situation, or that it is interpreted falsely due to invalid but popular theories. But to take people's reaction in such cases to be "psychological" and its economic consequences to be a sort of "psychological impact" on the economy, especially as a way of analyzing the situation, is hardly worth consideration in a rational, objective theory.

An example is this economic focus article in The Economist, which is concerned with the sensitivity of the Chinese economy to a stock market bubble burst. After giving a detailed account of who in China and how owns shares of the stock market and the proporion of companies and how much they issue shares in the market, The Economist concludes

The direct economic impact of a fall in Chinese share prices would therefore be modest.

But right afterward it continues

Some indirect effects could be larger. For instance, the psychological impact of a sharp sell-off could severely puncture consumer confidence.

But this way of viewing things is fishy. If the detailed analysis leading to the first conlusion is right then there remains nothing left to the psychology of the general consumer. Why should they care about a stock market sell-off if it doesn't affect them? What could be the case is that the consumers are not aware of this analysis. They have their own analyses. They act on them. If the result is a state of severly puncutred consumer confidence when the economic data show it need not be the case, I can't see this as the "psychological" impact of the stock market crash. It is the consequence of widespread false theories of what that crash means. It is perfectly non-psychological in exactly the same sense an otherwise solid consumer confidence would be.

Similar and much worse analyses prevail about inflation and prices in Iran. For instance, Davoud Danesh-Jafari, then head of the Economic Commission of Majlis and now the Minister of Economic Affairs and Finance, has the following theory:

"People expect the prices to go up when the new-year starts and this automatically pushes up the rates."

The fallacy of such claims is apparent on a little thought. Why, for instance, do people expect the prices to go up? As the same newspaper article also notes,

A close and impartial look at the budget statement and reasons behind chronic deficits show that unless the government comes up with ways to put a stop to the unchecked rise in liquidity, inflation will continue to haunt the economy not only during the next year but for years to come.

The psychological theory of inflation, of course, has no room in serious economics.

Suicide on Donated Rope

2007-06-18T20:10:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran workers economy

ILNA reports:

The last one who saw Hasan Hasani was one of his colleagues. Together with other workers they had gone to Kanaf (hemp) Factory in the morning to stop the evacuation of production machines but they faced the police. After they were beaten by anti-riot police they went to protest at the provincial governor's building. They were scattered by the police again. Then Hasan asked his coworker for some money. "He didn't even have a coin in his pockets." His coworker didn't have more than 500 tomans (less than $1) either. They shared the money. "He said don't count this as a loan. I didn't pay attention to what he said. We had been beaten since morning and just wanted to go home with our tails between our legs. He asked, they took the machines too, so is that it? I said, you saw what they did." He wanted to hear it from someone else that the little glimmer of hope to return to work had been destroyed. "No machine, no work. He knew, poor man! He took a cab with the money to go to the factory faster." At 1pm they found Hasan Hasani dead hanging from a rope in an abandoned factory. His eyes were white and his teeth had cut the tip of his tongue. The factory security who found him said, "he had tightened the noose so strongly I had to cut the rope to bring his body down." Such was his determination to go.

He had not received his wage of less than $200 a month for 11 months.

The Blame of the Crime, Again

2007-06-15T17:10:00.000-04:00

Khamenei's regime is muddying the waters, but they could catch the big fish only if we lose our sense of justice and reality.

technorati tags: politics iraq iran US

A horrible blast in Samarra, Iraq has shattered the shrine of two Shiite imams on Wednesday. On this, the Supreme Leader of the the Islamic Republic said the following:

"The disgraceful and blind-hearted agents behind this big crime, whether they are remaining stooges of Saddam's Baathist regime or the beguiled Wahhabi and Salafi fanatics, it cannot be doubted that the intelligence services of the occupiers and Zionist's are the main masterminds of these heinous schemes."

But what causes this incredible certainty? This, he says:

"The occupiers have left the scene open to terrorists and panic-mongers to weaken the bases of the popular government of Iraq and justify their illegitimate presence in that country and are causing discord among Muslim brethren."

Apart from the nonsensical equality claimed between "leaving the scene open" and "masterminding" the crime, His Supreme Excellency sees of course no need to further explain why the occupying forces would even need such desperate justification for their presence. Are they benefitting from it? Even a cursory look at the facts shows this not to be the case. The US is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on its presence in Iraq. That would equal the entire Iraqi oil production in a decade. They have lost in excess of 3000 of their soldiers in Iraq. Even on a personal and political level, G. W. Bush is greatly unpopular because of the mishandling of the aftermath of deposing Saddam's regime. So what is there to gain in causing even further unrest? The simple answer is none.

But there is a lot to gain for Mr. Khamenei and his regime in spreading such lies and distorting the truth. In opposing the US, however irrationally, they buy legitimacy for their illegitimate hold on power in Iran and the region. By wrongly putting the blame of the crime on the US presence in Iraq they muddy the waters. But whether or not they can catch the big fish they are after depends just as much on our, the ordinary citizens' sense of justice, reality and truth.

Take Action for Syrian Activists

2007-06-14T04:13:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: human rights middle east

Human Rights First reports that since the time between January 26, 2006 and March 18, 2006

Seven young activists have been detained for more than one year by the Syrian authorities for being part of an independent pro-democracy discussion group and publishing articles on the Internet criticizing the lack of democracy and freedom in Syria. Some of them were also involved in the creation of an online youth forum. [...] They could face up to 15 years in prison.

You can send a letter to Syrian officials protesting their conditions. I am not sure how effective this is, but it's something.

This sounds very much like the situation in Iran. Given the similarities, I wonder if they also have their apologists, (pseudo-)intellectuals and apeasers in the West who would procliam all this inhumanity is either necessary for a greater good or plain non-existent?

Capitalism from Epistemology

2007-06-11T03:08:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: philosophy economy

The theory of knowledge (or epistemology) is arguably a foundational theory for our understanding of the world. Intuitively, however, it would seem quite detached from our everyday lives. What could the philosophical question of whether an objective framework of knowledge could be established, or whether I am just dreaming the world have to do with, say, what economic system I would prefer to live in? But the reason for this common-sense intuition is that, for the most part, it presupposes a particular, objectivist theory of knowledge à la Popper. It would seem that we could argue about the best economic system independent of how knowledge is attained, whereas in reality the former arguments rest on a particular way of attaining the knowledge contained in them.

In this objectivist theory we can never be certain, in its logical sense, of the truth of our theories (knowledge). The best that we can do is to criticise them and discard the ones we find to be false. This asymmetric situation between truth and falsehood is the basis of the method of trial and elimination of error and of scientific discoveries (growth of knowledge). Once we accept this, it follows more or less directly that the best economic system is the one that allows such trials-and-errors to be performed at the minimum cost to allow the maximum growth of knowledge. This is possible, so far as we know, only in a free-market system, that is, capitalism.

Rationale of Tyranny

2007-06-05T05:18:00.000-04:00

Survival is why tyrannies do what they do and propaganda is how. This adds to, not diminish, the dangers of their propaganda.

technorati tags: iran freedom

There is a great confusion in the way people think about a tyrannical regime like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Does the regime really mean all the hateful propoganda they spread about the West? Do they mean it when they express a desire to "wipe Israel off the map" or "crush America under their feet"? Or when they write them on the missiles paraded in the streets? Aren't they just trying to survive? Wouldn't everyone else in their shoes do the same? Shouldn't we separate the "intent" (survival) from propaganda? Isn't the Islamic regime just another rational player? (See this comment, for instance.)

Some of the answers are "yes", and some "no". But the point is these questions miss the actual rationale of tyranny.

I don't have a problem with accepting the Islamic regime, as a whole, as a rational player. But so what? Even rational players have assumptions that go into their decision making. And there is always room for questioning the moral justifications of those assumptions. Yes, even a tyrant could be rational. But does that somehow make his tyranny okay?

Would anyone in a tyrant's shoes do the same under external pressure? No! Why should they? If the outsiders have reasonable demands, one could adequately assure them that their demands are met. One doesn't need to be a violent and abrasive dictator even in an authoritarian system. Even a tyrant really does have options. In particular there is always the option of accepting to dismantle the dictatorship altogether. This has been demonstrated many times in recent history of non-violent revolutions, be it in Eastern Europe or in Chile.

But what about the intent and the propaganda? It is a major (and sometimes deliberate) confusion of logic to claim that the fact that a tyranny's intent is to survive would somehow make the propaganda it spreads less lethal and dangerous. It is the complete opposite. Tyrannies spread hateful and false propaganda because they want to survive. Survival is why they do what they do and propaganda (and repression) is how. And when the why demands that they actualy act on the how they won't cringe. There is ample historical evidence for this. Here's one relevant to Iran:

In the second half of the Iran-Iraq war (more or less after Khorramshahr was liberated by the Iranian forces) when Iraq was in a defensive position and was seeking a ceasefire, the Islamic Republic continued the war and said it would not accept the UN resolution No. 598 for a ceasefire. So the war continued for another 4-5 years during which hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed and the economy was shattered even more.

How did they convince the people to do this? Propaganda, of course, besides a cycle of repression and fear. The walls of Tehran were covered with slogans such as: "War, War, Till Victory!" or "The Path to Quds Goes Through Karbala" or "War, War, Till Mahdi's Revolution!". The only two TV stations were filled with stories of martyrdom, etc. Saddam was kafir (nonbeliever) and the war was one against kufr (nonbelief). Classic tyrannical propaganda methods were practiced. Moreover, almost any voice of dissent was brutally silenced. Those who had differing ideas from the head of the power pyramide, from all stripes and colors even many early supporters, were silenced, jailed and/or executed.

Why did they do this? To survive. Did they believe in all they said? Probably not. In fact, after the intent for survival forced the weakening regime to finally accept the ceasefire in 1988 (or "drink the potion of death" in the words of Khomeini), it was suddenly as if Saddam was no longer kafir or the path to Quds did not go through Karbala.

In short, the strategy of tyranny is set by the intent for surival and its tactics by the propaganda. They go hand in hand. So the question of whether they believe in their own propaganda becomes irrelevent to what they would actually do. They'd do as they see fit for their survival and this could include acting on existing propaganda, or creating new ones. But what is for certain is that we on the outside should never dismiss or devalue the dangers of their propaganda.

Wish Come True?

2007-05-31T03:29:00.000-04:00

The anti-neocon agenda is behind every thought of the Left.

technorati tags: iran human rights freedom

Iranian.com, a popular community web site, has published a rare letter by a group of academics including Noam Chomsky and Hamid Dabashi, prominent voices of the Left, to the government of Iran in protest to the recent detention of Kian Tajbakhsh. Though it starts by calling the policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran towards its own citizens "repressive", the real reason behind the letter shows even in the title: the anti-neocon agenda. Here, it shows up as:

The Iranian government should know how damaging these arbitrary arrests are to the country’s reputation and how these arrests have given ample opportunity to American neocons to vilify an entire nation in the interest of yet another military adventurism with hundreds of thousands of innocent lives at stake.

And also in the concluding remark:

The systematic abuse of human and civil rights of Iranian citizens can only exacerbate Iran’s international isolation and play into the hands of warmongers in the United States.

In this logic the problem is not the systemic abuse of human rights per se, but that it plays into the hands of "neo-cons". Even when they finally raise a voice in protest to a really repressive regime, Messrs. Chomsky, Dabashi and Co. would not miss a chance to repeat the false and ideological claim that the neocons are the real villains.

This truly disgusts me.

The neocons' influence on American politics has diminished greatly over the past couple of years. Evidence that no serious presidential contender in 2008 seems keen on the neocon strategy. In any case, there is--and always has--ample opportunity to oust the (remaining) neocons from office democratically. There is no such end in sight for the Islamic Republic's repressive policies. What excuse would this idiotic bunch use when G. W. Bush is gone in less than two years?

Targeted Arrests: Scare Tactic

2007-05-29T16:24:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran human rights freedom

Why should Iran's government arrest people who have apparently been trying to portray a good image of Iran abroad? Ms. Esfandiary, for instance, the director of the Middle East program at the Woodraw Wilson Center had been regularly analyzing the political situation in Iran and its elections as if they are happening in a perfectly democratic setting. In the most recent example of such an analysis, Iran After the June 2005 Presidential Elections, there is hardly any mention of voting fraud, undemocratic laws and institutions, and the extremely limited choice, which essentially undermine any analysis of the elections and their implications for the demographics and the wants and needs of the electorate that presupposes a democratic setting. In brief, her activities could be seen as a vindication of the Islamic Republic. So, why is she prevented to leave Iran after a regular family visit, interrogated long hours for weeks, and finally detained on clearly bogus and selective charges? (In fact there are yet no charges, just hints at what they entail.)

The reason is simple once we look at the Islamic Republic as what it is: a tyranny whose first and foremost objective is to prolong its existence and the reasons behind it. Of course, Ms. Esfandiari has not been active in anything that would resemble a plan for toppling Iran's theocracy. The words freedom, democracy, liberalism and their derivatives do not even appear in the Wilson Center Mission Statement. But she is a known figure in a known institute concerned with Iran's politics. As such, she must have contacts with other scholars, including those who could be considered liberal and/or active in institutions with an agenda for democratic government and human rights in Iran. Her arrest is a scare tactic. It is even more effective once her background and her line of thinking is taken into account.

There are a few million Iranians living outside the country for various reasons. Almost all of them still have family and close friends in Iran whom they would like to visit. This diaspora could be very effective in ending the tyranny in Iran in various ways. So, it pays greatly to scare them off.

But now what? What should we do? Apart from the calls and the campaign to release these innocent men and women, an important thing for the Iranians abroad is to show that they are not scared, and for those who care for freedoms to bolster their calls. This does not mean engaging in silly and plainly dangerous activities. All it needs to show is that such scare tactics will not work. If this advanced assault on our front is not withheld the international pressures by the Iranian diaspora on the government of Iran to behave will be subdued and their effectiveness eroded. Then, we could expect an even worse situation inside Iran for those we love and care about.

Hostages in Their Own Land

2007-05-25T04:17:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: human rights iran

Iran's government has detained four Iranian-American dual nationals: Parnaz Azima, who works for Radio Farda, the Persian channel of Radio Free Europe; Haleh Esfandiari, an academic who was most notable for promoting a positive image of Iran; Kian Tajbakhsh, who is affiliated with George Soros' Open Society Institute; and Ali Shakeri, founder of the Center for Citizen Peace Building at the University of California, Irvine. Regardless of the details of their cases, these men and women are being held against their will on bogus charges.

There are many more unnamed individuals in similar conditions who don't make it to the headlines. But even when they do, like Mojtaba Saminejad, Arash Sigarchi and Sina Motallebi, there remain parasitic analysts and apologists of Iran's regime, who live by passing on as experts (on what?) in every online forum they can sell themselves off, that insist this is just a figment of our imagination. It is in fact perfect daylight, they proclaim, despite all the evidence of a pitch dark night. They are morally accountable for the lies they spread and for the harms they inflict. For lying in the same bed with the evils of our time. Because they do so knowingly.

Happiness

2007-05-13T17:04:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: freedom philosophy society

Cato Unbound had a lively round of discussions on "happiness" in April. A major focus of the debate was how and to what extent the emerging "science of happiness" must influence public policy. However, I think a very basic question was left untouched. As McMahon writes in the lead essay all attempts at defining and designing a rout to "objective happiness" have so far failed. I go as far as to say that such an "objective happiness" does not even exist. Happiness is, in essense, subjective. What way is there, for instance, to know if someone is happy other than to ask them? All surveys of happiness basically do the same. There is no way of "calculating" how happy someone is from other data.

Here is the question: why should we as a society allow a subjective quality affect the objective realm of public policy? In answer, a central argument is that happiness is a fundamental value or even the end of life. However, to declare, objectively, that a subjective perception is the end of or a great value in life is at best presumptuous. It is contradictory.

My answer is that we should not. Only an objective end related to happiness, such as the pursuit of happiness, can be thought of as a collective value and allowed to shape public policy. Ultimately all such objective ends are tied to individual freedoms and hence contained in it. Of course, precedent historical situations might necessitate a bigger weight be given to some such ends in public institutions as, for instance, the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, but even that would not make any sense in the absence of an even more weight given to freedom.

Nudging the Nudgers

2007-05-03T00:24:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: economy society freedom

The Free Exchange writer reports from a session at Cato Institute where Prof. Mario Rizzo criticized the new trend in behavioural economics, the "libertarian paternalism." (Is the oxymoron sound here deliberate?) One could debate the merits of the proposal and its critique at great length, but what caught my eye was this at the very end of this blog post:

Of course, we'd also want to ask how the deciders are overcoming those cognitive biases the rest of us suffer from.

This is, to me, the most important problem with such grand and well-meaning "programs" for doing good. If we set up a system to "nudge" poeple to be better than they would supposedly be otherwise, how and by whom should the nudgers themselves be so nudged?

Novelist Put in Jail

2007-04-21T22:15:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran human rights

Yaghoub Yad-Ali, an Iranian novelist, has been jailed since March 14, 2007 in the eastern city of Yasouj, Iran for what has been called "insulting ethnic groups and interfering with national security." The charges are related to two of his books, Halat-ha dar Hayat and Adab-e Bigharari (The Ritual of Restlessness), published in 1998 and 2004, respectively. Books published in Iran are first vetted by the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance's censor office and must have an official permit. The charges of insult have been brought against the writer because in the first book he had described a "special" relationship between a female character who speaks Luri and a man other than her husband. The second book was awarded the 5th Golshiri Best Novel of the Year in 2004.

His conditions are reported to be grave. His request for release on bail has been denied by the judge.

(Via خوابگرد and BBC Persian.)

Someday

2007-04-19T16:55:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran canada music human_rights

Someday is the title song of Nazanin Afshin Jam's début album. It is a recounting of the "regressive revolution" that marked her birth in Iran. The Revolutionary Guardians of the new regime "jailed and tortured" her father. "Awaiting execution, it was the family's escape to Europe that saved them from political persecution." The song is poignant and powerful. With her passion for human rights (she staged a major international campaign to save another Nazanin, a minor, in Iran from execution), intelligence, and beautiful and effective art Nazanin is a fine example for the Iranian youth in diaspora -- and for my generation as a whole.

Guns For or Against Safety?

2007-04-17T11:35:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: society freedom guns VTech massacre US

The horrible massacre at Virginia Tech yesterday morning brings (or will bring) to the fore again the debate over guns. But maybe this reflexive reaction to the news is too shallow to capture the reality of situations like this.

On the two sides of the debate sit two rather simple representative propositions. On the anti-gun side, it is that "guns kill, and kill only." On the pro-gun side, it is that "outlawing guns leaves them with the outlaws." Each and every time an incident like the VTech or the Columbine massacre occurs the anti-gun people turns up its voice, and the pro-gun crowd rebut. According to The Economist

Similar atrocities have happened in countries with much stricter laws--at Dunblane in Scotland in 1996 and in Erfurt, in Germany, in 2002. But such events, elsewhere, lead to the laws being tightened even further. Inevitably individuals set on committing violence find some way to act, but with such effective tools as automatic pistols available to do so quickly and efficiently, the toll may be higher.

On the first thought the anti-gun argument is very weak. Guns don't just kill, they can also injur or threaten to injur or kill, which are all different in their consequences for the parties involved. They are, in short, a means of self-defence or attack, depending on the use the owner puts them in. So could be knives and there are knives that are designed for that purpose alone. Once we settle that, it is simply against personal freedoms of people to take away their means of self-defense. So on this first analysis the pro-gun crowd wins.

But there is a catch. Self-defence granted, we can still argue that carrying guns for this purpose in the community falls under the category of security. Security is a public good and that is why we need a state-run police. So, if carrying guns endangers the safety of the individuals in the community, we are justified in enforcing some restrictions as a way of minimising the total danger to the lives of the individuals (and no more). This is perhaps the non-emotional gist of the anti-gun argument and the pro-gun proposition is its negation.

This question is an empirical one: Does it or does it not endanger the security of the individuals to be free to carry guns unrestricted? It could and must be answered with sound reasoning (not the Michael Moore style) and adequate data. Is there such an answer?

The Blame of the Crime

2007-04-16T19:42:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: politics US iraq

Strange times we live in! A great number of people believe in fantasticly unrealistic explanations of the ongoings of the world. There are different levels of this divorce from reality, but the one that hits me hardest is the utterly amazing places where some people put the blame of an apparent crime. For example, a suicide bomber blows himself up in a Baghdad market killing tens of ordinary Iraqis. They tell us that the crime is that of the United States. Of course the US (along with the Iraqi government) bears the responsibility for the security and safety of the streets of Baghdad at which they are doing a dismal job. But this is not the sort of blame the US is burdened with by our mostly intellectual fellow citizens. She shoulders the blame, we are told, of the crime of killing civialns itself, as if it is the US that has given the bomber his intent, his plans and his bombs to carry out the attack. (Caution: the US might have given him the motivation, objectively, but that is different from the intent, which depends on the worldview of the subject.)

Imagine a gang of thieves take on a bank, hold the people and the clerks hostage and kill the security officer. If the number of such incidents in the city is increasing we could perhaps blame the police and city authorities for failing to ensure the safety of the city. But by what sort of twisted logic could we blame the actual killing of the security officer on the police? That would mean that we should jail the police chief or some such person instead of or beside the shooting criminal, with no criminal intent, planning or execution whatsoever relating to the charge. (Of course I am assuming there are no complicating details here.)

Such moral confusions, dilutions and inversions pose a mortal threat to our existence as a civilized society. What's the cure? I'm not sure. But the only way I know of attemting to cure this illness is by trying to find convincing arguments that show the falsehood of such irrational modes of thinking.

Darfur on Google Earth

2007-04-15T02:17:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: darfur human_rights

If you use Google Earth (if not, you should!) search for "Darfur, Sudan", click on the fire flame sign and download the file. It gives a glimpse of the horrible genocide that's been unfolding there in the first years of the 21st century through information, video footage, photographs and eyewitness testimony thanks to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Washington Post reports:

When Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel conceived of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, he envisioned a "living memorial" that would not only chronicle the crimes of the past but also take on issues of contemporary genocide, said Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the Washington museum.

"A memorial unresponsive to the future would violate the memory of the past," Bloomfield quoted Wiesel as saying.

To help fulfill that mission, the Holocaust Museum this week launched a multimedia initiative with Google Earth to highlight the genocide unfolding in the Darfur region of western Sudan, where government-backed militias and nomadic tribesmen have burned huts and villages to drive sedentary farmers from their homes.

Pictures from Zimbabwe

2007-04-12T07:21:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: world human_rights

People get used to their conditions and make do with whatever they can. However, this simple fact about the resilience of people and human nature is often misunderstood, misused and abused to mean miserable conditions may not be that bad. But how can one argue that for James Ndani (pictured right, not his real name) and his mother whose drinking water comes from a mine shaft (in the back) with a sign that reads: Danger - Cyanide Mining!

With the fastest shrinking economy of the world, a 5,000% inflation rate, and the public health ravaged by an AIDS epidemic that has decreased the life expectancy down to a mere 35 years, Zimbabwe is the textbook example of a nation devoured by the monumental tyranny of a mad 83-year-old thug who just decided (and was approved by his party) to keep going at what he knows best: beating his critics.

Gift of the Impudent Thief

2007-04-06T18:35:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran politics

I intentionally did not make any comments during the recent hostage-taking crisis of British marines by Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRG) of Iran. It was clear to me that the whole incident was staged by elements in the Iranian government. There were some clues, such as the initial "mistake" in the Iranian claimed position of the captured marines that was in Iraqi waters. But the people who could ultimately shed some light on the incident were captive and there was no hope that they would speak freely in captivitiy. Their "interviews" could not be trusted in the hands of a regime who has constantly forced even its most benign prisoners to confess to unimaginable crimes on TV since the begining of its existence. It was a well-calculated move by Iran, one that avoided a full clash with the US while sending a message that they could be a significant annoyance if they want to. I was particularly bothered by the continued state of inaction by the British and other European countries prior to the incident and their apparent puzzlement at the result of their irrational optimism toward unworthy actors in Iran's politics, the so-called "reformists."

But the ultimate insult came when after exploiting the staged situation for all its propaganda worth, Mr. Ahmadinejad announced that the marines are being released "as a gift" to the British people. It seems in the Islamic Republic's logic giving a gift is no different from returning stolen goods. This particularly persisting impudence is the essence of the Islamic Republic's existence.

Now that the marines are free and back home they can and are giving us a glimpse of their experience in captivity. As it appears, and I think the course of events is well explained by their statements, the marines refrained from a military engagement because they recognized the IRG was heavily equiped. Had they chosen differently they could have jeopardized not just their own lives but those of the people of Iran in the aftermath. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman claims these are "staged" statements. But what would the marines lose? Would they face an uncertain period of time apart from their families and loved ones? Would the costs of telling the truth be so high for them that not even one would confirm his or her statements made in Iran? Does the Iranian spokesman really expect the sane people of the free world to believe him instead of 15 free men and women?

Impudence indeed!

Happy Passover!

2007-04-04T03:21:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: holiday

An interesting costum in a Persian jewish Seder ceremony is to

simultaneously chant the Passover song "Dayenu" and hold bunches of either celery, chives, leeks or scallions in their hands and lightly beat each other on the back and shoulders to symbolize the sting generated by the whip of the Egyptian taskmasters.

Happy freedom and enjoy your matzos!

Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?

2007-04-02T05:04:00.001-04:00

technorati tags: human rights iran movies

I just read an interview of Jafar Panahi, the renowned Iranian director, in LA Weekly (hat tip: Normblog) that contained an anecdote I could not help noting down here before going to bed.

Panahi is recalling 2003 when he was summoned to the infamous Ministry of Information. His 30-something interrogator has just gone on a 15-minute rambling of goverment memos indicating Panahi had published offensive material.

Then he said, “Why is it you’ve continued to stay here? Why don’t you just leave? Go abroad. They like you there, don’t they? They like your work. Go there. Why would you even want to remain here?”

I didn’t reply immediately. I was halfway done with my cigarette, and I put it out in the ashtray, and I looked at him and said, “Listen, I know exactly what I’m saying to you. And I realize where I am and I know where I’m living. So, it’s with full possession of my faculties and freely that I say this to you: Who the hell do you think you are to tell me I shouldn’t live in this country? If you ever said such a thing to me outside this building, I’d punch you so hard you’d never be able to get up again.”

He didn’t expect anything of the kind, and frankly, no one in their right mind would say such a thing to an interrogator in an official building. He was floored, and for about two whole minutes, he didn’t say a thing. Then, when he tried to speak again, I picked up where I’d left off. “Now,” I said, “you want me to leave this country? Let me tell you something. I’m never going to leave this country. If you want, you can expel me. That isn’t up to me. It’s up to you.”

This straight-forward, well-calculated and extremely courageous reply is basically the essence of Panahi's films too. I have been in that room myself and know the arrogant and self-confident air these interrogators exude. To say to them the truth as it is in such circumstances takes more than courage though. It takes clear thinking and the knowledge that in spite of their self-assured power they will be standing naked if one pulls the single thread that holds their dreadful outfit together.

But with all his courage, I do fear for this man's life. If he goes too far at some unfortunate moment, these people won't hesitate to kill him -- the murderers that they are -- as they have many a courageous soul before. I wish him safety and many more great films.

Happy Noruz!

2007-04-01T05:10:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: holidays

I have been very busy -- and let the all important new Persian year go without notice. Spring is here. Let us hope that it brings more freedom and peace than shackles or unrest.

Today is the thirteenth day after noruz (literally, the new day) -- the sizdah bedar. It's a day of outing in the nature and the countryside, of being with family and friends and of cherishing the goodness of life. There is also a practice of having fun by making practical jokes or making false and outrageous claims, very much like April fools day jokes. It is interesting to note that the two days coincide exactly for some years including this.

Stand Up for Your Rights

2007-03-29T13:34:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: human rights

A very fine leader from The Economist and a pleasantly familiar argument, too!

American Era in the Middle East

2006-12-09T21:09:00.000-05:00

technorati tags: middle east us

If the American era in the Middle East is ending, as argued by some analysts, what is likely to replace it? Chaos? Self-determination? Iranian hegemony? A new caliphate?
- David Ignatius & Fareed Zakaria

First, let me say that the American era in the Middle East is not ending, and the mentioned analysts are wrong.

America is having problems and clearly needs to change and adjust some of her policies, but her Middle East era is not ending precisely for the answers sought to the question asked by Messrs. Ignatius and Zakaria: there is no regional or global player nearly as strong as the US to fill the void. The possibility of chaos is very real. However, the moral dilemmas faced by the US if it were to leave the Middle East to burn in chaos must be enough reason to keep her involved. As to self-determination, I don't see the American involvement in the Middle East as a hurdle, but an aid to that end: Even in Iraq, which is host to a few hundred thousand American and allied forces, it is not self-determination which is threatened, but security, and that only by ideology-driven terrorists, disgruntled Sunnis, and angry Shiites. If anything, the American presence has brought elections that are the primary tools for self-determination.

American era is not ending, and for the better.

Zahra Kamalfar Trapped In Moscow

2006-11-20T17:03:00.000-05:00

technorati tags: human rights iran

A one-time demonstrator against the extremist theocracy, she escaped from an Iranian prison when on a two-day furlough to visit her children. She ended up being buffeted from country to country, then spent months in a Moscow deportation motel before being ejected and left to float in the transit area of the airport. Now in imminent danger (possibly today, if the Russians cooperate) of being taken back to the Islamic Republic for the Mullah’s version of justice, Ms. Kamalfar speaks out in this dramatic video smuggled out of the airport to Pajamas Media.

(Hat tip: Solomonia and PJM.)

Mahmoud and Hooman

2006-10-01T02:57:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: Iran politics US

Hooman Majd, Ahmadinejad's interpreter, has published a brief diary of his experience during Ahmadinejad's recent trip to the UN in New York. It is an interesting read, but take it with some caution. Majd's story contains some unmarked sillinesses such as this:

"I had no intention of veering from the text, but it was both tantalizing and terrifying to know that a few extra words here and there would create headlines and headaches across the globe, if not land me either in Gitmo or Evin prison in Tehran."

Apart from the comparison being meaningless, the suggestion that he could end up in Guantanamo for veering from his text is just absurd. But it is an interesting read nonetheless.

Fighting Terror and Promoting Democracy

2006-09-29T13:05:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: politics terrorism human rights middle east Iran US

After depicting the unsatisfactory situation of the press freedom in his native Morocco, Jamai Aboubakr, a contributer to Washington Post's PostGlobal weblog, concludes with the following remarks:

"[T]he Arab world has seen some profound hypocrisy. While advocating democracy in the region, the Bush administration was relying on human right abusers to aid it in the fight against terrorism. These human rights abusers, heads of state, high ranking security apparatus officials and the like were and are the ones who are the most opposed to the flourishing of a truly free and independent press. It is hence the duty of the western, and more particularly, the American civil society, press, Human right NGO's to expose this situation. It is the only way to help tilting the balance in favour of genuine democratic forces in our countries."

While I see the merit in "exposing [Western] hypocricies," I believe it is by no means "the only way" or even a sufficient way of tilting the balance in favour of democratic forces.

We should note that fighting Islamic-fundamentalist terrorism is itself an important step in promoting democracy in the Arab and middle-eastern countries. The terrorists, whether in power (as in Iran) or on the loose (as in, say, Saudi Arabia), are one of the most important roadblocks in the social fabric of our countries to democracy. So, as they lose their actual and supposed power, the chances of victory for democratic forces get better.

Admittedly, this is a delicate matter and Western and especially American policies have not been without serious mistakes. However, as a critical operation for the protection of ordinary people's lives and also in the global effort to promote democracy, some compromises and deals with less-than-prefect players are necessary. What must be added to such deals is transparency in their terms and the overarching principle of promoting democracy with which they must be in line.

The last point is very important and should not be taken just as a rhetorical add-on to political speeches. There must be concrete items of any such deal that implement this program. For instance, when signing a deal with, say, the authoritarian government of Pakistan whose cooperation has been vital in combating the Taliban and Islamic extremists, the West and especially the US must put in concrete demands for the protection of people's lives and freedoms, changes to school curricula in order to educate the population on the principles of freedom and democracy, reforming the courts and rolling back the inhumane practices of the Sharia law, etc.

Simply put, fighting terror does not only happen in the battlefields and skirmishes. More importantly, it happens in classrooms and courts and other parts and layers of the society. It is the resolved intention of a partnership of the democratic forces of our societies and the free world (their governments, civil society, etc.) to open up our societies and to create the necessary institutions of democracy that is the only way of tilting the balance in favour of both parties.

Safia Amajan Killed by Taliban

2006-09-28T02:16:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: human rights Afghanistan

Should international forces still leave Afghanistan to their previous oppressors? No, no, no!

Take Action for Mousavi Khoini

2006-09-27T13:25:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: human rights Iran

Human Rights First starts a campaign for the imprisoned Iranian activist who is now being tortured.

"Virtual US-Iran Dialogue" -- Part Two

2006-09-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: Iran US media politics

Mr. Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist, is looking at the virtual dialogue between Iran and the US through indirect signals and is looking forward to suggestions from Iranian bloggers. This is the second and final post of my contribution to this debate. The first post can be found here.

What I will try to describe is the following: (i) a working, yet simple theory of the nature of the Iranian regime; (ii) the objectives that must be pursued by the American foreign policy; (iii) a practical strategic program in order to achieve these objectives. Parts (i) and (ii) have been posted before. In this post I will describe part (iii).

Foreign Policy Program: Dealing with Tyrannies

I hope it is by now clear what should be done in order to achieve the above objectives. Free countries of the world must devise strategic foreign policy plans that deprive the tyranny from the single most important goal of its dealings with the outside world, i.e., its survival through outside help while holding the power inside. Such a program need not be necessarily military, but it needs to be strict about the survival tricks of the tyranny's foreign policy. All such maneuvers must be denied.

Let's focus on the case at hand, namely, Iran's nuclear crisis. Obtaining nuclear weapons is a vital survival task for the regime in Tehran. There is no question of whether Iran is "really" pursuing nuclear weapons, since Iran is a plurality. It is the tyranny in Iran, not Iran as a nation, that is after nuclear weapons. In today's world the tyrannical regime of Iran can be given no guarantee by the outside world short of an indefinite security deal to be dissuaded from seeking nuclear weapons. This is precisely why the religious dictatorship in Iran has so far rejected all offers on the table for its "peaceful" nuclear program that would objectively deny it the possibility of obtaining nuclear weapons. A nuclear Iranian regime may still be toppled by boiling pressure from inside, as the Soviet bloc was, but we have no idea or working theory of how that hypothetical situation may be materialized in the foreseeable future of Iran. The regime in Tehran knows this very well. Thus, an American foreign policy seeking the spread of democracy around the globe must reject the notion of coexisting with a nuclear Islamic Republic before the fact.

Another outcome that the American foreign policy must avoid is making security and economic deals with the Iranian regime solely on the issue of nuclear crisis. This is exactly what the tyrannical regime is seeking for its survival. Instead, the US must actively seek to promote the chances of establishing a democracy in Iran. The US and her allies must deny the regime the chance to use their nuclear program as a playing card to win more feeding tubes for its decaying body. This can be done through a variety of tactical plans, such as banning the government officials' trips, targetted economic sanctions that affect the government's vital veins, and at the same time establishing direct aid to the people of Iran, for instance, through academic, economic, and social transactions with trusted individuals and organizations. The free world may also make economic agreements with the regime in a transparent fashion in return for opening up the political situation inside. This is the best way to give the fruits of a better economical and political situation to the people of Iran, and especially the forces of democratic change. However, the free world and the Iranian freedom activists must implement measures and programs to follow the adherence of the regime to its commitments under such agreements if they are to bear any pleasant fruit.

The strategy of the proposed American foreign policy program can be summed up as punishing the tyranny and rewarding the people.

David Ignatius' "Virtual US-Iran Dialogue" -- Part One

2006-09-25T23:18:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: Iran US media politics

Mr. Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist, is looking at the virtual dialogue between Iran and the US through indirect signals and is looking forward to suggestions from Iranian bloggers. The next two posts are my contribution to this debate.

What I will try to describe is the following: (i) a working, yet simple theory of the nature of the Iranian regime; (ii) the objectives that must be pursued by the American foreign policy; (iii) a practical strategic program in order to achieve these objectives. In this post I will describe parts (i) and (ii). Part (iii) is posted separately.

Iranian Regime: How Tyrannies Survive?

The Islamic Republic regime of Iran is a tyranny. For the purposes of this writing, the detail mechanisms of the IR tyrannical rule in Iran's conditions do not matter so much. They do matter, however, when one is devising specific or tactical policy plans, which is beyond the scope of this piece. Instead I limit myself to the general mechanisms of the tyrannical rule, which should be adequate for planning strategic policies.

A tyranny sustains its rule internally through a cycle of repression and misinformation to keep the society closed. This could go on indefinitely if people would or could still produce efficiently and live happily under tyrannical rule. However, a direct consequence of tyranny is that it cannot possibly employ the society's various internal capacities effectively. Against exponentially mounting economic and social hurdles, a tyranny invariably needs a mechanism through which it can supply the needs of the society from external sources without compromising the powers of its rulers. This is the most important function of a tyranny's foreign policy. It is also its Achilles' heel.

Foreign Policy Objectives: The Case for Democracy

What should the objectives of the foreign policy of a free country, or collectively, of the free world be toward a tyranny? This is a contentious issue. Understandably, any foreign policy does and must pursue the interests of the people for which the policy has been devised. I argue that the foreign policy that best serves the interests of the people of a free country is one that promotes and seeks the establishment of a democracy anywhere in the world. Most importantly, it must seek the replacement of tyrannies with democracies.

There are many moral and practical reasons for my argument. Instead of going through them in detail, I present one reason that is often mistakenly used in opposition: security. By its nature a free country's first task must be the protection of the lives and freedoms of its citizens. This raises the issue of security as an important foreign policy objective. However, lasting and reliable security can only be negotiated and acheived with democratic countries.

A tyranny may tactically accept or even initiate security agreements, but the purpose of such agreements is to supply its needs without compromising its tyrannical rule. So, it may soon calculate that the current security agreements are not enough or necessary for its survival, at which point it would see no need to honour them. A democracy, on the other hand, has no such incentive and even strong disagreements between democracies never create direct security problems for the parties. More importantly, democracies have every incentive to find a solution for their disagreements and continue to cooperate with each other on many levels seamlessly and often quietly even though they might vocally disagree on a few issues. For recent examples of the two cases one may look at the relationship between US and Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, on the one hand, and the US and France or Germany, on the other.

In short, a tyranny, even a friendly one, is always a security threat. A democracy, even one that disagrees with us, is never so.

Read the rest here.

IHRAG Alert: Mousavi Kho'ini Tortured

2006-09-24T23:33:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: human rights Iran

Khatami: Dialogue as Brutality

2006-09-24T05:05:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: human rights democracy Iran

Rusell Berman, a Stanford professor, brings to our attention a "small detail" about Khatami's speech at Harvard's Kennedy School for Government:

"Maybe if the relatives of Kazemi had not made into such a big political issue it could have been resolved a lot quicker and more to their liking."

As always, when it comes down to earth, Khatami sides not with the victims, but the murderers and tyrants. (Found via: Shiro-Khorshid-Forever.)

Shana Tova!

2006-09-23T05:41:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: holidays

Happy Rosh Hashana -- New Jewish Year!

The Pope's Danish Cartoons

2006-09-22T03:10:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: Islam

I was not going to write about the recent drama of Muslim sensitivities over the Pope's speech. I still am not. Waleed Aly, a director of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Australia, has said it all.

The Master Sophist

2006-09-21T13:41:00.000-04:00

"He is a master of counterpunch, deception, circumlocution. If this man represents the prevailing government opinion in Tehran, we are heading for a massive confrontation with Iran."

The Enemy of Liberty

2006-09-21T12:56:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: Iran US democracy terrorism

Now, what did Mr. Bush say that authorized the "sulfur-sensitive" Mr. Chavez to call him "the devil"? Here is what he said about me and my people:

"To the people of Iran: The United States respects you; we respect your country. We admire your rich history, your vibrant culture, and your many contributions to civilization. You deserve an opportunity to determine your own future, an economy that rewards your intelligence and your talents, and a society that allows you to fulfill your tremendous potential. The greatest obstacle to this future is that your rulers have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation's resources to fund terrorism, and fuel extremism, and pursue nuclear weapons. The United Nations has passed a clear resolution requiring that the regime in Tehran meet its international obligations. Iran must abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions. Despite what the regime tells you, we have no objection to Iran's pursuit of a truly peaceful nuclear power program. We're working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis. And as we do, we look to the day when you can live in freedom -- and America and Iran can be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace."

These words reflect the sentiments shared by many of my compatriats, though they may not express them as clearly as Bush does. The pursuit of liberty, prosperity, and peace has been the theme of my generation's lives. Many have been forced to take this pursuit abroad, where they have a realistic chance, in their lifetimes, of achieving these objectives: Every year 180,000 university-educated Iranians leave Iran in search of a better life in the free world. This is more than half the number entering universities annually.

If a Venezuelan military showman labels these remarks as those of the devil, at the same time aligning himself with those who oppress the millions of people whose lives and aspirations the same remarks describe, he must know that he is not only their and my enemy, but the enemy of humanity at large and freedom itself.

PS. And of course it is no surprise that he should start by waving a book by no other than Noam Chomsky.

The Madman Smells Sulfur

2006-09-21T02:35:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: politics US democracy terrorism

The Venzuelan President Hugo Chavez called the American President Bush "the devil" no fewer than eight times in his address to the UN General Assembly yesterday. He even smelled the "sulfur" one day after Bush's address. A showman of the first rank, Chavez seems to have taken his show to new heights. If he were not speaking in the capacity of a state leader, it would make no practical difference to take him simply as a madman. He is, alas, a leader of our world. Consistently with his fiery rhetoric, he has been forming an alliance with the rogue regimes of the world, from Iran to Belarus, which have little in common but their antagonism to the US and their illiberal social, political, and economic agenda.

This showy, populist agenda will never bring the world any good, as has been proven time and again by previous incarnations of the same ideas by the likes of Castro and Khomeini. One would be tempted to think that this new wave would also be doomed to defeat in the same way as the old wave. But something has changed in the mean time: we live in a new era of global terrorism, which imposes a new, dangerous dynamic on the world. As a result, countering the unholy alliance between these populist governments needs all the resources that the free, individual people of the world can afford. The stakes are very high: if a critical mass of people convert to these populists' ideas, we will all be living in a new dark age of fear and tyranny.

So, we must find a way to stop these ideas from propagating, and to convince our fellow citizens not to give in to their hypnotic hold on their brains.

Freedom and Power

2006-09-19T01:35:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: philosophy politics economy

It is common, especially in leftist literature, to confuse the meaning of freedom and power. If the words freedom and power are to have a separate meaning of their own at all, at most only one of the following two statements can be correct:

1. Not being free implies not having power;
2. Not having power implies not being free.

This is just a matter of logic; otherwise, freedom and power would be identical concepts. The confusion is caused by assuming that the second statement is correct where it is not. The first statement, however, is correct by any reasonable definition of power: to have the power to do something, one first needs to be free to do it.

Consider a case where one is in principle free to do something but does not have the physical, mental, or economic power to do it. This situation does not violate the existence of the original freedom. In fact, so far as the basic freedoms of doing things are not violated, one can, over time, acquire the necessary power. This is the manifestation of the accumulative nature of power, whether in the life of one individual or the history of the generations in a society.

Now consider the converse situation where one has the power to do something, but is prohibited by law or other people from doing it. This could mean that one has only the physical, mental or economic power, but not the power in its full sense. Power is a compound quality because tasks to which power applies are compound entities. If I am able to talk, but not able to listen, I am not able to converse. If I am able to lift, but not able to walk, I do not have the power to move objects. And so on. In this regard, the most basic ability to do anything is, not to be prohibited; that is, to be free.

In short, freedom is the necessary condition for power, not vice versa: it is not sufficient.

This discussion rejects at once the notion, put forward frequently and vocally, that "a person who does not have enough money, has already lost his freedom of choice."

Politics, Names, and Meaning

2006-09-18T02:30:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: politics history Iran US

Learning the labels of the political spectrum is one of the first steps of political awareness. The primary function of these labels is to distinguish between alternative and/or opposing factions and their ideas. But, politics is also an emotional affair and, unfortunately, more often than not such labels become code words for expressing these emotions, ranging from sympathy to anger and outrage. Devoid of their informative content, they take a separate life of their own, even ending up representing groups and ideas that are diametrically opposed to their literal and historical meaning.

One example is provided by what is today known in the US as "Liberal." Historically, the Liberal Party of England grew out of the British Whig Party. They stood for constitutinal power, the rule of law and limited governmental powers, free market, free trade, etc. The consistent framework for these ideas is a system of minimum government based on "third-party effects" and "externalities". The main theme of such a program is individual liberty. However, the debate over freedom was muddled by Marxist ideas of economic freedom (mistaken for economic power), and consequently the label "Liberal" was in effect hijacked by leftists and government-action advocates in the US. Today, the American Liberals often stand for the sort of politics that is the opposite of what the label should mean.

As a result of this situation the true liberals have become homeless. Some of them try to go by the name, Libertarian. Others have been content to give and receive support from the other political parties who happen to include their concerns in their agenda. Depending on the subject (social, economic, etc.) both Democrats (US Liberals) or Republicans (US Conservatives) have played that role. (I have myself decided to stay the course and see how far I can go with the old label.)

Another example of this semantic detachment is the common mistaken perception of "Conservativism." In its proper meaning, conservatism must be the label for a political program based on conserving the past or current state of the society and/or system of government. As such, the practice of conservatism is without firm principles of an independent system of thought. Also, one would expect that its ideas and policies must be a function of locality and history. But, in today's politics, Conservativism seems to stand for simply the opposite of Liberalism. So the above confusion about the latter is projected to a similar confusion about the former.

Such misconceptions have also led to a paradoxical mapping between the political spectra of different countries. For instance, a commonplace mistake is to identify the labels of political groups in the US, a free society with a democratic government, with those of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a repressive and theocratic establishment. I have myself been guilty of thinking in terms of this mapping for a short time. As a result, we hear casual commentors as well as serious analysts talk about the "similarities" of Conservatives in the US and in Iran. Ahmadinejad is labeled a neo-con, and Khatami a Liberal.

Without reference to the political systems of these countries such statements are hardly different from gibberish. Conservatives in Iran aim at maintaining the traditional, pre-modern, and religious structure of the society and the government, whereas the Conservatives of the US strive to conserve a system which has been conceived as a democracy from day one. As such, they could not be any more different than tyranny and freedom. Such mappings and analogies stretch the meanings of the names so thin there remains barely any meaningful concepts in terms of which a coherent and rational thought could be formed or expressed.

Today is Darfur's

2006-09-17T08:28:00.000-04:00

Islam, Freedom, Democracy

2006-09-15T04:39:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: Islam human rights

For all the talk and thought that goes into this topic, the answer is very simple: Islam is not compatible with freedom, nor it is with democracy. We need not set up a complex decontruction scheme or a hermeneutic reading of religion to find the asnwer. The answer sits simply in Qur'an, the foundation of whatever may be ever called Islam. In the fourth chapter (Surah) of the book, titled "Women" (al-Nesa') lie some of the most foundational rulings of Islam regarding freedom of opinion, role of women, etc. Verses 88 and 89 read

What is the matter with you, then, that you have become two parties about the hypocrites, while Allah has made them return (to unbelief) for what they have earned? Do you wish to guide him whom Allah has caused to err? And whomsoever Allah causes to err, you shall by no means find a way for him. [4:88]
They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper. [4:89]

Here, Qur'an lays the basis for killing whomever comes to the conclusion that he does not want to be a Muslim anymore--the apostates. They are deemed "hypocrites" who are misguided by no other than Allah (God) himself. Once they choose to act on their personal belief, they must be killed wherever they are found. This ruling has been used over and over again in the history of Islamic societies to kill those who chose differently from not just their fellows, but their parents and grandparents. The same law applies equally forcefully to those who have converted to Islam. There is no way back! In recent history (1988) Ayatollah Khomeini infamously issued an edict (fatwa) to kill Salmun Rushdie, the Indian-Muslim-born British writer, deeming him an apostate for his book, The Satanic Verses. The fatwa also included "all those involved in its publication who are aware of its content," resulting in the death of the Japanese publisher of the book and injuries to a few others.

Now, what is freedom, if not to change one's mind? And what is democracy without the chance to choose differently? Islam is neither free, nor democratic, if for the sole reason that apostates must be, and are killed.

The Community of Democracies

2006-09-14T02:54:00.000-04:00

Two Clips of Two Sides

2006-09-14T01:58:00.000-04:00

1. Bush head to head with Matt Lauer over at LGF;
2. A peek at the propaganda machine that is IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, the sole TV broadcaster in Iran) on whose Channel 2 a number of conspiracists, including the former head of the Islamic Center in Washington DC, go at 9/11.

Path to 911 and United 93

2006-09-12T02:28:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: US terrorism 9-11 movies

The truth is simple. The two movies made this year on what truly happened on the way to 9/11 attacks do a good job on conveying the simple truth: avowed enemies of freedom managed to plan, prepare, and execute attacks on the leading nation of the free world on a scale that no ordinary citizen of the world would accept as real before they actually took place.

This point is made boldly clear in The Path to 911, the ABC-commisioned docudrama. It is particularly clear about the failure of the (limited) security-based foreign policy that does not see the connection between security and the state of foreign governments. It also makes clear the falsehood of the theories that ignore the Islamic terrorists' declared objectives and instead assign, directly or indirectly, the burden of guilt for the terror crisis to those who stand for freedom.

The same point is made even more clearly in the feature movie, United 93. Some passengers of the hijacked UA93 flight decide to take on the terrorists after learning through their phone comunications that there have been other hijacked planes flown into the WTC and the Pentagon. There is, however, a passenger who vocally opposes such plans. He first argues that they should not interfere with the hijackers in the hope that they would land safely somewhere. But even after the news about other hijacked planes he continues, completely irrationally, to oppose others. Eventually, he even tries to alert the terrorists on the other passengers' plan to make a run. He is quickly silenced. "Let's roll," one of the passengers demands, and roll they do. As a result of their correct understanding and courageous action, United 93 crashed in Shanksville, PA. Not in the Capitol, DC.

When the World Changed -- Or Did It?

2006-09-11T03:10:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: US Islam 9-11

September 11, 2001.

"When the world changed," the common wisdom goes. In a way, this is true. Many had not anticipated the sheer magnitude of the atrocious attacks of 9/11. Before there was a false feeling of security, magnified by the collapse of the Soviet bloc ten years back. Some had declared "the end of history." All those theories and perceptions must disappear with the WTC twin towers.

There emerged a new theory of how to deal with the rising threat of Islamic terrorism. It was adopted to a large extent, after the 9/11 attacks, by the Bush administration in the US and Tony Blair in the UK. In essence, it states that the reason behind the terror attacks is the fascist ideology adopted by the terrorists. It follows that the West must confront the terrorists as close to their havens as possible. Yet, the old theory is still around. In short, it states the following: the terrorists attack the West since they are grieved by Western policies. For its internal consistency, it also proposes that what goes on in under their rule is a matter of culture, and thus should not be a basis for the West's foreign policy. A plethora of conspiracy theories surround these ideas, ranging from "oil conspiracies" to "world domination conspiracies." Interestingly, this is also what terrorists say by and large, so the adherents of this theory have in effect surrenderd to the terrorist logic. Today, there is a fierce battle of ideas between these two theories, on different levels of our social and political lives.

The old theory was thoroughly discredited by the events of 9/11--or one would think it should have. Many still stick to their falsified ideas. Some conspiracy-theorists among them even think that 9/11 itself was the working of the US government.

This is an imminent danger to the West as we know it today. The same mode of thinking gave in to the 9/11 attacks. To prevent a second, deadlier 9/11 and in order to survive the lethal challenge of Islamofascist terrorism, the free world must completely discard its old, falsified theories.

Global Day for Darfur

2006-09-08T01:45:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: human rights darfur

Estimates of those killed in the conflict in Darfur, Sudan, range from 180,000 to 400,000, and at least two million people have been forced to flee their homes. 7000 African Union forces have been deployed in an effort to protect the people in Darfur, an area the size of France, but they lack adequate financial and human resources for a successful mission. The Sudanese government has rejected both African Union peacekeepers and UN soldiers in Darfur. Meanwhile a Sudanese newspaper editor has been kidnapped and behaded by hardline Islamic groups (link via LGF). Sudan was the breeding ground for al-Qaeda in the 1990s.

Maybe you didn't know. But now, you know! So, watch for Sudan, and take action for it.

Cox and Forkum

2006-09-08T01:36:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran

Charm Offensive

Purging 101

Breach

2006-09-07T04:14:00.000-04:00

The little bug was lying sideways on the floor, struggling against the trembling train to set itself up again. With three legs scratching the ground and the other three grabbing the air, it had little chance of success from where I stood. The passengers were completely oblivious to its pain. As they came in or stepped out at station after station the bug came many times close to feeling the crush of their soles. It was a lucky bug, I thought. The small woman in front of me, dressed elegantly in a suit and hanging on to her bag, was trying to keep her balance without touching the bars. Her feet moved in jerks as the train shook on the bumps and turns of the railroad. But she did not kill the bug. The big woman did.

Soon the bug was reduced to a small, dark spot on the floor, indistinguishable from the dirty smudge of the shoes. Its legs bent inward and remained still. I kept watching.

There is no Universal Declaration of Bug Rights, whose first declared rights are "the right to life, liberty and security of person." If there were one, I, the knowing and silent observer, would be in breach of it.

Khatami Must Be Denied

2006-09-06T02:15:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: US iran democracy

Iran's former "moderate" president, Mohammad Khatami, has been invited by the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University to deliver a speech on the "Ethics of Tolerance in the Age of Violence." He was issued a visa by the State Department, which is reportedly also providing him with security services. At the same time Governor Mitt Romney has ordered all Massachusetts state agencies to decline such support if asked. (Thanks LGF for the link.) Luboš Motl, a physics professor at Harvard provides a good background for the event.

The whole circus is a shame for KSG, Harvard University, and the State Department. Khatami was not and is still not a "moderate" in the sense people in the West would wishfully like to think. If anybody still thinks of him in such terms, he must have been in a very deep sleep in the past 6 years. Here is what he realy is and how he should be treated:

Khatami was elected in a landslide vote in 1997 largely by the youth, women, and other sections of the Iranian society who had been marginalized by the Islamic republic during the Iran-Iraq war and the following eight years. He did talk about tolerance, the rule of law, and democracy in his campaign, and most of the people who elected him thought he meant those in their plain meaning that everybody understands without much philosophizing. This is when he was named a "moderate" and his supporters, "reformist." But when the time eventually came to face the violent, but honest opponents of such concepts (in their true "Western" meaning), he chose to act differently. "The preservation of the system" was his most-frequently expressed concern throughout all the suffering endured by the students, ordinary men and women, and even his own friends and close staff, who had elected him as a "moderate" and given him the mandate of "reform." He did bemoan often that he had no real power to achieve his "reformist" objectives, but are we to believe that he did not even have the power to resign from that "care-taker" position, as he dubbed his presidency of the Islamic republic? This is what he promised to do four years ago, and then still managed not to do, because he felt it would weaken "the system."

So, the logical conclusion is that Khatami, in his own words, is not a moderate reformist, but a "care-taker preserver of the system." As such, he is also a culprit in the brutal attacks of the paramilitary vigilantes to the student dorms in July 1999, whose victims were later tried and sentenced to long terms in jail, where one recently died under duress. Khatami's "tolerance" was for murderers, his "rule of law" was of the law of Sharia, and his "democracy" was conditioned to be Islamic and non-secular. And now he is coming to the US to propogate those same discredited ideas that serve no purpose but to "preserve the system" of the Islamic republic and its crimes.

For all this, he must be denied such an opportunity. If KSG and Harvard cannot see into that and if the State Department is not up to that task, then those who understand his true nature must deny him the chance by asking him to answer for all his hollow words and non-existent actions.

P.S. Praise goes to the New York Sun editorial for their clarity.

Intellectual Connivance

2006-09-01T07:27:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: philosophy politics

Ideas are arguably the most powerful tool humans have. This statement is self-referring, as it is itself an idea. It is very broad and covers many facets of our lives; from involuntary impulses that cause us to act in certain ways in response to certain stimuli, to grand decisions we make over a prolonged period of time and after painstaking scrutiny of the situation at hand. Moral statements are also ideas, indeed theories, that seek to explain certain phenomena and provide us with solutions to problems that arise in those phenomena.

This picture suggests that we must feel responsible for our share of processing ideas that we perform even through our everyday, mundane, conversations with family and friends. This is true, even though we lack a satisfactory system of defining and exacting that responsiblity in a way that could be relied on in the public sphere, say, in courts. Indeed, such exacting may well be impossible without jeopardizing personal freedoms, and thus must be avoided in a free society. However, in our own personal conscience, we must be aware of this responsiblity.

There is one case of this responsibilty, for which, I believe, the liberal man is compelled to make a distinction in that, even though the responsibility may not be determined in a socially acceptable fashion, he must strive to make it clear in his own personal circle. It is when a person or a group of people take sides with an idea whose clear and direct effect is to destroy the basic civil liberties and, most of the time, indeed the very livelihood of a group of people who are themselves not involved in any demonstrable illegal or immoral activity. A case in point is the advocacy in some layers of young Iranian diaspora for the evil remarks of the President of Iran's Islamic Republic, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, regarding the Holocaust and his attitude towards Western democracies. Those who advocate these ideas, even if they profess not to be supporters of Ahmadinejad, are accomplices in the intellectual act of spreading and promoting such evil ideas, and turning them into lasting memes.

In the political arena, this situation is usually colored as black and white by politicians who tend to oversimplify the situation in order to maintain the support of their constituency or to make new recruits to their camp. Although this practice is inadequate and in cases of error simply perilous, there is a seed of truth in it. That is, such situations are usually so grave that it pays to gather the support of as many people as possible by explaining to them, even in oversimplified terms, what is at stake. This would be justified even if it alienates a minority who would see the complexity of the situation and be put off by such oversimplification. It is an unfortunate irony of life that, in these occasions the less sophisticated (who constitute a larger portion of most societies) would see and understand the situation better than the more sophisticated and analytic minds who, nevertheless, lack the sharp imagination necessary to go beyond the surface of the political game.

I believe it is justified to use such an oversimplification once we have demonstrated the case as one of such gravity to make little difference to include the more complicated dynamics. That is to say, this oversimplification is a good first approximation to the complete understanding of the problem and its solution. The first step of an intellectual assessment of such cases is indeed an answer to the ovesimplified question, are you with us or against us? This answer will set apart two moral paths. The liberal man must be clear about the one he must take, and denounce the intellectual connivance of those who are not.

What's in a "Regret"?

2006-08-31T06:05:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: politics middle east

We hear that Nasrallah claims they would not have abducted two Israeli soldiers (and killed eight more) had they known it would start a war. That's a nice gesture, one that is sure to be used by an even larger number of people now to state that it was actually all Israel's fault to start a war that Hezbollah did not want. But then if Nasrallah truly regrets the well-planned kidnapping operation, perhaps Hezbollah is going to release the soldiers, now that it is certain their abduction did start a war? No, they are not! So, what's in Nasrallah's "regret"? Wishful reporting is the answer.

All Problems Are Existential

2006-08-29T15:31:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: philosophy evolution

I am putting forward a bold conjecture that, all problems are ultimately existential. By problems, I mean those situations that need resolution in terms of understanding or explanation. My argument is that, all such resolutions have evolutionary effects. Good resolutions are advantageous and bad ones disadvantageous. (This last sentence is really just a definition.) A small problem might have a minuscule evolutionary effect, but the fact that it has even a tiny bit is enough for it to be considered existential when acting over the large time scales on which evolution is felt. A posteriori, one can also argue that, if the resolution of a problem had no evolutionary effect whatsoever, there would be no reason to spend our time and resources on it. In other words, those who do spend their resources on such problems are at a disadvantage and must have been (or will be) deselected by evolution against others who don't.

The "Human Rights Watch" Watch

2006-08-28T15:46:00.000-04:00

The Harvard Law Professor, Alan Dershowitz, who has been called "the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer" and one of its "most distinguished defenders of individual rights," and "the best-known criminal lawyer in the world," considers one of the toughest questions of all, both moral and practical.

Befuddled Chomsky

2006-08-28T03:46:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: politics

On August 16, 2006 Akbar Ganji met for the second time with Noam Chomsky at MIT in Boston. Though it is a very strange choice of person to meet given that Ganji's writings in recent years have been laced with names, such as de Tocqueville and Popper, who are the intellectual antidote of whatever Chomsky says and stands for, the meeting may not have been comepletely without benefit. Here is my selective translation of parts of their dialogue in Persian, since I could not find an English source to quote:

Ganji: The picture you have of the government in the US is one that is completely non-democratic [...]
Chomsky: [...] Polls are freely available, but not in the media. [...] There is an open society. I repeat that the US is the freest society of the world. [...] You face a paradox: on the one hand there is an open and free society, and on the other people are deprived of information. [...]
Ganji: I don't think I got my answer. On the one hand, you say that the US is the freest country of the world, and on the other that, there is a vast public dissatisfaction. I ask why this dissatisfaction does not turn into a social movement? If you ask me why public dissatisfaction is not seen in Iran, I answer that one of the important reasons is that the regime strongly suppresses any social activity by the dissatisfied. The regime claims that the NGOs pursue a velvet revolution. The bus drivers' gatherings were brutally suppressed and many were arrested. Women's gathering in Tehran was severly suppressed. Now, even the kind of student gatherings that existed before Khatami are banned. But you say that the US is the freest country of the world, so what is keeping the people of the US from expressing their views or peacefully demonstrating?
Chomsky: When I say that we have the freest socity in the world, I mean that over the years many popular movements have succeeded. [...] It took over a century for the capitalists in the US and Britain to relaize that they cannot block people's will through violent means. In both countries, which are the freest countries of the world, they have taken on new ways of suppression [...] like controlling the media. When you turn on the TV you see a superficial life. [...]

I just hope that Ganji sees that Chomsky is ultimately unable to form even a single rational thought on the question he is asking. The simplest consequence of Chomsky's claim that the media are controlled in the US and Britain would be that they are not free societies at all, let alone the freest in the world. But he chooses the way of insanity and claims both. In contrast, Ganji's first-hand experience of the tyranny in Iran has shown him what real oppression is and how it is implemented in reality. I hope he sees the true message of his meeting with Chomsky: never listen to him again!

Iran Exhibits Anti-Jewish Art

2006-08-26T04:45:00.000-04:00

Exchanges of Violence

2006-08-26T04:31:00.000-04:00

Jim Lederman gives us a new perspective on the determining role of free markets for a nation at war:

In the past, when there had been strict market and foreign exchange controls and a war had broken out, the black market in dollars had sprung to life and the stock market had suffered. Savings were wiped out overnight. This time, when the war broke out, as a result of the economic reforms, Israel had virtually no exchange controls in place. [...] By the end of the war, the stock market was only two percent below its pre-war level, and the shekel had recovered almost completely. That was a major key to maintaining national morale. One of the keys to this optimism was the assessment that had been made, not by naturally-supportive Jews, but by foreign investors taking a cold look at the IASB-based bottom lines of companies and government accounts. Among the most important assessments published during the war were those of the ratings companies that left their pre-war ratings untouched.

Muslim Sisters Need Our Help

2006-08-26T02:10:00.000-04:00

Pamela Bone writes persuasively. Thanks to her for that!

... the least we can do is let the brave Muslim women who are pushing for reforms know they have our support when they want it.

Most of us 1970s feminists are grandmothers now. Lifelong socialist and humanist that I am, if fighting to prevent the possibility that my granddaughters - our granddaughters - will one day be forced to wear a burka makes me right-wing, then right-wing is the label I'll have to wear.

Human Rights and Economy

2006-08-25T03:00:00.001-04:00

technorati tags: economy human rights health care canada

A critical reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) reveals that there are two kinds of rights discussed there:

Basic Rights: These are the rights that are naturally existent. There is no need to provide them in order to ensure them; the society only needs to ensure that they are not taken away. In many ways these rights are the most fundamental of all human rights. The rights to various freedoms fall in this category. Article 1 of UDHR declares, "All human beings are born free...," so obviously there is no need to provide freedom for human beings; they already have it. The institutions that are needed to ensure the protection of basic rights are mainly political in nature. They do not need to engage in economic activities directly; their connection to the economy is made through the legal framework they require. For instance economic freedom in making mutually voluntary transactions that do not involve demonstrable third-party effects, is itself a freedom to be protected under UDHR's first article. In order to do so, the law has to ban its violationsl. The ban affects the economy by setting the framework of legitimate economic activities. But the law does not require any direct intervention in the economy and its detailed processes. Another general feature of basic rights is that they are easy to define and understand. This is of course because they are essentially related to individual life. It is easy to understand what freedom is, even though it is usually hard to convince or require people to respect it.

Provisional Rights: These are the rights that need to be provided. These are usually important qualities of life that we would like to see or have in the society. Article 23(1) of UDHR declares: "Everyone has the right to work, ..., and to protection against unemployment." The first part still spells out a basic right, and is basically equivalent to the right to freedom to work; that is, no one should be allowed to prevent someone else from working. But a protection against unemployment is not naturally existent, and the society needs to provide it in some way. Such rights have a much closer connection with the economy. Often those who call for their provision also call for the government to provide and guarantee them by directly engaging in economic activities. Many democratic governments run sectors of the economy that they consider of importance in providing such negative rights, such as the health care and education, but also whole industries, such as steel in Britain and telephone companies in France. In contrast with the primary rights, a general feature of the provisional rights is that they are not easy to define or understand, let alone agree on. This arises because these are related to social life, and thus include its complexities in their character. That is also why providing them is not a straightforward matter of mandating their provision.

Just by the nature of these two categories of recognized rights, there arises a natural order. It is by no means certain that economic activities of governments, though aimed at providing the provisional rights, actually do so. However, the government guarantees to punish violations of basic rights are often very effective. Also, they do not hinder the provision of other rights, while the opposite is often not true. On the social aspect, it has been the collective human experience that the systematic government violations of basic rights justified by providing other "rights" have had very serious consequences. Even if it were guaranteed, the matter basically would come down to the question, whether the society will benefit as a whole by losing some or all of its freedoms in order to obtain some social security. The answer from the history of the alternative answers to this question weighs in favor of a firm "no!" This wisdom was beautifully put together more than two hundred fifty years ago by Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

On these considerations, the economic role of the government in providing the recognized rights of citizens should be subject to the protection of basic rights from the outset. If a proposed method of providing health care, for instance, violates basic rights of people to their freedoms, including the freedom of deciding whether to go ahead or not with a mutually voluntary transaction, it should be discarded. This qualification will then immediately reject a law that, say, bans private clinics that work outside the government's health care system, quite seperately from its adverse practical effects.

Freedom as the Ultimate Public Good

2006-08-24T02:22:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: human rights economy

Often it is argued that we need to abandon or limit some freedoms in order to secure a public good. It is argued that to achieve a publicly desirable end, it is necessary for all or a great many of the members of the society to effectively limit their choices to one of an argued nature, so that it becomes economical and be commonly used and of benefit to all.

Whereas such argumentation is not necessarily false and does indeed justify some central-planning measures it must be born in mind that it has very limited applicability. The main reason for this limited applicability is that, freedom itself is the ultimate public good. (Here it is assumed that the right to life, which is the source of all other rights, is already universally protected.) In many instances freedom of a particular kind cannot be a subject of competition since it won't be favored on an individual basis. If anyone were asked whether a particular group or individual should have certain rights, say, freedom of expressing an unpopular view, on a narrow and self-centered premise, a mojority is likely to respond negatively. Yet everyone would love to be free. Thus, freedom needs to be protected through political means for all to benefit. If an alleged public good is to be enforced through political means, it must be only to such an extent that it does not jeopardize the ultimate public good, freedom.

In view of the nature of freedom as a public good of ultimate value all other public goods that may be enforced at the expense of limiting freedoms of individuals must be politically temporary and subject to constant revision and discussion, which is, interestingly, only possible if we do our best to preserve the freedoms that guarantee the very existence and also the rationality of such discussions.

Dealing with Tyrannies

2006-08-23T02:31:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: politics iran human rights

Observing a self-imposed deadline, 10 days before the one set by the UN Security Council resolution 1696, today Iran handed over its response to the package of incentives offered by the group of 5+1, five permanent members of the Council and Germany. It may sound too soon to voice an opinion about the exact minutae of Iran's response; but, from the general attitude of Iranian officials, and the fact that there is no straight yes/no answer from Iran (it covers 21 pages), it is safe to say that Iran has in fact rejected the central demand of the UN Security Council, that is, abandoning the process of enriching uranium on its soil.

Iran's response seems to have been crafted in such a way to cause maximum disunity among the 5+1. First there are mixed signals sent by the regime: the rhetoric before the "official" response was extremely negative. Khamenei, the supreme leader, strongly rejected the offer, saying, "[t]he Islamic Republic of Iran has made its own decision and in the nuclear case, God willing, with patience and power, will continue its path." However, in the announcement of the response, Ali Larijani, Iran's top negotiator, shifted the focus of Iran's response to being "constructive" and the "resumption of talks," saying, "Iran is prepared to hold serious talks from August 23." The 10-day breathing period before the Council's deadline is meant to serve as enough time for these mixed signals to have their effect. This is a risky move, since the same time may be used for defusing this strategy. But it seems that Iran's regime has calculated, with China and Russia's hesitations, this is a move worth the risks.

What seems to have been sadly forgotten in all this, is the issue of human rights and the nature of the regime in Iran. It is simple to see the appalling state of human rights in Iran. Just on August 17, Iran's top prosecutor announced that Ramin Jahanbegloo, a prominent intellectual and philosopher who was arrested in April, has "confessed to plotting a velvet revolution" and that his confession may be aired on the state TV.

The Iranian regime is playing a subtle game. But their objective is simple: to survive. Being a tyrannical system, the country cannot sustain itself from within, so the regime needs outside help. Their nuclear ambitions serve to solicit this help at the price of stability in the region. However, in the deal that should be struck to this end, they also serve to divert the focus away from the human rights issues and to secure their position inside, thus guaranteeing their survival.

This is a disaster for the people of Iran, who will continue to suffer as a result. In the long run it is also a bad deal for the rest of the world. As proven time and again in recent history, tyrannical regimes cannot be trusted in their deals, since the reason they enter into these deals is only to extend their existence. Deals struck with tyrants are always bad deals all around. The only way forward is to deal with them decisively and in unison, on a single clear principle: they shall receive help from outside only when they respect the rights of their own citizens.

UPDATE: Matthew B. Stannard of the San Fransisco Chronicle argues similarly that, "Experts see Tehran using tactic as way of sustaining program".

Hezbollah Is Not Loved; It Is Feared

2006-08-22T03:51:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: politics middle east

It is heard quite often these days that since Hezbollah spends some of the money it receives from Iran for constructing schools and hospoitals, and because it has fought the Israeli army, it is loved by the Shiites in the south as well as the rest of the people of Lebonan.

As much as this line of thinking is apealing, it is however irrational and completely false.

It is irrational because it conflates two opposite concepts: a dictatorial regime would have to spend some money for the welfare of its subjects so that it is not hated to the extent that would end it. What these subjects feel is not love, but a controlled hate. On a more intimate scale, a dictatorial father, for instance, evokes two sorts of feelings in his children: a natural love for father; and fear and frustration with his dictatorial ways. Hezbollah cannot be attributed such an intimiate relationship with the ordinary people of Lebonan. In the absence of a natural (biological) feeling of love, all that remains is just the feeling of fear and controlled hate.

This is not just a philosophical point. In the tangible world, one should not look hard to find many examples. The regime in Iran also builds schools and hospitals (and much more) and fights aggressors to the land, because it has to. All such regimes do is to keep their population content to the extent that they survive. In fact, more often than not, a library built by them is to be used for, say, propaganda purposes. The statements about Hezbollah being an indigenous force is also of no relevance. Most tyrants are.

The truth of the statement, on the other hand, can be tested this way: let Hezbollah put down their arms; if they are loved, they would be able to command their current power without resorting to the power of their guns. But the answer to the test is known: Hezbollah rejects being disarmed, since it feels threatened. The threat is not from Israel, which withdrew from Lebonan completely in 2000, but from the power of other ideas in the Lebanese political scene, if they are to freely and peacefully compete with those of Hezbollah's. And Hezbollah knows this better than most of us do. Were they to lose their guns and compete freely in the marketplace of ideas, they would also lose their position of power sooner that it might now seem.

UPDATE: arthemis has directed me to an article by Mona Fayyad, a Lebanese professor, 'To Be a Shi'ite Now…', which gives evidence for the arguments put forward above.

Tarek Heggy on the Lebanese Crisis

2006-08-21T16:25:00.000-04:00

Hard-Talked Susan Sarandon

2006-08-21T13:42:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: US media politics

Susan Sarandon, the Oscar-winning actress, was on BBC's Hardtalk Extra on Friday, talking about ... well, all sorts of things. It is amusing to see what a mix runs through the brain of the "liberal" stars of Hollywood who have brought, for the most part, shame to the word "liberal".

At one point, talking about the "generations of youth" now and in the past, she said, and I paraphrase, that the youth now are less optimistic because they do not see the results of their action as soon as her generation did in the '70s. Morevoer, she thought, the corporate culture and power has increased since then. But she remained hopeful that because of the advent of the internet and cell phones and other means of fast communication and a new tech-savvy generation of youth, it would be countered. For this she pointed out the anti-WTO protests of 1999 in Seattle. When asked what she thinks of the failure of her friends to effect any change recently, she said that was because

the other side conrols the media, and the house, and the senate, ... you lose everything when you lose the press.

These remarks left me wondering:

How could the hope to battle "corporate structure" in Sarandon's view remain in the use of technologies such as cell phone and the internet, which have been made mainstream themselves by "corporate structures" like T-Mobile and AOL?
How could Sarandon think they have lost the press when, for instance, the New York Times, one of the world's most widely read newspapers, is basically a conduit for her kind of ideas, and Sarandon herself appears on BBC World, one of the most widely viewed news channels of the world?
How could Sarandon think they have lost because they have no control over the house and the senate? "Losing" in this case is itself defined as "losing the control over the house and the senate." An effect cannot be its own cause.

The actual reason Sarandon and her friends (or anyone for that matter) have lost the battle of ideas is that their thinking is irrational. They will continue to lose over the long run as long as they remain that way.

Defusing the Cover of Conflict

2006-08-18T06:47:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran democracy media

In two different articles, the New York Times considers the effects of the hike in tensions between Iran and Europe and the US. What has sparked these new articles appears to be that "[u]nder cover of the international furor over its nuclear activities and its support for Hezbollah, Iran is trying to silence its most prominent human-rights activist, and, by extension, all of the Iranians who speak for fundamental rights." It is argued that "the regime's moves against government critics have recently intensified." Recent examples include the banning of Shirin Ebadi's Center for Defense of Human Rights and the death of Akbar Mohammadi, a student activist, in Evin prison in Tehran.

In the second article, Lionel Beehner gives a detailed account of the current dominant view in the intellectual circles of the West about the human rights situation in Iran and the role the West can and should play. On "Why is Iran's human rights situation worsening?" he quotes Bill Samii of Radio Free Europe: "Because of Ahmadinejad's conservative stance on cultural issues and embrace of strict Islamic law." He then informs us that Ghaemi and Ebadi had opined, in a February 2005 New York Times op-ed,

[T]he threat of foreign military intervention will provide a powerful excuse for authoritarian elements to uproot [human rights organizations] and put an end to their growth... .

Moreover, he reports that "experts say" Europe and the US have "not much" leverage on human rights in Iran, and that

[T]he best U.S. policy should be, like the doctor's oath, "to do no harm."

It is clear that by "harm" it is meant any challenge to the regime in Tehran since it gives, the theory goes, the regime a "cover" to increase its crackdown on human rights activists. But does this theory stand the test of reason? The short answer is, no!

First, the abuses of human rights in Iran and the pressure on its activists have not increased; they just have become more official. We cannot forget that many such activists were murdered under the rule of the past two "moderate" presidents, many more were jailed and tortuted, and still more beaten and threatened to silence during the same time. The fashionable story these days that Ahmadinejad's ascent to presidency has had a dramatic effect on worsening this situation is but a false, and at best useless, representation of the facts.

Then, let us ask this simple question: if, according to this theory, the conclusion is that we shall not challenge the regime so we do not give it a "cover," then what is the purpose of even bothering with the issue of human rights inside the country? By standing by and doing nothing, we defeat the purpose of concerning ourselves with human rights in Iran in the first place. Simply put, this is an irrational conclusion.

The truth is, the claimed "cover" is not provided only by a confrontation, but also by detaching the resolution of the conflict from the regime's human rights record. Such a conflict gives the regime two birds with one stone: they use it to justify their grip on power in the face of an "external enemy" while they continue to abuse the rights of their citizens at no cost. The second part is what has to be changed: the regime shall not only be challenged, but any possible resolution of the ensuing conflict must be tied to improvements in its human rights record.

It is not difficult to see that this provides the West with a huge leverage on human rights in a tyrannical regime, contrary to what "experts" say. A tyrannical regime cannot rely on the creativity of its citizens for its survival, for it cannot trust them, and for they are not given the freedom necessary for such creativity. So it inevitably has to convince outsiders to help it directly or indirectly on financial and economic issues. By levying a cost on the regime for abusing the rights of its citizens, it will not only face an unsolvable existential dilemma, but also human rights activists will be further boldened in their just demands. The regime is thus deprived of both those birds it would get for free otherwise.

It is only in this simple way that the "cover of conflict" is defused. But at the moment it appears, sadly, that understanding, let alone demanding, this simple policy requires a grasp of reality and an intellectual honesty beyond what the "experts" can afford.

Bias and Control on Media

2006-08-17T18:25:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran media

In a brilliant and short article, Ahmad Zeidabadi writes

In the first few days of war Shargh reported the entry of the Israeli army into southern Lebonan. This simple piece of news angered [state-owned] Keyhan so much that it warned, and threatened, Shargh against publishing any news that would seem to portray Hezbollah as weak. From then on, all the news in the Iranian media of the war became completely one-sided, and the whole business turned into a part of the propaganda machine of the Islamic republic. [...] In the war between Israel and Hezbollah, all the media in Iran were put on pressure to arrange their news so it reflects Hezbollah's strength and Israel's weakness, as if the result of the war would be determined on the paper sheets of the press in Iran, and not in southern Lebonan. Surprising as it may be, Iran's state media took their proof for the weakness and defeat of Israel from the Israeli newspapers and quoted Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, Maariv, and Yedioth Aharanoth one after another. But they never asked themselves once how it is possible that the media of the country that is itself a party of the war can attack the military policy of their government with no fear and reveal its weaknesses and defeats, but the media of Iran, which has only an alliance with Hezbollah, should not be able to run a headline on the entrance of the Israeli army into Lebonan.

This is what bias and control over media really means, and all other allegations of such charges must be measured against it.

Sent to Hell vs. Joining the Heaven!

2006-08-17T00:37:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran media

John Kifner of New York Times reports in a front-page overview

Nehme Y. Tohme, a member of Parliament from the anti-Syrian reform bloc and the country’s minister for the displaced, said he had been told by Hezbollah officials that when the shooting stopped, Iran would provide Hezbollah with an "unlimited budget" for reconstruction. [...] Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, offered money for “decent and suitable furniture” and a year’s rent on a house to any Lebanese who lost his home in the month-long war.

At the same time, Iran's supreme leader, Khamenei, sent this message through Hezbollah's Al-Manar television,

"Your unprecedented holy war and steadfastness are beyond the limits of my description. It's a divine victory. It is a victory of Islam, [...] With God's help you were able to prove that military superiority is not (measured) in the number (of soldiers), planes, warships and tanks. Rather, it depends on the power of faith and holy war, [...] [t]hey (Israeli attacks) have also uncovered the level of falsehood surrounding the hollow slogans ... about human rights and democracy."

By reversing the order of these sentences, one chould see the real chain of logic: "democracy and human rights are ploys. There are no such values. We have our own values. And we fight those who think otherwise. This is holy."

But seeing the reality in such a confusing situation and through the destruction of a war is particularly difficult for an observer in the West. With all the different opinions and manipulation, it is a daunting task to discern the truth of the matter. It is, by contrast, a painfully clear view from the inside of a tyrannical system, where the truth is sitting bare naked on the side, for those who dare to look at it:

I would like to know if the money that was spent in the past two decades in Palestine and Lebonan and Bosnia, was spent for preparing the people and organizations for the earthquake [of December 25, 2003 in Bam, Iran], how many of the thousands who died under the rubble would survive? By the way, how many did Lebonan's Hezbollah and Palestnian Islamic organizations send to help us? What about Bosnia? or Iraq's Shiites? Or Syria and Libya? On the other hand, Israelis have offered to help, but our masters have taken a major offense and refused. I bet they have bit their hands and said: "Astaghfor-allah! Would we offer to help if it had happened in Israel?!!" [...] One night, I heard this news on the state TV: "This afternoon a Palestinian teenager, in a martyrdom operation [suicide mission] joined the heaven and sent four Israelis to hell." Now, the one who would be sent to hell if he dies, has put aside his grudges and offered to help as a human, but the ones whose death would be equal to joining heaven don't even bother to send a message of condolences.

These days, too, the state-financed media are counting the Israelis "sent to hell!"

Let me ask then, how would we find moral equality here? How would we relativize this? That should make for a good afternoon exercise of sophistry and advanced contextualization.

How Does That Boot Taste, Mr. Wallace?

2006-08-16T04:51:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran US media

In his "interview" with Ahmadinejad, Mike Wallace, the host of CBS's "60 Minutes" said: "I couldn't be happier for the privilege of sitting down with the president of Iran." I completely believe him. He was all too happy, in fact, to be able to do his job. Jeff Jacoby, a columnist with the Boston Globe observes

Time and again Wallace let Ahmadinejad brush him off with inanities and lies he would have pounced on had they been uttered by a business executive or an American politician. When Wallace asked why Iranian Revolutionary Guards are helping terrorists in Iraq kill US soldiers, Ahmadinejad's non-reply was that the Americans shouldn't be in Iraq, since it is ``a civilized nation with a long history of civilization." The ``60 Minutes" star's withering rejoinder, according to the transcript: ``Mm-hmm." Wallace didn't press for an answer to his question, so Ahmadinejad flung it back at him. ``According to international laws," he said, Iraqi security is the responsibility of ``the occupation" -- that is, the US military. ``Why are they not providing security?" The befuddled Wallace changed the subject.

Could Wallace not at least ask which way is it in Ahmadinejad's fractured view: Americans should be or should not be in Iraq? Should they or should they not provide security according to their international obligations?

Jacoby also tells us a little anecdote, which I find very befitting for Wallace today:

Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to see Adolf Hitler, Walter Winchell observed in 1938, ``because you can't lick a man's boots over the phone."

As if having heard that story, Mr. Wallace describes the taste, too: "very smart, savvy, self-assured, good looking in a strange way . . . infinitely more rational than I had expected him to be." To what horrifyingly low levels does Mr. Wallace think our understanding of "rationality" has sunk?

Errors of Freedom

2006-08-16T00:10:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: philosophy politics

A system based on the principle of freedom and structured in order to safeguard it (e.g. democracy) is still prone to mistakes. Does this mean that it is a bad or evil system? No! Since freedom and democracy do not mean the absence of mistakes, but the possibility to peacefully correct them. This is simply the best we can do.

Ganji's Assumptions

2006-08-14T19:04:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran US human rights Ganji democracy

Robin Wright recalls in a Washington Post article that

A year ago, President Bush issued a statement saying [...] "[Ganji's] valiant efforts should not go in vain. [...] Mr. Ganji, please know that as you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you."

In the same article, Ganji recalls

"I was in solitary confinement in prison and had no contact with anyone when Bush announced support for me." Interrogators, however, "talked to me as if I had had dinner with Bush the previous evening."

Wright adds that "Bush administration support is dangerous for Middle East democrats these days."

Wright, I guess, is doing what she is paid to do. Ganji, however, reveals here that the art of self-delusion is still alive in him. Is he suggesting that because the interrogators use Bush's support as evidence against Iranian liberals, Bush should stop supporting them? Can we not apply the same twisted logic for, say, the same liberals' belief in basic freedoms? These beliefs are used everyday as evidence by regime's interrogators and revolutionary courts that these people are "irreligious," "lackeys of the West," "traitors" and "symbols of corruption on Earth." These are actual charges brought against many who had merely dared advocate freedoms of opinion in Iran, including Ganji himself. So, should we also stop believing and advocating our own freedoms because they are used as evidence against us?

It was only last year, when Ganji wrote in his Republican Manifesto

[The US] plan depends more on the behavior of the Iranian regime than it does on the conduct of the opposition forces. [...] [T]he only way out of a US-Iran face off is the establishment of a democratic system in Iran. [...] They believe a widespread democratic social movement can pre-empt an American military attack on Iran. With such a movement, a military attack will no longer be an issue. [...] Did Afghan Mujahedeen stop their fight and join the Taliban? Did Iraqi freedom fighters stop fighting Saddam and join his regime because America was going to attack Iraq? If they had done so, wouldn’t they have been condemned by freedom lovers around the globe?

But now, he is doing exactly what he had advised against in his writings. He "scoffs at the $75 million that the Bush administration has allocated for programs to encourage Iran's democracy movement. He said the funds would be better used for Iranian- or Islamic-studies centers at American universities." But why? Why not spend that money in programs that promote international solidarity with the people of Iran in their struggle to attain their freedoms? What use are all those Iranian-studies programs if Iranians suffocate while being studied? By missing the chance to engage the world's superpower in a program of support for the Iranians' struggle for their freedoms, Ganji is now a good candidate to be condemned by freedom lovers around the world.

Interestingly, Ganji's own account shows his fallacy: even though he was in solitary confinement, the interrogators accused him anyway. This shows clearly that it is misguided to believe that Iranian liberals' actions, specifically their seeking help from the outside world, is what causes the regime to mistreat them. It is the ideas that they advocate, which go against the very existence of the tyrannical rule of the regime, not the real or imaginary support they receive from outside, that the regime fears and tries to eliminate. So, when the regime and its agents mistreat us anyway, why not encourage the free world, which can lend enormous resources to our cause, to support our struggle for freedom?

Ganji had it right in prison! Only by encouraging the US officials to help the Iranian people can we avoid a bloody war before it becomes unavoidable by the conduct of the regime in Tehran. Ganji is wasting a unique opportunity, given to him for his acknowledged position in the eyes of the people of the world and their governments, and created by his previous couragous and correct ideas and the efforts of those who spread those ideas by translating them, holding long vigils, signing petitions and making a noise for his and others' freedom, all around the world. Instead of spending time with Hollywood celebrities, he should meet with those who can actually make a differnece, through helpful laws that would bind any cooperation with the regime to its respect for human rights and its conduct towards its citizens. The effects of these lost opportunities can be already seen. Last year, Bush repeated the "we stand with you" language used earlier for Ganji in his 2006 State of the Union address. This is exactly what Iranian liberals need. Now instead, human rights are losing their place as an issue altogether in the language of veteran US politicians. This would be a fatal blow to the cause of freedom in Iran.

In his more philosophical thinkings, too, Ganji is slipping.

"I realized that repression is in the essence of revolution," he said, smiling. "And I realized that we cannot produce democracy with revolution."

He forgets that the longest standing democracy of the world was in fact created by a revoultion of the sort he thinks must be "repressive in essence." Not only that, it had to rid itself of slavery (the brazen face of repression) through a bloody civil war. Yet, the people of the US now enjoy the sort of freedoms Ganji is yearning for. The simple truth is, it is not revolutions per se that are repressive, but the ideas behind them. There is a link: repressive ideas seek their domination through revolutionary and violent methods, but the inverse (which Ganji states) is not true.

The truth is that Ganji is distancing himself from American officials for two reasons: one is that he fears, as he reveals in Wright's article, harsher treatment for himself and his friends by the regime. For not telling this straight out he is at least to blame for dishonesty. Second, and more importantly, he is against US policies because he still carries with him, from his younger days, deep and untouched assumptions about the US, an ideological baggage against "US imperialism" and the sort, albeit in a lighter and modified version.

As a young man, he rallied behind Ayatollah Khomeini, served in the elite Revolutionary Guards at the same time as Iran's current hard-line president, then worked in the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, churning out its propaganda.

One is left wondering if those years had a permanent effect.

At this time it seems, unfortunately, that Ganji can only be trusted when he says, "We still don't have the emergence of a Gandhi, Havel or Mandela." Sadly, that is right. Gandhi, Havel, and Mandela never had a baggage of unattended assumptions, from their early days of supporting their later adversaries, affecting their thinking and actions years after they had nominally rejected them as false. Ganji, unfortunately, does.

McCain Gets It Wrong on Negotiations

2006-08-14T16:59:00.000-04:00

technorati tags: iran US human rights

Senator John McCain (R) of Arizona has commented on US-Iran negotiations or direct talks:

Tehran should renounce its idea of removing Israel from the map as also pursuit of nuclear weapons if it wants o have direct talks with US. "As soon as the President of Iran renounces ...Two things. One is (Iran's) dedication to the extinction of the state of Israel, and the other, if it's not going to be decided with bombs, then stop your pursuit of the acquisition of nuclear weapons."

Senator McCain's concerns with Iranian nuclear threat is legitimate. And so are those of the people of Iran. And they are exactly what McCain's gets wrong in his argument. Putting "security" ahead of the "freedoms" and the "human rights" of the people of Iran is a fatal mistake many make when thinking of the crisis in the Middle East. They should be reminded that even if the government of Iran abandons its current nuclear program and threats against Israel, which in McCain's view should qualify them for direct talks and exchange, there is no guarantee the crisis won't reveal itself in the (very) near future due to the repressive form of the government. When people cannot freely discuss and decide about the policies their government chooses to pursue (for its own protection) there is absolutely no guarantee that the day after the current government abandons its nuclear ambitions, it or the next administration, won't reopen another or even the same program, if it is seen beneficial to the survival of their tyranny, always at the expense of the ordinary people everywhere.

Cyrus Ferdowsi

2006-08-13T23:13:00.000-04:00

Cyrus Ferdowsi was born and lived most of his life in Iran. As a child, he experienced the upheavals of the 1979 revolution and the horrors of the Iran-Iraq war. In school he felt the urge to resist the brainwashing of the religious state propaganda by reading alternative ideas, and by studying math. The latter has now turned into a profession. The former included whatever was there to find; at first, other (mostly leftist) leftover propaganda from the revolution; then, after discovering some local and home libraries, the writings of a string of irrational philosophers (Hegel, Marx, Nieztche); and finally, in late teenage years, the works of the more rational ones: Kant, Descartes, Michiavelli, Mach, Popper, Arendt, Hayek, Friedman, ... . Even when spending time on the leftist literature, Cyrus' central issue was "freedom." It was only the meaning of the word that had to be clarified later by rational thinkers and rational thinking.

All Links

2006-08-13T00:05:00.001-04:00

October 14, 2006
• Identifying Misinformation

US State Department Explains:
Did the U.S. "Create" Osama bin Laden?
9/11 Revealed?
The 4,000 Jews Rumor,
Etc.

September 26, 2006
• Gozaar by Freedom House

A Journal on Democracy and Human Rights in Iran

September 21, 2006
• Akbar Ganji's Letter to America

The regime [in Tehran] is dangerous mostly because it is willing to brutally trample on the democratic and human rights of the Iranian people. ... The real goal of the nuclear program is to make these policies permanent.

September 17, 2006
• Iranian blogger released after two years in prison

Mojtaba Saminejad was charged for "activity against national security ", " insulting Khomeini and Khamenei", "profanity", "opening several blogs", "having unlawful affair", ...

• Bishop Concerned About Human Rights In Iran After Visit

Clampdown on activists, discrimination against women, and the plight of political prisoners ... Christians are leaving Iran because of social, cultural, and religious restrictions.

September 15, 2006
• Reza Pahlavi's Senate Statement

The best way to deal with the clerical regime of Iran is an integrated three-pronged policy of "Confrontation, Pressure and Support."

• Oriana Fallaci, 77, died today
September 12, 2006
• Silencing the Voices of Dissent

Forced shutdown of another Iranian newspaper, Shargh.

September 10, 2006
• Families Of Kidnapped Persian Jews Sue Khatami In US Court

Khatami has twenty days to file an answer denying the allegations or default the case.

September 7, 2006
• New Death of Political Prisoner in Custody

A second prisoner of conscience dies in Iran in five weeks.

September 1, 2006
• Amnesty Int'l redefines 'war crimes'

Alan Dershowitz presses on!

August 28, 2006
• The "Human Rights Watch" Watch

August 26, 2006
• Iran Exhibits Anti-Jewish Art
• Muslim Sisters Need Our Help
• Exchanges of Violence

August 21, 2006
• Tarek Heggy on the Lebanese Crisis