Kamangir (Archer)

October 2, 2008

Persian Blogosphere: Going Ahead, Slowly and Smoothly

Filed under: Blogging, Features, Iran, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 2:15 pm

I got involved in the blogging experience in here and in English and then moved on to writing a Persian blog. Persian Kamangir, however, progressed faster and farther than what I could imagine and even overshadowed this blog (according to the statistics, Persian Kamangir is now among the twenty most referred blogs in the Persian blogosphere). All this, however, does not mean that this blog will be sacrificed.

The matter of fact is, if anything is to be done for Iran, it will be accomplished through community building and by creating an environment for healthy discussions. The Persian blogosphere, in spite of its vast population, has not yet been able to meet that goal. One of the reasons for this failure, to my understanding, is that blogging can very easily become a venue for individuals whom seek means for satisfying their narcissism. We have suffered from that in the Persian blogosphere to a great extent.

I am just back from Toronto, where we had a panel on the Persian blogosphere and I tried to emphasize on some of the ideas I have also talked about in this article: Do Not Be A Dinosaur Blogger. The head of the Persian blogosphere has gone ahead with using the new technologies, but, nevertheless, there are a lot of people to whom feed and content aggregation are still rocket science.

Struggling with all the bullying and all the “Paris Hilton”s, things are going ahead in the Persian blogoshpere. Recent indications of state-backed efforts to infiltrate into our communities prove that.

September 22, 2008

Video: Arrest for Unknown Reason

Filed under: Features, Human Rights, Lead Story, Video of the Day, Women — Kamangir @ 9:52 pm

(direct link to video)

The video is apparently taken from one or two floors above the street level. The screams of the girl to be arrested are not legible but people around the camera are contemplating why the girl is being arrested and if this has anything to do with the Modesty Police.

September 11, 2008

9/11: The day of terror and despair

Filed under: Blogging, Features, Iran, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 11:37 am

Translation of a Persian post commemorating the 9/11 attacks from “The Old Land“,

9/11: The day of terror and despair

September 11, 2001 was a hot day, and I remember that the heat was irritating. I was going home, so I waited in the street to get a [shared] cab. I don’t remember how long I waited for, but it was enough to irritate me even more. Just then, a cab came and I told the driver where I was going. I chose the front seat… I was able to get some air and cool off. I was tired and irritated of the heat when the driver, with his face covered by a big smile, turned to me and said “Is it right that the US is all gone?” Maybe he was not even talking to me. I had a newspaper in my hand and I was opening it to read.

I thought, well, another head of the state has probably found a vacant microphone and has probably uttered some fuss. So, with a smile of sarcasm, I said “Things happen”, meaning “Do your job and drop me where I am going”. He, on the other hand, translated my sentence as “Yes, I heave heard too!”

“And so I have to listen to the details of how the heroes of the revolution have blown up the US”, this was what I imagined. It was boring, we were actually blowing up the US couple of times every day.

I finally got home. No one even turned back from TV when I stepped in. They were watching the national television and all in shock. One was standing, one was sitting, one was pacing. I looked at the screen. The towers were falling down. I had a cold feeling in my stomach. I could not understand it. The towers fell down and fell down and fell down. The tape went on and on and on. This was the only scene I ever watched more than that fantastic goal Khodadad Azizi scored [and led to Iran's admission to World Cup 98 - Wikipedia].

My mom kept crying. She had no idea where these towers were or what the Pentagon was. She was just sad.

9/11 is my mom’s birthday. I will never forget her birthday, ever.

September 7, 2008

Video of the Day: The Blogging Revolution

Filed under: Blogging, Features, International Bloggers, Lead Story, Video of the Day — Kamangir @ 6:16 pm

Antony Loewenstein’s The Blogging Revolution will be available on Amazon soon. This is how he describes the book,

(direct link to video)

August 21, 2008

Video of the Day: Persepolis 2 – Safeguard the Innocent

Filed under: Features, Human Rights, Iran, Islamic Republic, Lead Story, Video of the Day — Kamangir @ 12:07 pm

Another marvellous piece of work by the Mideast Youth TV (also available in Persian). Good job guys!

(Direct Link to Video)

August 8, 2008

“I regret the fact that a woman led Iran’s Team in the Olympics Opening”

Filed under: Features, Human Rights, Iran, Islamic Republic, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 6:37 pm

The Leader of the Friday Prayers in the religious city of Mashhad, Ayatollah Seyed Ahmad Alam Alhoda, stated regret because Iran’s team in the opening of the Olympics was led by a woman.

“This was against the Islamic values as well as those of the establishment and the revolution and what the government claims to be accomplishing”, he stated. He added, “Putting a woman on the front is telling the world that we are not for the promotion of the Islamic values”. “As I have also mentioned before, the attendance of the Iranian women in the international events and exhibiting them outside Iran is against Islamic values. However, not only we are sending them to the events, they are put on the front as well”, he was reported saying [Persian].

Related: More about the Iranian women who will compete in the Olympics in Shahrzad’s blog: Iranian Women In Olympics. Do make sure you subscribe to her feed if you’d like to get a first-hand look at Iran presented from the point of view of an Iranian lady.

July 18, 2008

Do Not Be A Dinosaur Blogger – My Article in Gozaar

Filed under: Blogging, Features, Lead Story, media — Kamangir @ 7:35 pm

Similar to the worldwide blogosphere, or maybe even much deeper and more faster, the Persian blogosphere is adopting the new tools and is mastering the new technique, in order to increase the efficiency and to enhance the quality of the content in the Persian blogosphere. In a piece just published in Gozaar, I go through this process and give a brief introduction into the new face of the participatory media.

There was a time when “becoming a blogger” was as easy as logging into blogger.com and creating an account. This fortunate player in the era of participatory media would then write down his or her thoughts and publish the masterpiece. The next few hours and days would pass with our hero waiting for passer-byes to read, ponder, and post a reply upon the content. This was how blogging was defined in the early days – Read the rest of the article in Persian or in English.

July 12, 2008

Mahmoud’s Fantasy: Video

A compilation of the “fake Iranian missile contest” from all over the web (originated at boingboing). See the frames here.

(direct link to the video)

Frames and music copyright of owners.

July 11, 2008

Magnificent Missile Test, Pictures of which do not exist

Filed under: Features, Islamic Republic, Lead Story, media — Kamangir @ 2:34 am

Will you be surprised if I tell you that the picture they used for the front page of the state-run ultra-right newspaper Kayhan was in fact two years old?

Front Page of Kayhan, July 10th, 2008, “Iran fires 2000-Km Missile, Israel: We are not going to start a fight with Iran”

Picture published on November 2006

The Two Images overlaid

July 10, 2008

Boosting the Morale with Old Pictures

Filed under: Features, Islamic Republic, Lead Story, Picture of the Day — Kamangir @ 7:30 pm

If you thought the Islamic Republic had only once made the “mistake” of using old images for propaganda (see: Iranian Missile Drill: Pictures do not Lie!), well, they seem to have plans to go ahead with it for some more time (on top of using Photoshop of course).

In today’s pictorial report of the state-run television, form Sepah’s drill, there is a picture we had seen before.

Supposedly taken recently

Published two years ago.

July 9, 2008

Iranian Missile Drill: Pictures do not Lie!

Filed under: Features, Iran, Islamic Republic, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 3:20 pm

Maybe all the worries about the new missile drill by the Islamic Republic are just overreaction. What would you think when you realize that neither Fars News, nor Mehr News or ISNA published any picture of the event. Add to that the fact that one of the pictures the state-run IRIB published actually looks too much like a picture taken at a drill which happened two years ago.

Presumably taken recently, published by the IRIB.

Published two years ago. Compare the clouds, the layout and the trail at the bottom right.

Maybe this is just another bluff. Not a good timing of course.

Related:

July 8, 2008

Filtering and Web 2.0: Project “Profiler” Launched

Filed under: Blogging, Didish, Features, Iran, KiBeKi, Lead Story, Profiler — Kamangir @ 12:04 pm

As I also briefly mentioned in the previous post (see: Kamangir is Back), I have started working on Project Profiler (see the development log here).

In short, Profiler attempts at discovering the map of the Persian blogosphere, through analyzing the connections between the Persian bloggers in different social networks, including Friendfeed.com, which I have been focused on for the last couple of months. This project will also use the reports now being regularly published by Project Didish.

As a short presentation, here, two preliminary graphs generated by Profiler will be posted. As of know, there are 717 entries in the database, each representing one Persian blogger.  These bloggers have been discovered through friendfeed.com.

The first graph shows that from the 566 blogs registered in the database, 171 are on wordpress.com (30%), 122 are on blogspot.com (22%), and 58 are on blogfa.com (10%). Interestingly, about 186 blogs are on their own domains (33%) (also see the corresponding pie chart in the latest Didish report).

The second graph shows the ten services used by the most bloggers registered in the system. Red bars indicate filtered services, while green and magenta denote services which are accessible in Iran and those about which mixed reports have been given, respectively. The category “blog” is included in the mixed reports because many leading blogs are indeed filtered. More detailed analysis of this issue will be carried out in the coming phases of the project.

Profiler not only aims at producing a large detailed map of the Persian blogosphere, it will provide information about connections, usage statistics, and trends in this online society.

July 4, 2008

Kamangir is Back

Filed under: Blogging, Didish, Features, Iran, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 12:32 pm

The date on the last post in this blog used to read “June the 13th” for almost a month. This was quite a change for this blog, which used to be updated more than once on almost every day for over two years. Things had changed, but better, less tense, days are ahead.

First, there was my studies. I finally did my Candidacy Exam on yesterday (the first step toward becoming Dr. Kamangir). It was a success, well almost, and I will have a lot more free time before defending my thesis, which is completely irrelevant to the stuff I post here (see more about my thesis in here).

Second, following a lot of discussions, and deliberations of course, I had shifted a lot of the time I spend blogging to the Persian companion of this blog. The reason is that, put briefly, what will bring the regime to its knees is not the CNN or FoxNews bashing it. It is the Iranians who are the problem, and the solution at the same time. It was in the news a week ago that a brother strangled and then stabbed his sister because she asked for the permission to get married to a man the family did not like. This, unfortunately, did not happen on the surface of Mars. It happened right before our eyes. The problem is not Ahmadinejad. The problem is the Iranian youth who argue “Well, we have different values”. To deal with these “values”, the language is Persian, not English.

Third, I am spending a lot of time on my projects on the Persian blogosphere. Didish and Feedcounter are becoming benchmarks Persian bloggers use to compare each other against. With that, today is in fact the day I am launching project “Persian Blogger Profiler” or in short “Profiler”. The aim of this project is to collect all the information I have gathered from the Persian blogosphere into one relational database. The data collected through this project will be used for producing the larger graph of connections, friendships, and interactions in the Persian Blogosphere.

So, Kamangir is back and, as we say in Persian, I’ll be keeping the lights on (sort of implying that I will be posting more regularly).

May 23, 2008

Persian Blogosphere: On the Verge of Adolescence

Filed under: Blogging, Didish, Features, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 9:23 pm

I had a presentation today in the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008 Conference, on a panel titled “Breaking the Silence: Iranians Find a Voice on the Internet“, about some of the results of the work I do on analyzing the Persian blogosphere (Project Didish).

My main argument in the talk was that the Persian blogosphere is now on the verge of adolescence and has well passed its infancy and childhood. To analyze this huge community, I argued, crude robot-based crawling methods do not yield meaningful results, due to the fact that splogs and seasonal blogs have cluttered the scene. To tackle the problem, then, I suggested using blogger-operated tools such as link sharing.

My slides are available at this address (PDF, 800KB). You can also go through the slides in this address, where slides are saved as individual snapshot images.

didish_cfp08_p11.jpg

icon for podpress  Persian Blogosphere: On the Verge of Adolescence: Download

May 19, 2008

Seven Valleys of Love – Collection of Works from Iranian Female Poets

Filed under: Features, Iran, Lead Story, Women — Kamangir @ 10:32 pm

seven_valleys_of_loves.jpgIn her newest book, Seven Valleys of Love, Sheema Kalbasi looks at the works of Iranian female poets from Middle Ages Persia to present day Iran. Sheema is fluent in both Persian and English, to the extent that she does fine writing in both languages. When asked by the Persian Radio Farda why she focused on female poets, she replied, “as opposed to eight thousand male poets, only four hundred female poets are mentioned in our history. Thus, it is necessary to move on from Saadi, Khayam, Roumi, and Hafez and add material like this to the curriculum inside Iran and outside”.

Those Days

Those days
Poetry
Was my room
And wherever I felt unsafe
I gravitated into its eternal sanctuary.

These days
There aren’t any rooms
That can harbor me against the crowd
and behind every window
inside and outside every room
a two-faced clown sneers.

Fereshteh Sari (more samples from the book )

Sheema writes,

I started the translation of these poems after losing my mother to breast cancer. I chose to work through my grieving period.

The book can be purchased online on Amazon. Some donations will proceed to a breast cancer research center in Connecticut.

May 15, 2008

Analyzing the Persian Blogosphere: New Results

Filed under: Blogging, Didish, Features, Iran, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 5:26 pm

Although, recently I have been quiet about my blogging projects, including Didish and Feed Counter, I have been steadily working on the twins.

The aggregation module in Didish is now a local tool, as opposed to the previously-used web-based Gregarius which was strangling Kamangir’s host as the number of links grew bigger. The project’s interface is now extensively more elaborate, at last using a php-based dynamically-rendered presentation.

The latest weekly report shows that Radio Zamaneh is still on top, followed by BBC Persian, which is being closed on by the Persian blog 1Pzeshk.com. Then comes the Persian companion of this blog and in the fifth place by Nikahang Kowsar, the Iranian cartoonist. The complete list can be found here. For more graphs visit here.

didish_domain.png

For those looking for more information, collected over the pace of longer periods of time, the latest trend report can be found here.

trend_links_normalized.png

As a companion to Didish, Feed Counter collects information about the readership of feeds in the Persian blogosphere. Recently, input from Persian bloggers has helped extend the database of this project. The latest report can be found here.

feedcounter.png

This was the short version. For the longer version follow the links and if you didn’t find what you were looking for, please drop me a line.

p.s. I’ll be joining Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008 Conference next week, through video chat, on the panel for Breaking the Silence: Iranians Find a Voice on the Internet.

May 8, 2008

Lacking Reasons to Hate Israel

Filed under: Features, Israel, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 5:32 pm

On September 2005, Azadeh and I boarded a plane at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport and traveled all around the globe before we landed in Winnipeg. It is fair to say that the land we started rebuilding our life on belongs to the people now politely referred to as the “aboriginals”. There is no need to look at the statistics; you only have to walk in the streets north of Winnipeg to see how off the society the original inhabitants of this land are. This observation will be complete when you talk to some “Canadians” and how much pissed off they are of “these people who reproduce to rip off more of our tax money”. Does that mean that I hate Canadians? Obviously not. Does that mean that I think the aboriginals are sub-human? Definitely not.

Imagine a Canada not surrounded by the Oceans, but by millions of Inuit ready to fight the European “occupiers”. Imagine an Indian leader having said “if each one us spits once, we are able to wash these bastards off our land”. Imagine cash and weapon coming from all around to fight off the “bastards”. Does that sound familiar? Yep, that would be called Israel and the leader will be the late Ayatollah Motahari of Iran.

The “occupiers” of Canada, including Azadeh and I, have been fortunate enough that none of the above has happened, that the first waves of immigrants were able to “push the indigenous people up north”, putting it very gracefully. Then, we came down the staircase and to the new city which embraced us and gave us new hope.

Does that mean that I think morality is not a factor in global affairs? I don’t know. Do I imply that we have the right to be where we are? Maybe. We are living here anyways. Do I mean that the same applies to Israel? Well, no European has had Canada being mentioned as the promised land and they are here. Israelis at least have the name mentioned in their “holy book”.

I wouldn’t want to be a Palestinian living in a refugee camp for sure, similarly not an Inuk living in a dusty reserve, if I could choose. Nevertheless, I don’t see what makes Israel anything more than a Canada established on the peak of a volcano.

YouTube Preview Image

(direct link to video)

April 27, 2008

Ahmadinejad and wiping Israel off the Map, A Persian Perspective

Filed under: Features, Iran, Islamic Republic, Israel, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 2:02 am

israel_ahmadinejad.jpg“Are you sure the Islamic Republic/Ahmadinejad have asked for Israel to be wiped off the map?” This is the question I have been asked by so many people over the course of the last few years. While I became more and more concerned why so many people kept asking the same question, I kept describing it, quite diligently, to whoever asked the question that “Israel is described as the tumor of the region by the former leader of the Islamic Republic and it is quite common to see slogans which ask for the destruction of Israel in military marches and such”.

Because the people who asked the question were more or less identifiable as belonging to the so-called “left”, I convinced myself that people are trying to negate the Bush administration’s perspective through saving the face of the Islamic Republic. When I was asked the same question for the last time by another friend a few days ago, however, I realized that the Iranian call for the “wiping off” of Israel might in fact be not about a “second Holocaust”.

A few days ago, I was asked the same question, this time by a friend who works for an institute some people accuse of leaning towards the “right”. When my friend Mark (name is fake) asked me the same question, I gave him the same answer, quite like playing a sound track I had stored somewhere in my brain. He refused to accept and sent me the link to the page on Wikipedia which talks about Ahmadinejad’s remarks about Israel. That was when I started doing a bit of research on the Persian sentence Ahmadinejad used in his speech at the “World without Zionism” conference on October 2005. Based on my knowledge of the Persian language, which I speak as my mother tongue, the translation given by Juan Cole, whose political viewpoints might be point of debate but his scholar weight in the field is irrefutable, and also given the translation published by MEMRI, which has no intention of apologizing for Ahmadinejad, I think the president of the Islamic Republic did not in fact ask for the “wiping-off” of the Jewish state. What he asked for, not that I find it legitimate, was the removal of the current regime in Israel.

the_world_without_zionism_ahmadinejad_s.jpg

Maybe this will make the issue more clear. My understanding of the average Iranian, and I am not referring to the super-ideological Armageddon-lover hardcore members of Basij, is that while they are mad at Israel because of its continuous portrayal as the “regime which has occupied Qods” in the national television, there is no strong anti-semitic sentiment in the Iranian public. I would compare that with what I have perceived in some of my Arab friends and how hateful some of them are when we talk about Israel. Without making any judgment about any person, I argue that in the Iranian case, even if Ahmadinejad does ask for the a second Holocaust, I do doubt that he would be able to gather an army who would fight for his “cause”.

I remember talking to a veteran of the Iraq war and he angrily remembered Iranian soldiers refusing to attend the fight when Iran started occupying land in Iraq. “The soldiers said they were not allowed to pray in occupied land”, he said. Although living under a hateful regime, the Iranian public is still very conscious when it comes to committing hate-inspired actions such as what Ahmadinejad is accused of having asked for.

The important question is, who should be blamed for the wipe-off misunderstanding. Is it the Western media which “took advantage of a vague remark”, as the following video seems to suggest? I think not. The number one person to blame is no one but Ahmadinejad, for being talkative and vague. He lacks the basic skills a politician, let alone a human being, has to possess, and that is spending more time thinking than giving speeches. He, whatever idiotic ideology he subscribes to, would have been told not to mention such a vague sentence, given he had asked for an advice before uttering his infamous “wipe-off” speech. The second place, in the list of people/entities to be blamed for in this misunderstanding, is IRIB (the state-run television), which started the use of the idiom in their English translation of the speech, without knowing what it exactly meant in English.

(direct link to the videos)

The fact is, as shown numerously on this blog and elsewhere, the English-language state-run media sources in Iran are hasty and irresponsible. They make such silly mistakes (see: Press TV’s Latest, and Funniest, Mistake) that I sometimes ask myself if, for example, the “prestigious” Press TV is taken seriously even by its own staff (see:Video of the Day: A very up-to-date PressTV Anchor).

The “wipe-off” sentence has been referred to in the media over and over and has become another “proof” that “Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler”. While I am not sure if he does not daydream about that, the Iran I used to live in was not a country he would be able to produce a genocidal army out of.

By the way, happy 60-th anniversary to all Israeli friends.

April 24, 2008

Goats and Dolphins: Journalist under Fire and the Conservative Reformists

Filed under: Features, Iran, Lead Story, media — Kamangir @ 3:58 pm

Three years ago, around these days, Masih Alinejad was banned from entering the Parliament [Persian]. At the time, Alinejad worked as the parliamentary correspondent for ILNA, a media source close to the reformists. When she published reports that indicated that contrary to their claims of “living an ordinary life”, the MPs do enjoy a high salary, she was accused of having stolen the regarding documents. Soon the allegations were denied, but she had already been banned from entering the Parliament [Persian]. Alinejad once again came to the spotlight when following Ahmadinejad’s request for “face-to-face discussion with Mr. Bush”, she asked for an uncensored interview with Ahmadinejad (see:Talk to Me Mr. Ahmadinejad, If You Dare To).

alinejad_ahmadinejad.jpg

Picture from Ahmadinejad’s ongoing trip to Hamedan – Fars

masihalinejad.jpgMasih is once again on the spotlight, this time for a piece she wrote for Etemad Melli, a reformist newspaper [Persian]. In the piece, she refers to her recent experience in an aquarium, where dolphins danced to their instructor. She found a similarity between that event and the crowd which gathers around when Ahmadinejad goes to his numerous trips to under-developed areas.

These days, when even the administration confesses that the inflation is pushing hard on the people…the dance of the dolphins does remind us of the gathering of people around their president [Persian] [not literal translation]

Although Mr Ahmadinejad called his opponents “young goats”, and there was no official reaction to it, Alinejad’s dolphin analogy did cause huge outcry in the conservative camp. The shock was complete when Mehdi Karroubi, the head of the newspaper and a prominent figure in the reformist movement, denounced the article and apologized for it [Persian].

During and off-the-record discussion with an active member of the student wing of the reformist movement, she told me “I dislike Karroubi more than I do Ahmadinejad”. The likes of Masih Alinejad’s experience seem to confirm the rising idea that the so-called reformists might in fact be too conservative for the younger generation. What the implications of this change are, we need to wait and see.

April 20, 2008

Dress for Sale on eBay for saving a Mother from Execution

Filed under: Features, Human Rights, Lead Story, Picture of the Day — Kamangir @ 2:39 am

akram_mahdavi_help.jpg

Akram Mahdavi is another victim of unjust and unequal laws in a country where, for the most part, the legal system considers females only half human, and where women’s rights, as well as their cries for help are routinely and systematically ignored, trampled upon, and even ridiculed. The now 32 year old mother of a girl in her early teens is facing imminent execution for conspiracy to murder. According to court and other reliable sources, including Akram’s defense attorney, Mina Jafari, when Akram was 27 years old, she sought the assistance of a young male friend and conspired to murder her then 74 year old husband. Akram, who suffers from epilepsy among other ailments, had been forced to marry the substantially older man; her own father physically beat her into saying “I do” for a second time (read more)

To save Akram from imminent execution, the campaign needs to collect the equivalent of $60,000 as ransom. A Paypal account has been set up and bank drafts are accepted.

The campaign has also been given the red dress the Iranian soap opera actress Nazanin Boniadi, recently seen on Iron Man, wore on the red carpet at the Emmy Awards 2007. The item is for sale on eBay and all the proceeds will be used to pay off the ransom.

To donate on PayPal click on this button, for other methods of donation send me an email arash@kamangir.net. I will put you through to Akram’s lawyer and the organizers of the campaign.


April 18, 2008

Is It Offensive to Joke about Bombing Iran?

Filed under: Blogging, Features, Iran, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 5:56 pm

After I published the post “Why bombing Iran is a Mustin Persian, I received a lot of angry responses. The outrage was to the extent that I deleted the Persian post and apologized from the readers. The same day, later in the evening, a group of us gathered in our apartment to talk about the piece. Here, you can hear selected parts of the discussion we had, and we included Azadeh, Mahmoud, our Canadian friend Sarah, and our friend Arman, who had found the piece offensive.

Note: The podcast starts with a short Persian introduction.

 
icon for podpress  Smaller Size (3MB) [14:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 
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April 11, 2008

Woman waiting for Her Execution and “Discount” from a Hosting Company, The “Iranian Connection”

Filed under: Blogging, Features, Human Rights, Iran, Lead Story — Kamangir @ 3:18 pm

There are moments of pure joy in the blogosphere. There are times you wish you could touch the hands of people you have had the privilege to know through blogging but have never met in person. When these moments come, you are proud of being a citizen of the blogosphere.

A while back, Bluehost, the company which hosts kamangir.net, announced a partner program. In short, they allowed customers to find new customers and be paid $65 for each sign-up. So I posted an announcement on Persian Kamangir and invited fellow bloggers to take advantage of this opportunity. I offered to pay them back what Bluehost was going to pay me, as a mean to encourage Persian bloggers to move into their personal domains (we also worked out the legalities and let Bluehost administration know about the arrangement).

Soon, four Persian bloggers used the opportunity and set up their blogs in their new domains. That was a few months ago. I promised them that I’ll contact them as soon as I get the check from Bluehost.

Finally, the first check came in a few days ago. It was a $130-check, so I contacted the first two subscribers and asked them for their bank information. Their response is what I would like to call a “pure moment”.

akram1.jpgSince a short while ago, we have been involved in collecting $60,000 for releasing a mother from prison. The convicted murderer of her 74-year-old husband, the 32-year-old Akram Mahdavi, is on the death row because she does not have the financial privilege to pay off the requested ransom. She killed her husband after a second arranged marriage was forced upon her by her family. Women’s rights’ activists describe her case as a very typical example of arranged marriages of teenagers to old men (her first husband was forty years older than her). Akram has a 17-year-old daughter from her first marriage (more information in Persian).

If you have not guessed yet how the case of a woman on the death row could have anything to do with “discount” a hosting company offers to its customers, well, that’s what I call the “Iranian Connection”.

Both people whom I contacted for the pay-back asked me to deposit the amount to the fund established for releasing Akram. Is that not something you can be proud of?

If you are willing to help us collect the ransom, please use this button and donate on Paypal. For more information, please send me an email at arash@kamangir.net.


April 7, 2008

Why bombing Iran is a Must

Filed under: Features, Humour, Lead Story, media — Kamangir @ 10:05 pm

The elaborate uranium enrichment facility that operates inside Iranians’ bodies.

Camels do not run on nukes. That, alone, is sufficient to prove that the Iranian theology is pursuing nuclear bombs. On top of that, with all Iranian women covering their faces, they are not at risk of skin cancer, eliminating Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric that the nuclear research in Iran is geared towards technological advances, including developing nuclear drugs for treating cancer patients.

In December of 2003, the historic city of Bam was devastated by an earthquake of magnitude 6.6 in Richter scale. 70 per cent of the city, including the historic Citadel of Bam was demolished, a moderate price the Mullahs paid for fulfilling their dreams of establishing the big Shia empire. Irrefutable sources have told Fox News that the city of Bam was similar to Israel’s Tel Aviv in terms of urban structure, and while the world was still unaware of the extent the Islamic Republic had gone ahead with its nuclear plans, the Ayatollahs carried out a secret nuclear test. After the blast, in a phone call, Ahmadinejad told Ayatollah Khameneii, “Eival!”, meaning “We did it!” in Persian, reported KillThemAll.com.

iran_bomb.jpg

This event also proved how incompetent the mainstream media is. Rather than following the news and informing the world of the dangers of extremism, the BBC asked the despicable question “but Ahmadinejad was not in power then!” The mainstream media has long underestimated the level of secrecy of the regime in Tehran. A senior analyst told Fox News that “they are very clever. They always show a puppet to the world while the actual president runs the country from his office buried thousands of nanometers beneath a swimming pool”.

The world was shocked after CNN’s Anderson Cooper revealed the Islamic Republic’s most secret plan of all. Reportedly, in an attempt to disguise it nuclear facilities, the regime of Tehran is using urban areas as human shields. What is more disgusting is that the average Iranian is unaware of how they have become a part of the huge uranium enrichment plan which is running right now in Iran. A senior member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who wanted his name to be kept secret, revealed that the Iranians are now using a complicated chemical process engineered by Russians. Rather than using conventional centrifuges, which could be spotted easily by satellites, the cruel regime of Tehran is using the bodies of the average Iranians (including children) as chambers in which Dihydrogen Monoxide is combined with Yellow Cake, an essential chemical in the process of enriching uranium. Cooper stated, “when you buy confectioneries in Tehran, you are in fact inflicting exposure to nuclear material upon yourself. The material is digested in your stomach and when you go to washroom you pass enriched Uranium. The substance is then collected by Chinese-made machinery which processes the sewage in order to collect the nuclear components.” Reportedly, the recent death of numerous dolphins in the Persian Gulf occurred after an Iranian child urinated close to the shore.

This, unfortunately, is not how low the regime of Tehran is willing to go to develop nuclear capabilities. Documents recently extracted from Ahmadinejad’s pocket, while he was giving his infamous “we don’t have gays in Iran” speech at Columbia University, unveil the pathetic soul of the Iranian fanaticism. Reportedly, in the note Ahmadinejad suggests to Khameneii, “we will order the suicide-mission guys to fill up their stomachs with a lot of cookies and cakes before they go to their holy mission.” Ahmadinejad continues, “this way, when they blow themselves up, not only the enemy will be covered with stool, but also there will be a lot of nuclear contamination in the scene and that is just glorious!”

The only feasible way to tackle such a brutal regime is to turn the country and all its inhabitants into glass parking lot. The enemy is not Ahmadinejad or his administration, but rather the real enemy lies inside the intestines of each and every Iranian and it is our duty to save the world from contamination with hazardous material. The sole thought of Iranians peeing here and there, after all the washrooms are destroyed in our eminent attack, should haunt every environment-loving person. In fact, it is our duty to help the Iranian public and let them die in a respectful manner, and not from nuclear poisoning.

Let’s bomb Iran.

Mr Smith was a member of the team which searched for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for five years. Recently, after that project failed, he was assigned to find them in Iran.

- This is the article I wrote for the joke version of The Manitoban, the University of Manitoba students’ newspaper. Picture (c) The Manitoban.

March 31, 2008

On Discrimination in the US and in Iran

Filed under: Features, Human Rights, Iran, Lead Story, Video of the Day — Kamangir @ 7:10 pm

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The sign reads, “No service to people with loose veil, not even to our old customers”. This sign I wish was rare in Iran, but it isn’t. The fact is, there are stickers which carry the same message and are printed by the Police. These stickers are widely used all over Iran and their use has been mandated by the Police in many instances. You may also remember the hospital which mandated the veil as the condition for service to patients.

The following video is rather old. At the first sight, it might seem to be providing proof that discrimination does exist widely in the US. Watching the video till the end, however, my catch was that discrimination does exist over there, as it exists in every corner of the world, but with the heartwarming observation that ordinary people oppose to it and choose to boycott the offender. Whereas, in Iran, discrimination is a daily practice prescribed by the government and followed by the nation. At best, the Iranian nation is ignorant, and that’s when you do not take into consideration the fact that discriminatory judgments have become a part of the Iranian moral code: “women with loose veil are perverts”. Similar observation can be made regarding judgments against people with different sexual orientations, minority religious groups, etc.

My conclusion is, when left alone to decide for themselves, people everywhere in the world are for justice and peace. Propaganda and political agenda, however, agitate people and turn them into discriminators, for obvious goals of the leading gang.

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(direct link to video)

I literally cried, wishing my country was like this.

March 27, 2008

Islam or Islamic Ideology, which one is the problem Mr. Wilders?

Filed under: Features, Human Rights, Islam, Lead Story, Video of the Day — Kamangir @ 6:08 pm

Geert Wilders’s famous video finally found its way to the Internet. The much anticipated 15-minute video carries footage of Islamic leaders cursing the west and its values and advocating for Islam and its ways. The footage gives subtitles for the various languages spoken in it, the Persian parts of which are accurate. I wasn’t able to find any mistake in the Arabic part either.

I am not a Muslim. Having said that, this video is not about Islam. Islam, like Christianity, Judaism, and other schools of thought, does not kill. Nor does it stone, amputate, or circumcise women. All this is carried out by a beast named man, one of whose most developed talents is to find phony justifications for his/her horrible actions.

Mr. Wilders shows us pictures of crimes carried out by Muslims, from the infamous 9/11 attacks to London bombings and executions in Iran and Afghanistan. I do agree with him that not only many Muslims commit disgusting actions these days, but also that the mainstream Islamic world fails in condemning these atrocities. Even worse than that, the average Muslim seems to have sympathy for murderess, or at least they are fast in condemnation when a fellow Muslim is attacked, but seem to forget to be fair when Muslims kill others. Greet Wilders’ video might make this more clear, as if we had any doubt about it, but does not present a solution. At its core, it merely makes racist remarks about the rise of Muslim population in Europe.

It is a fact that the conventional interpretations of Quran and Islam do lead to issuing death Fatwas against non-Muslims. As rational human beings, this is what we need to talk about. Wilder’s presentation, however, mixes up the faith with the actions of human beings and fails in telling us what we don’t know. At the middle of the carnage, we need to sit together, Muslims and non-Muslims, and make it clear that discussion is the only way. This video, and works similar to it, only stir up the fight.

Ironically, the video contradicts itself when at the end it asks for the Islamic ideology to be defeated. If that’s what you are asking for, Mr. Wilders, which I totally agree with you in it, then why offend billions of Muslims? Really, what’s the point of agitating Muslims by that cheesy “tearing Quran apart, oops! no! it was a phone book” scene?

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