I recently attended the Cyber Dissidents Conference at the Bush Institute in Dallas. A wrap up of the conference can be seen in this video from Ideas in Action.

(Direct Link to Video)

While the last post on this blog dates back to December last year, I have never been this active in my five plus years of blogging. The Persian Kamangir was recently nominated for the best Persian blog by DW-World and I have had closer contact with the Persian media organizations outside Iran. To put it shortly, blogging for the Iranians needs to be done in the language they use, and that’s exactly what I am doing. As of today, Kamangir’s feed has over 6,000 feed subscribers, according to Google’s Feed Burner.

Follow my Persian blog at persian.kamangir.net (feed). You can also use Google Translate, which suspiciously manages to produce some form of poetry out of my mostly social-oriented posts.

I am in Copenhagen, Denmark, for the CPH:DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. My friend Omid Habibinia and I just had a seminar on the role of the new media in post-election events in Iran (The Revolution will be twittered – IRAN and the Internet). Omid discussed the process of transferring some of the videos, which later became popular on the Internet, out of Iran. I asserted that I am a fan of blogging but I want to take the role of the cynic and talk about the pitfalls of blogging, using examples from what did happen in the past six months in the Persian blogosphere.

Here are my slides. The title of the presentation was “Blog.Persian, The Empty Half”. Any comment or suggestion is absolutely welcome. Take the PDF file from here (200KB).

 Blog.Persian, The Empty Half: Download

A great post from my very good friend Hadi cross posted here due to the importance of the issue.

Correction on Fox News

I noticed that Fox News made a big mistake in describing the reason for shut down of a weekly magazine in Iran, “after featuring President-elect Barack Obama on its front cover and asking the question, Why doesn’t Iran have an Obama?”

But the fact is that the weekly magazine, Shahrvand-e Emrooz, was not shut down for its speculations about the “Iranian Obama”, as Fox News suggests.

Indeed, The magazine had already been closed down by the authorities before Obama won the elections. The administration of Shahrvand-e Emrooz, however, enjoyed the Iranian slow bureaucracy which let them publish another issue before the verdict was submitted to their office.

The commentary, which is referred to by Fox News and other sources, was in fact written by the editor-in-chief of the weekly as a reaction to the shut-down of the magazine. The regarding sentence reads “Why don’t we have the Iranian Obama? Why does the Iranian government make the friends to be foes, instead of making the foes to be friends?!”

But, to mention the accurate justification for closing down the weekly, the Press Supervisory Board has announced the verdict to be based on what they mention as “the license mandated the weekly to address social and cultural issues whereas the publication in fact had contained political commentaries”.

In addition, the editor-in-chief of what many consider to be “Iran’s Time Magazine”, Mohammad Ghouchani, has opposed the verdict, which is still to be approved by higher courts. Ghouchani still hopes to negotiate with the officials for the reconsideration on the verdict.

There were lots of criticizes even by conservatives. Even the Parliament Spokesman, Ali Larijani, who is a close political figure to the Iranian Supreme Leader, has criticized the weekly’s shut-down.

Some other Iranian MPs have questioned and summoned the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance of Iran specifically for the event as well. In the Iranian constitution questioning a minister in the Parliament can potentially result in an impeachment.

Based on the political reactions to the shut-down of Shahrvand-e Emrooz, its staff are still very hopeful to be able to revive their weekly from the ban.

This is the English translation of a piece I wrote in August 2008 for Radio Zamaneh on how the Persian blogosphere responded to the controversy surrounding the Ph.D. Ali Kordan (the former Interior Minister) had claimed to have been granted by Oxford University (for more details refer to “Ali Kordan – Degree controversy” on Wikipedia).

This is an example of the work I have been doing recently, as a part of project Didish. I will be posting more information about my work in the coming months.

Kordan Gate – The Persian Blogosphere and Ali Kordan’s Fake Ph.D.

Arash Kamangir – arash@kamangir.net

Masoud Behnoud writes, the fact that Ali Kordan did not know that in today’s world you can not get away with telling big lies in the public is enough reason to make sure that that “piece of paper” could have not been issued by Oxford University (Ahmadinejad responded to inquiries regarding Kordan’s degree by saying that it is “only a piece of paper”). Many people have written about Ahmadinejad’s and Kordan’s reactions to the controversy and how it should be resolved. This short report looks at how the Persian blogosphere responded to the controversy.

This analysis contains items aggregated through 933 link-sharing feeds which are used by Persian bloggers. Some of these feeds are published in friendfeed.com and some others are included in the feeds of Persian blogs. Some others are presented to the visitors of the blogs maintained by the owners of the feeds. Therefore, it will not be an overestimation if we consider link-sharing feeds as one of the tools for communication and distribution of content in the Persian blogosphere.

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows the daily percentage of items shared from July 29th till August 20th of this year which contained one of the keywords “Degree”, “Oxford”, or “Kordan” in their title. In order to draw this figure, first, for each day in the period, the total number of items which had one of the keywords in their title has been calculated. These numbers are subsequently divided by the total number of items shared in the corresponding day. Figure 2 shows a similar curve for the percentage of items which had any of the keywords in their title.

Figure 2

All four curves, the ones shown in Figures 1 and 2, exhibit peaks on the 11th and the 16th of August.

The peak on the 11th coincides with the day after alef.com first published reports regarding mistakes in what was claimed to be a degree issued by Oxford University. On the same day, Alef also published a statement by Oxford University in which the degree was officially discredited. The Persian blogger Jomhour commented on the news by writing a post titled “Will the genius minister discredit the Oxford minister?” The next peak, namely on the 16th, corresponds to the date in which the Persian blogger “Big Sleep” wrote a post titled “I will file a complaint against Kordan“. Both these posts will be discussed shortly.

Figure 1 shows that compared to the peak on the 11th, the keyword “Kordan” has gained more importance on the 16th. On the same day there is less emphasis on “Degree”, maybe exhibiting more concentration on the consequences of the actions undertaken by the minister, and thus mentioning his name rather than the actual events. After the first peak, there is significant drop in the use of the keyword “Oxford”.

Figure 2 shows that the second wave is weaker in magnitude than the first one. This might indicate decreased interest on the topic in the Persian blogosphere.

Among all the items which have any of the keywords in their title, the post by Soroush Rouhbakhsh (whom blogs at “Big Sleep”) has been shared 44 times and is the most shared item in this analysis. Choosing the title “I will file a complaint against Kordan“, He writes,

I will file a complaint against Kordan for forgery of an academic degree, as indicated in article 527 of the Islamic Prosecution Law. What will you do?

The next most popular item is titled “How animals reacted to Kordan’s fake degree“. Having been shared 22 times, the blogger uses humorous pictures of animal figures to mock the issue in that post (one of the pictures is shown to the right).

Jomhour’s post, “Will the genius minister discredit the Oxford minister?“, is shared 18 times and is on the third place. The blogger examines the credibility of the Minister of Higher Education who was given the task of investigating the authenticity of Kordan’s degree. The minister already has a suspicious “Scientist of the Year” title in his resume.

Shared 16 times, the official statement by Oxford University if the fourth on the list and a post titled “Dr. Kordan’s Ph.D.” by Persian blogger “The Wise Boy” is the fifth. In that post, the blogger looks at the research done by Prof. Edmund Rolls, whose signature is seen at the bottom of the claimed-to-be Ph.D. degree. The post, which is archived in the category “deep thoughts” by the blogger, sarcastically argues that “Dr. Kordan” had indeed deserved the diploma.

Figure 3

This analysis includes 166 unique items, shared for a total of 459 times. Figure 3 shows the share of blogs and other sources in the number of items and the number of times an item is shared. As seen here, 45% of the unique items regarding Ali Kordan’s degree controversy have been produced in the Persian blogosphere. In terms of the number of times any item is shared, items from the Persian blogosphere have had a 49% share.

Audio brought to you by Odiogo.

 

 Listen to the post... [5:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A rather long conversation with Daniel Breslau about blogging in Persian and the Persian blogosphere. Listen to the interview here.

If you have been visiting this blog for some time, I guess you do know that I am a relaxed person and that I do not take offense easily (see: Do not Panic! You are not a Cockroach! for example). But, seriously, what is this? “Iranians eat evidence“? So what? That Iranians are hungry creatures strolling in the streets looking for prey? (and that reminds me of “28 Days Later” by the way) Is this Reuters, or is this a spoof item from The Onion? I guess this is yet another clue how much more relevant a blog-like point of view can be.

This is the English translation of a “Personal Note” written by Ferevertish Rezvanieh, published in Pendar about the mentioned sandwich.

Why We should be Proud of the One-and-a-Half-kilometer Sandwich

In the midst of the rising negative views at Iran in the world media, why should we really be proud of our 1500-meter sandwich?

How is our cinema presented in the world? A student who has lost his school book, a kid with a worn off shoe, a boy who so wants a yellow balloon. We definitely should be happy that we have won the Golden Palm and the Golden Lion and all the other prizes, and that couple of Iranian directors are known around the world. Nevertheless, we have to also be aware of how Iran is portrayed in these movies.

Hollywood has long been selling the US as the “lost paradise” which accepts everyone, from whatever race and nationality they are and whatever their color of skin is. But, is that actually what is happening in the US? People think they have gotten more familiar with a society, its culture and the dynamics in there, after they watch a movie from that region. Similarly, when they watch an Iranian movie, of the kind described in the above, they will think, “So, this is Iran!” They will find Iran a country of deserts where kids run after shoes.

Does the presence of Golshifteh Farahani and Mitra Hajjar lead to a more realistic presentation of Iran in the world? Do you go and watch an Afghan singer and then imagine her as an artist who has fled her land of misery using her talents? Does her fabulous voice help you forget the Taliban and the devastated Buda statues for a second? Or to picture prosperous Afghan cities full of colors?

Some Iranian sources have reported that groups of Iranians complained against the making of the sandwich. Is it really useless to have the name of Iran registered as the host for the longest sandwich in Iran when we own the record for death in our roads? It is correct that the money spent on that sandwich could have been put to use in making a lot of sandwiches for the poor. But, still, is it pointless to not fight against the anti-Iran coverage?

The longest sandwich was prepared on Friday morning in Mellat Park, Tehran, and received a lot of attention in the international media. Just look for “Iran+Sandwich” in google to see some of the reactions.

700 kilos of ostrich, 700 kilos of chicken, 100 kilos of green peppers, 120 kilos of onions, 500 kilos of Mayonnaise, 700 kilos of mushrooms, 700 kilos of mustard sauce, 500 kilos of vegetable oil, 1 kilos of Saffron, and 2 kilos of caraway seeds were put into a sandwich. That was how the people of Tehran were brought together in Mellat Park for the world to see that Iranians do own shoes, and Handy cams, and parks. That they eat sandwiches and ride Hummers. That they do not look for a shoe in the sewage.

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.

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

It was in the news that,

A council employee in Japan has been punished after officials discovered he had logged more than 780,000 hits on porn websites at work in nine months (BBC).

BBC also adds that, “At his peak, the worker was looking at almost 10,000 pages a day” and Reuters reports that he has been “spending up to three hours a day”. Telegraph then goes as far as claiming that he “saw 780,000 porn websites in 9 months”. Finally USA Today realizes  that these numbers do not match up.

I think what has happened here is the confusion of “page hit” and “browsing an actual page”. Right now, you have caused dozens of “page hits” on Kamangir’s server, one for every element on the page. That does not mean that you have watched thirty or forty pages on kamangir.net. Not that even this would make this man less of a porn freak.

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).

Picture from Ahmadinejad’s ongoing trip to Hamedan – Fars

Masih 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.

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.

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.

[youtube]xuDc_wYzjis[/youtube]

email address, website, you know they are all the same (Direct Link).

I talked to Ido Hartogsohn of the Israeli website Nana last month, about the Persian blogosphere and how its members manage to communicate with Israeli fellows despite all the tensions between the two countries. The piece was originally published in Hebrew, but Lisa Goldman has been kind enough to translate the whole piece in English. The title is “Are the deepening connections between the Israeli and Iranian blogospheres the way to peace?“. Read the rest on Lisa’s blog.

Update: Maverick News Media comments on the piece.

Archive: This is copied from Lisa.

THE IRANIAN CONNECTION

Are the deepening connections between the Israeli and Iranian blogospheres the way to peace?

By Ido Hartogsohn / Nana

16 January 2008

On 25 December 2007, at the University of Tel Aviv, the Netvision Institute held its third conference on the struggle to maintain freedom of information on the Internet. The main topic was Iran: the attitude toward the Internet in Iran, Iranian hackers and also our Persian neighbour’s rapidly expanding blogosphere.

The conference did not go unnoticed in Iran. Five days later, on December 30, the Iranian news site Khedmat, which is considered close to former president Khatami, published an item under the headline, “Zionists Express Interest in the Subject of the Internet in Iran.”

“‘The Internet in Iran and its various facets’ was the subject of a conference that took place at Tel Aviv University in Occupied Palestine,” reported Khedmat. “The conference participants discussed the role of the Internet in contemporary society, and Internet struggles. Iranian blogs, rap music and the role of the Internet in creating other types of music that imitate Western culture were amongst the subjects that interested the Zionists.”

The article further reported that a committee of “Zionist experts” criticized Iran’s limited access to some internet sites.

Israel is a concept that does not exist

The Israeli media has been paying attention to the lively Iranian blogosphere for several years now. Amongst other things, the visit to Israel of Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan (Hebrew link) was mentioned in several international media outlets. From the perspective of the Israeli reader, Iranian bloggers are a comforting alternative source of information about another Iran – one that is friendlier and less aggressive to Israel. Over the years, articles about the Iranian blogosphere portrayed it as a different voice from a society that was usually shown in the Israeli media as closed and extremist.

Recently, the Iranian blogosphere has been the subject of academic studies in Israel. In the talk she gave at the Netvision conference, for example, Dr. Liora Handelman-Bavor said that, eight years after the launch of the first Persian language blog, “The [Iranian] regime’s attempts to suppress the blogosphere have largely failed.” Dr. Handelman-Bavor claimed that the Iranian blogosphere was intimately connected with alternative culture, the graffiti phenomenon and street art.

And now, based on the item in Khedmat, it seems that the Iranian media is aware of Israel’s interest in the Persian blogosphere.

But according to Arash Kamangir, an Iranian blogger who lives in Canada, few Iranian bloggers are aware of the interest they have aroused in Israel. “You probably know that the term ‘Israel’ does not exist in the official language of the regime of Iran. Even in my passport I am banned from traveling to ‘Occupied Palestine,’” he wrote in response to the questions I sent by email. “The average Iranian blogger is very anxious about being known as a person ‘who has connections with Israeli guys.’ A very interesting example happened a short while ago, and I believe it describes the whole situation.”

When Ahmadinejad moved to WordPress

As a means of illustrating the extent to which Iranian bloggers must be careful to avoid contact with Israelis, Kamangir offered an amusing-yet-sad anecdote about an incident that occurred last summer. This incident also shows how ordinary people who are citizens of enemy states find themselves making contact – albeit of a hesitant, groping kind.

“A friend of mine writes a blog about technology,” recounts Kamangir. “And a very helpful plugin for this system is called FireStats and is designed by an Israeli blogger. When my friend started using FireStats he was so fascinated by the functionalities that he wrote a post about it, in Persian of course. The next day he found out that he is getting hits from a Hebrew page. It turns out that the Israeli guys are also amazed that an Iranian person is using their code. So, they write a Hebrew post which reads, in English, ‘The formula to peace with Iran.’”

Omri, the Israeli blogger who discovered the post by Kamangir’s friend with the technology blog, wrote an amusing post that describes an imaginary conversation between Ahmadinejad and the leaders of Iran, in which the latter warn the president against attacking Israel because, “FireStats is developed in Givatayim, so if we destroy Gush Dan [Greater Tel Aviv] there won’t be any more versions!”

One of the Israeli readers surfed over to the Iranian’s blog and left a comment – in Hebrew. This apparently freaked the Iranian blogger out a bit. He deleted the comment and went over to the Israeli blog, where he left a comment asking for an explanation of what had been written about him. And that is how a discussion in awkward English was initiated between Iranian and Israeli bloggers. But a Utopian dialogue that unites “enemy” bloggers in an amusing exchange about politics and WordPress can be taken only so far.

“I wrote a piece titled ‘Iran-Israel Peace through a WordPress Plugin,” recounts Arash. “Because of the sensitivity of the issue I sent an email to my friend asking for his permission before I would publish the post. The answer was very short: ‘Arash, you know this can be dangerous.’””

So Iranian bloggers cannot write openly about Israeli bloggers?

“When Iranian bloggers have to censor themselves when it comes to sharing the mutual passion for scripts and other nerdy stuff with Israeli fellows, I guess showing any attention to ‘the Israeli interest in the Iranian blogosphere’ is out of context.”

So why are you not more cautious about entering into contact with Israeli bloggers?

“I live outside Iran, in Canada. There is a saying in Persian, “When you are drowning it does not matter if it’s one meter or 100 meters.”

Posts from the Underground

Estimates of the number of blogs in Iran range from 170,000 to 700,000. These are certainly impressive numbers, but Kamangir says that they are not an accurate reflection of Iranian society – particularly in the sense that the people who live in the less developed areas are unrepresented. “Most Iranian bloggers are middle class university students,” he writes. According to Kamangir, Iranian bloggers tend to be more liberal than the rest of the population.

On the other hand, Kamangir stresses the importance of differentiating between the opinions expressed by the Iranian regime and those of the ordinary people. “A friend of mine who came from Iran a few days ago was telling me that it is quite common to see Iranians criticize the regime, even using offensive words, in the public transit.”

“At the same time,” continues Kamangir, “A big portion of the Iranians have been exposed to the propaganda of the regime for decades and thus have unintentionally become ambassadors of the Islamic entity in many aspects…there is a big difference between an Iranian who is living inside Iran and the one who has had the experience of living in a free society, such as Canada.” According to Kamangir, when Iranian leave Iran they “start to question what they have been fed by the regime for a long time and start to think independently.”

“Blogs written by Iranian students abroad play a major role for these ‘new-born’ Iranians,” he writes. “Fortunately, this trend of free thinking is not limited to the Iranians who live outside the motherland. There is a huge number of blogs written by Iranians who live inside Iran and these blogs substantially question the official opinions of the regime. Interestingly, the questioning covers issues ranging from the official narration of Islam to human rights and sex.”

A different image of Israel

Although the circumstances are not yet ripe for an Iranian-Israeli blogger connection that could be a contra to the enmity of the Iranian and Israeli regimes, Kamangir writes that “…very strong links have been formed between the Iranian and the Israeli blogospheres. The strongest one, which I am aware of, is our communications with Lisa Goldman and her blog, On the Face. From time to time I translate her posts to Persian and the statistics of my blog, which I too get from FireStats, shows that a lot of my visitors follow her posts passionately. There are of course other Israeli bloggers whose blogs the Iranian bloggers follow, but Lisa has become almost an icon* for many Iranian bloggers I have talked to.”

“The Israeli blogosphere in English is a window into Israeli society for Iranians,” said Lisa Goldman in an interview for Nana10. “That is why I often translate items from Israeli blogs [in Hebrew], in order to expose a different view. Because the most interesting things written about Israel are written only in Hebrew.”

Goldman, a Canadian-born freelance journalist, spoke about some of the fascinating encounters created by the connection between the Iranian and Israeli blogospheres.

“I do receive emails from Iranians. It is as if they want us to know that they are not all as they are made to seem in the media, and I’ve had some fascinating encounters. There was someone in Tehran who used to chat with me via Messenger. He was a really intelligent, knowledgeable guy who knew excellent English. We used to chat about the situation in Iran, the elections, democracy and Israel, about which he was remarkably well informed. He even spoke a little Hebrew. But he refused to tell me his real name, and he was pretty paranoid. Each time he logged on, he was at a different computer and using a different online identity. I felt as though I were receiving messages from the Resistance. It was an amazing experience, but one day he disappeared and I haven’t heard from him since.”

How do Iranian bloggers find your blog?

“Look, I try to show a more human, complex and nuanced picture of Israeli life. They’re sort of stuck behind the Middle Eastern version of the Iron Curtain, but they’re very curious about us. They want to find out more, and it’s as if they’re extending their hands out through the Iron Curtain. The fact that I don’t write only about politics, but also about my day-to-day life in Tel Aviv, shows them a lively, modern, Levantine city that they would never see in the mainstream media.”

Fewer reasons to kill one another

So are blogs the way to create unmediated contact between Iranians and Israelis who, it sometimes seems, are led by politicians whose careers were built on a mutual agreement to issue bellicose threats against one another? When the media on one side serves the interests of the regime, and the media on the other side sells newspapers with lurid headlines about existential threats caused by Iranian nuclear warheads, perhaps the blogosphere could be an alternative source of information.

Eli Cohen, a senior research manager at Netvision, says, “The internet facilitates connections between individuals and bridges between cultures. Once you neutralize the political landmine it is possible, with the help of the internet, to create wonderful interpersonal relationships between human beings and to see that both your sorrows and your joys are very similar.”

Goldman, too, sees blogs as a tool for creating understanding between peoples. “We must find a way to get past the pre-conceived notions and one-dimensional portraits presented by the mainstream media,” she says. “They just perpetuate conflicts. I think that if you hear a human voice from the other side, that’s the beginning of the way.”

“I am not a sociologist. Neither am I a philosopher. However, I do know that when people talk they find less reasons to kill each other,” agrees Kamangir. “And this is what blogging is so generously providing us with.”

*I swear I did not encourage Arash to call me an icon.

In a piece titled “The reality of the recent confrontation (?) of the Iranian boats with Americans vessels” (Question mark used by the source), the state-controlled website Tabnak seems to claim that the speedboats which apparently threatened to explode American warships were in fact American, or at least definitely not Iranian. The piece reads [Persian],

Tabnak reporter from Bandar Abbas [the harbor city close to the location of the incident] revealed the real event which happened on the Strait of Hormoz.

Reportedly, Iran has established a control post on the Strait of Hormoz in order to control the passage of ships through the strait and ask them about their destination and activities through wireless.

On the day of the incident, while American ships were passing, as they regularly do, the center contacted them for information. At the time, five boats were present close to the ships. Interestingly, after a 24-hour delay, Pentagon announces that the ships have been contacted by the boats and that the message has contained a threat in English. More interestingly, on the footage, the section where it is said “you’ll explode after an amount of time”, the actual mentioned amount is unintelligible. Most definitely, the ship would have not been able to recognize whether the message had come from the boats or from the post on the harbor.

I have tried to translate the piece with all its ambiguities. Therefore, if you do not understand what they mean, I do not fully understand the Persian text either. Apparently, Tabnak is asserting that this was a scam and that the boats were harmless or even non-Iranian.

Tabnak is considered by many to be the cover for Baztab, a state-controlled website recently filtered due to internal struggles in the Islamic Republic. Interestingly, Baztab English, which is still functional, has two reports on the incident, none of which questions the authenticity of the event (one two).

Fars News also reports that an IRGC senior commander has called th footage a “clumsy fabrication”, mainly because the speedboats in the footage do not carry the “holy” flag of Iran.

“When trafficking in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman to protect the security of the region, all IRGC’s naval vessels carry the holy flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but in this fake film, Americans have left this primary and crucial point unheeded,” the source further added.

Update: In fact, pictures taken in IRGC drills in the Persian Gulf show that not always the “holy” flag is carried by the vessels. The flags on these two speedboats are definitely “holy”, according to some Muslims, but they are Islamic slogans and signs, not the Iranian flag.

Important Update: This picture is taken in a drill IRGC has been a part of (source) and the boat which seems to have no flag on it does look like the boat in the American footage, at least to me. The picture is taken on April 6th, 2007, in the Persian Gulf during the “Great Prophet Joint Drill”.

Update: The speedboat is visible in the minute 4:43 in the footage provided by the Islamic Republic and it does not carry an Iranian flag.

Starting last month, I have been working on a project which I have titled “KiBeKi“, or “What’s up?” in English. The project aims at developing a software robot which would crawl inside the Persian blogosphere in order to generate the connectivity graph of this dynamic place as well as to extract other information.

At this moment, the robot has found 47317 sources, 3408 of which have been completely analyzed and 30866 of which have been determined to be Persian blogs but still await full analysis. During this process, the robot has discovered 2945 email addresses which are used by Persian bloggers. The robot is working right now and is gathering more information by the minute.

It is worth to mention that the robot does not have language recognition skills yet, and thus is only able to spot Persian blogs based on the server they are located on, plus the clues I manually give to it. Therefore, although there are many Persian blogs on blogspot and wordpress, these tentative results mainly include blogs found on Persian-language servers such as blogfa and persianblog.

This graph shows the email services used by Persian bloggers, as found so far by the robot. Clearly, for the group analyzed here, yahoo email is the most favorite service by far. gmail and hotmail follow with gmail being about six times more popular.

This graph shows the servers on which the spotted Persian blogs are located. The graph is titled as showing the “scripts” because there are many on-domain blogs which use wordpress, movable type or even blogger. Clearly, for the blogs analyzed here, blogfa.com is the most favorite service.

I am ready to share this information with any serious researcher in order to carry out a joint research project which would hopefully result in the publication of the generated results and analysis. If you have any interest in the subject, or know of any similar research going on anywhere, please leave a comment or send me an email to kamangirblog@yahoo.ca.

You might remember this post: MP’s Website attacks Kamangir. Since then I have been in contact with one of the editors of the Pajamas Media. We have been working on a piece which is now posted with the title “It’s Rough Out There In the Iranian Blogosphere“.

I copy the text here for archival purposes.

It’s Rough Out There In the Iranian Blogosphere.

An Iranian student at a Canadian university has been accused by fellow bloggers of being a government agent and by the Iranian regime of being “the number one source of anti-Iran news from the Iranian blogosphere for the neo-con media.” Nonetheless, Arash Kamangir says he has no intention of stopping.

By Arash Kamangir

You can’t lose your temper in the Iranian blogosphere – and whatever you do, you mustn’t lose your sense of humor.

We Iranians generally have one of the sharpest and most resilient senses of humor that I have ever seen. Some theories relate that to the decades of oppression, during which people have only been able to use indirect methods to express themselves.

Even today, you only need to ride the bus in Tehran to hear the latest rumors about the Ayatollahs and the regime through the jokes people trade and laugh at. But if you try to move from humor to a more direct way of expressing your opinions, you’ll likely end up crossing a couple of the unspoken red lines and eventually people will start yelling at you.

A lack of free speech has basically halted constructive discussion from developing and years of dictatorship have caused massive resentment, even among the ordinary people.

What makes things worse is the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iranians have been killed during these years, some executed by the regime and some killed on the various fronts of the supposed war “to conquer Qods [Israel]“. This has made all political argument incredibly sensitive – lives have been lost for every point argued.

As a result, any successful discussion with a group of Iranians has to start with a long introduction through which one has to clearly declare his positions on key issues.

And if you dare to express your views in a public forum, it’s incredibly easy to be accused of being “on the payroll of the Islamic Republic”, “being an apologist”, or at the other end of the spectrum “a warmonger Iran-hating traitor”.

The majority of the accusations come from sincere people who are irritated by politics and political games. But then there are the the opportunists, bloggers who thrive on accusing others in order to promote their image as the “reasonable observer” – throwing horrible accusations at those who dare to speak out on sensitive issues.

I have been accused of being on the Islamic Republic payroll in the past on multiple occasions. Most of the people who made those accusations are now amongst my good blog-friends. That’s because we sat down – either virtually or in person – and talked it out. Then came the accusations of being anti-Iran activist, including charges of “involvement in a filthy plot against Iran”.

When I started blogging, on October 17th, 2004, about three years ago, my goal was to improve my English towards helping me score higher in the upcoming TOEFL exam, which I had to pass as a step in my admission to the Canadian university in which I am a graduate student. In those early days, and months, Kamangir was a lonely blog somewhere on the outskirts of the blogosphere. Soon after my wife and I came to Canada, I started writing about politics more explicitly. On February 25th, 2006, a post I had written about a blast in a shrine in Iraq attracted the attention of high-traffic bloggers. The next day, after the number of hits of my blog jumped to 600, from the steady 25 of the past year, I had mixed feelings of joy and horror.

The best move I made was on May 1st, 2007, when I started writing a Persian blog as well. As of today, according to Alexa, half the visitors of my blogs visit Persian Kamangir. I have shifted a large portion of my efforts to my Persian blog in order to have the opportunity communicating with the Iranian youth. As we discuss issues of mutual interest such as human rights and fanaticism I am able to glean a lot of information about Iran through Persian blogs, comments and emails.

The result of this communication is translated into English and published in my English blog.

My efforts to help the flow of information from the Iranian blogosphere into the English-speaking audience and media has deeply irritated those who want to build a wall of denial to hide their atrocities.

As a result, on October 27th, 2007, Alef, a website known to be owned by a high-ranking conservative Iranian MP, published a piece about my blog. The report referred to my ongoing research on the state-run media’s incomplete quote from the Norwegian Foreign Minister’s speech at the United Nations University in Tokyo.

“He claims that the sentence ‘West must be more concerned with their own arsenal, rather than pointing at Iran and North Korea’ is made up. The blogger mentions that he will follow the story with the Foreign Ministry of Norway”, wrote the author. The piece then followed with mentioning my real name accompanied by two pictures of me and describing me as “a resident of Canada whose blog is frequently referred to by the media and the warmonger neo-con blogs (including Pajamas Media and Gateway Pundit)”.

It followed, “His blog is the number one source of anti-Iran news from the Iranian blogosphere for the neo-con media. The content translated by him, regarding President’s speeches, Iranian missiles, stonings, executions, the social security project, and so on, have been enthusiastically followed by the neo-con blogging networks. During last few months, he has increased his presence in the Persian blogging atmosphere, and also Iranian social networks, in order to direct anti-Iran content.”

While public disclosure of my real name, in connection with my blog, has jeopardized my safety, it wasn’t the first time this vital information is spoken of publicly. On May 6th, 2007, another expat Iranian blogger disclosed my real identity for the first time in a post on his blog.

One of the pictures of me used in Alef’s piece is in fact a rare picture I had used in my biography in an academic journal paper related to my engineering degree. Earlier, the other blogger referred to that paper on his blog, when mentioning my real name.

I wasn’t surprised to find him accusing me of being involved in a “big filthy plot” against Iran in a Persian online community a short while after Alef’s piece came out.

In a society so politicized, it is important to pierce through the layers of confusion and look at what is happening at the core.

The fact is that Iran is rapidly deteriorating in terms of many measures of civilized life (the last one was being ranked 162 among 168 countries in terms of freedom of press, by RSF). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg — there’s the terror of the sharia police, the increasing drug use among young people, and other social problems.

In the international arena, Iran is on the verge of war because of its president’s behavior and because the Islamic Republic seems obsessed with what it calls “peaceful nuclear technology.”

In this environment I say – let’s talk with those who are willing to talk and ignore those interested in accusations and flame-throwing.

With my homeland falling apart so rapidly, losing one’s temper or getting offended by flames and throwing in the towel is the last luxury we can afford. We Iranians need to harness any tool for constructive discussion we can get our hands on, and right now, the Internet and the blogosphere is the best forum available.

Arash “Kamangir” is an Iranian graduate student living in Canada. He named his blog after the legend of a heroic archer who saves Iran.

You might know that I was following strange claims on Islamic Republic’s Press TV, also mentioned in Persian in Fars News [Persian] and IRNA [Persian]. The claim is that the Norwegian Foreign Minister has urged the West “to look at their nuke arsenal”, rather than pressuring Iran to dismantle its nuclear program.

I managed to contact a few people in the Foreign Ministry, but being a freelance blogger I did not have a lot of chances there. So, I resorted to the next move, being contacting journalists I know. Thanks to Farid Pouya, I had the chance to talk to a Norwegian journalist. Then, another friend found the text of the speech and, well, it seems someone has “forgotten” to refer to many of the sentences Jonas Gahr Store said at the UN University in Tokyo.

Looking at the text of his speech at UNU, Press TV’s report fails to deliver a full account of his reference to Iran. Store said,

Today, resolving the issues of Iran and North Korea is critical. The continued international concern over the nuclear activities of the Islamic Republic of Iran and North Korea illustrates the need for compliance with the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the demands of the UN Security Council and of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

…We have also seen some signs of positive development from Iran. The IAEA has made great efforts to resolve outstanding issues related to Iran’s past nuclear activities. But there are still too many uncertainties surrounding the present activities that have to be sorted out. Only Iran can deliver on that account. Iran must allow full and unconditional inspections by the IAEA. And it must comply with the demands of the international community to suspend all nuclear activities. By doing so, Iran would contribute to a negotiated political outcome to the benefit of all the parties concerned.

oth North Korea and Iran must be brought to realise that they have everything to gain by discontinuing their nuclear programmes. However, the challenges before us goes beyond Iran and North Korea.

There are still some 27 000 nuclear warheads in existence. This does not make sense nearly 20 years after the end of the Cold War. The disarmament process must be brought back on track.

The Islamic Republic media outlet, Press TV, misses the criticism and jumps to the sentence which seems to suite their purpose.

The challenge goes beyond Iran and North Korea. I believe that those who argue against these countries need to look at their own credibility to do so,

This sentence is indeed mentioned by Store, as seen in the video of his speech, but after a long introduction (Thanks to Jeremy Hedley from UNU for the link).

Also, the two Persian state-run sources provide two different translations of the sentence mentioned by Press TV. Fars writes a sentence which matches Press TV’s. IRNA, however, writes,

I believe that those who argue against Iran and North Korea need to look at their own nuclear warfare capabilities and reduce their own arsenal.

Update: Not everyone liked this: MP’s Website attacks Kamangir

Important Update: I had written,

Press TV’s report, however, includes

The challenge goes beyond Iran and North Korea. I believe that those who argue against these countries need to look at their own credibility to do so,

The second part of this sentence does not exist on the complete text, as provided by the UNU.

As Jeremey Hedley from UNU pointed out, the text does exist in the video of his speech, but not in the text of the speech. So, I correct this. He did mention this sentence but after a long discussion about Islamic Republic’s tense situation. The Islamic Republic media missed the introduction.

This is a comment I recently wrote for The Manitoban, the University of Manitoba students’ newspaper. I should thank Michael Silicz, the editor of The Manitoban, for all his help.

An Iranian cure for an Iranian problem

The inevitable regime change in Iran and how Canada and the world can help

For a country with a double-digit inflation rate, regime change is only a matter of time. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s humiliation at Columbia University and the criticism that followed it in the Iranian government ranks was only one other sign that the group which rules the Islamic Republic is shrinking. It is a bitter fact, however, that during its 30 years in power, the Islamic Republic has successfully dissipated or humiliated any political alternative. This leaves no other appropriate option on the table, making the chance for a “velvet revolution” grim. Nevertheless, the regime is indeed under harsh and active criticism by a large group of people who do not constitute a classical opposition party.

A few months back, the Iranian judiciary announced that Jafar Kiani was to be stoned in public on charges of adultery. He and his partner were sentenced to death because they had lived together for more than 10 years after they carried out the Islamic marriage rituals without registering so. Soon the news was out that Jafar had in fact helped his wife, Mokarrameh Ebrahimi, who is still behind the bars, escape from an abusive husband who had been forcing her to sleep with strangers for money. The couple was arrested after her original husband raised charges against the couple.

In a matter of a few hours the Iranian “blogosphere” erupted. Posts shared phone numbers of government offices, and blogs invited everyone to call up and mention their disgust. The next day, the state-run media outlets carried reports about the “false mentions of a planned stoning.” It was a moment of joy and glory that unfortunately ended horribly. Only two weeks after that first announcement, judiciary officials transferred Jafar to a tiny village called Aghche-kand, in the province of Qazvin and buried him up to his waist. The next day many blogs carried pictures of the bloody stones which were used to kill him. Mokarrameh was called up to the prison administration the next day to be informed of her saviour’s fate. Nevertheless, probably because of the wave of disgust and condemnation that had followed the stoning, Larijani, the head of the Human Rights Commission in the judiciary, called the stoning “the personal decision of the judge,” although he defended stoning as a “punishment.” The tip, the pictures, and the updates about the stoning were all sent out by Persian bloggers inside Iran, but many of those who orchestrated the awareness cause were sitting in the security of their armchairs in North America and Europe.

After the first few months of shock, I have met with other Iranian students in Canada, and we have started to rethink the Sharia-based governance in Iran. The matter of fact is, the average Iranian youth is raised under the grip of the Islamic propaganda machine. As soon as they are free from the poisonous atmosphere of Islamic fanaticism, rational thinking kicks in. For many, this is through blogging, the modern means of international discussion and learning. The same people may once have considered stoning “a legitimate Sharia punishment,” but after they inhale freedom of thought they start to question. This questioning then spreads and infiltrates Iran through blogs.

If there is to be any chance for a democratic system to blossom in Iran, it has to start from the Iranian people questioning the irrational aspects of the Islamic practice that rules Iran. No smart bomb can ever target the dungeons of confusion and twisted argument that the Iranian regime has prepared itself to survive in. It is the Iranians, and only the Iranians, who can sneak into these ideological strongholds and shed some light. It is quite embarrassing, and at the same time quite common, to hear a well-educated Iranian speak of stoning, strangling, and other degrading actions as “acceptable” and “prescribed by the religion.” That’s because the chaos of the “War on Terror” has turned the focus away from the Sharia-based governance, the main source of these horrid actions, even helping it grow stronger.

Let more Iranians breathe freedom. No single Iranian has been ever involved in a suicide attack anywhere in the world. Our politicians speak of “martyrdom,” but, unless it has been to defend the motherland, no Iranian has ever reached for arms. It happens quite frequently that a person passing airport security with an Iranian passport is asked for a “random check”. Remembering the horror the 9-11 attacks caused, many of us patiently follow the orders. At the same time, many Iranians blame the inconvenience on the Islamic Republic for its financial and political generosity to terrorist groups. Persecuting average Iranians for what the regime of Iran, whose legitimacy is seriously questionable for many Iranians as it is, only serves in the favour of the Islamic Republic propaganda machine which seeks stories to prove the theory that “the West hates Muslims and/or Iranians.”

Accepting Iranian students into Canadian, American, and other universities in the developed world is the best way to help the Iranians communicate with the reality, not through the deceitful channels of the regime. These hardworking individuals not only bring creativity to their hosting countries but also act as sources to send out the message to the Iranian public that there is more to life than living under an Islamic dictatorship.

Two very good Winnipegger friends Julienne and Simon, and I chatted a few days ago in Tom Horton’s about Persian blogosphere. Some of the things we talked about is mentioned in the article “The power and pitfalls of ‘citizen journalism’“, by Julienne Isaacs, with files from Simon Charles, published in the University of Winnipeg Student Weekly.

Iran is a hotbed of active blogs. Impressively, Persian (Farsi) is the second-most common language of the blogosphere after English, tied only with French. Iranian youth connect online in ways that prove impossible in the country’s hard-line fundamentalist environment. They blog about politics, or to meet people of the opposite sex, or to speak out about what they see happening in the streets of their cities. Blogging is becoming so common in Iran that the mullahs, Iran’s religious leaders, have begun training bloggers in the Holy City of Qom, in an effort to keep the balance of voices in Iran from shifting too far from their agenda.

“Think of it this way,” Iranian blogger Arash Kamangir advised me in an interview last week. “Canadians use Facebook to talk about weddings. In Iran, people blog about public executions.”

I spoke over the phone with the bright and well-informed Canadian journalist Terry Galvin. An excerpt of our discussion has been mentioned in his new article “What Iranian Dissidents Need, and why they deserve more from North America’s left.”

In the United States, a debate is raging over whether dissidents in Iran should accept U.S. State Department funds aimed at assisting the regime’s adversaries (Kamangir says it’s foolish to take money from Americans; it just provides the theocracy with another pretext to criminalize dissent).

…”It makes a lot of difference to people in Iran when they see that people outside Iran are trying to help with protests and demonstrations,” Kamangir told me, “but there is also a lot of text and lots of images coming out of Iran every day. I just observe, and then I post things. I don’t really engage in theoretical debates. I just observe.”