Protected: American Muslims in the Obama Era and What We Don’t Know About Them? (5 videos)
September 14, 2011 Enter your password to view comments
How Lesbians Live in Iran
The Daily Beast, August 27 2011- A controversial new movie explores the lives of lesbians forced to live in the shadows. Omid Memarian talks to women in Iran who say the movie doesn’t do their predicament justice.
Four years after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared there are no gays in Iran during a speech at Columbia University, an Iranian-American filmmaker courageously portrays an unusual story of two Iranian lesbians who struggle under religious and cultural repression to explore their sexuality.
Iranians are, in general, culturally hesitant to publicly talk about their private lives and sexuality, so the sex scenes between two schoolgirls Atefeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemi) in Circumstance, take the viewer to the most extreme parts of Iranian underground lifestyle.
While Maryam Keshavarz’s portrayal is bold, and addresses a major taboo in Iran, many lesbians who actively live and love in the shadows there say the movie is not necessarily a true portrayal. Read more
August 28, 2011 Leave a Comment
American Muslims in the Obama Era (Multimedia)
American Muslims: Prejudice, Politics and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Obama Era (Multimedia)
August 20, 2011 Leave a Comment
New Oil Minister Cements Ties with Military
"Putting an IRGC commander in place as oil minister completes the military's domination of Iran's economy, politics and military- intelligence apparatus."
NEW YORK, Aug 8, 2011 (IPS) - Last week’s appointment of a ranking member of Iran’s influential Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as the country’s new oil minister could lead to a more unaccountable and unpredictable military with greater influence on the government in Tehran, analysts say.
The IRGC currently controls Iran’s most powerful intelligence- security arm, which played a key role in the post-election crackdown of 2008 and the intimidation, arrests and imprisonment of hundreds of political dissidents.
It has built up a sprawling business empire since the 1979 Revolution, with annual revenues estimated at some 12 billion dollars and investments in sectors ranging from oil, gas and petrochemicals to cars, bridges and roads. It also controls the paramilitary Basij militia. Read more
August 8, 2011 Leave a Comment
Take That, Tehran
The Slate, Tuesday, July 12, 2011 -This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. A Future Tense conference on the promise and limitations of using technology to spread democracy will be held at the New America Foundation on July 13. (For more information and to sign up for the event, please visit the NAF website.)
The Obama administration has begun taking action to bring Internet freedom to Iran. This sounds wonderful.
But this approach ignores two key factors: 1) Iran already has the upper hand in this battle; 2) the current approach is dangerous to activists and focuses on too few people. If the U.S. really wants to bring free-flowing information to Iran, it needs to rethink its current strategy.
I grew up in Iran and worked as a journalist there until 2004, when I—along with 20 other bloggers, Web technicians, and journalists—was arrested by security forces for my blog, in what was the first major raid against bloggers and online activists. After two months of mistreatment and solitary confinement, I was released and soon after moved to the United States. Read more
July 12, 2011 Leave a Comment
Why Did Iran Say “NO” to the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights?
During the past weeks, a lively momentum has been created amongst Iranian activists to help the UN Special Rapporteur in compiling his report on the country.
Huffington Post, Posted: 7/5/11- Less than a week after the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed former Maldivian Foreign Minister Ahmed Shaheed as Special Rapporteur on Human Rights for Iran, Head of Iran’s Judiciary, Sadegh Larijani, in a TV interview said, “accepting the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights is not our policy.”
In March, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution establishing a monitoring mechanism for Iran and appointing a Special Rapporteur. Last month, three candidates were considered for this position. The Iranian side, knowing that a Special Rapporteur would be immediately appointed soon, sent a message to Geneva that the Rapporteur on Iran should have three qualifications: Be a man, be a Muslim, and not be from an Arab country. One of the male candidates didn’t seem to cause any controversy for Tehran; Ahmed Shaheed’s appointment met all of Iran’s requirements. Read more
July 5, 2011 Leave a Comment
New Arsenal Emerges in Struggle over Iran’s Internet
From left: Ehsan Norouzi, Issac Mao, Cyrus Farivar, and Mehdi Yahyanejad
NEW YORK, Jun 20, 2011 (IPS) - Millions of Iranians who have lived under an intense level of internet filtering and advanced monitoring systems for years may soon benefit from new technology that sidesteps the censors.
Last week, the New York Times reported that “the [Barack] Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy ’shadow’ Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.”
One of these projects has been dubbed “Internet in a suitcase”. According to the Times, the suitcase - financed with a two-million- dollar State Department grant - could be smuggled across the border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet. Read more
June 20, 2011 Leave a Comment
The U.S. Pressures Iran on Human Rights
Huffington Post, Posted May 20, 2011- Many may be critical of America’s human rights policies, particularly its double standards when it comes to the records of its allies in the Middle East and beyond, not to mention in Bahrain. But human rights activists and organizations have welcomed the Obama administration’s presence at the Human Rights Council in Geneva since 2009. Like it or not, “without a strong U.S. counterweight, non-democratic states such as Cuba, Algeria, China and Pakistan joined forces to blunt the Council’s work and bully other states.”
The UN will appoint a special rapporteur for Iran in the weeks to come.
In Geneva, Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, the U.S. representative to the Council is a superstar. She is the face of U.S. human rights in town, a master of building coalitions and cooperation with different partners to make things happen. In an interview with me in Geneva, she responded to questions about the urgency and significance of establishing a monitoring mechanism for Iran, the role of politics in U.S. human rights policy, the perception of U.S. hypocrisy towards its friends and foes, her opinion about the Iranian officials’ allegations on the politicization of UN human rights mechanisms, and finally, why the U.S. is going aggressively after Iran’s human rights record. Excerpts from the interview follow: Read more
May 20, 2011 Leave a Comment
Iran Battles U.S. At UN Human Rights Council
Rights situation in Iran has been drawing the focus at the the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Credit:Omid Memarian / IPS
GENEVA, Mar 21, 2011 (IPS) - Forty-nine United Nations member-states have co-sponsored a resolution asking for a special mechanism to monitor Iran’s human rights situation, which is expected to be voted later this week at the UN Human Rights Council (HRC).
Instead of responding to the criticism in the four-week long sixteenth session of the Council, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s delegation chose to bash the human rights situation in the United States, the country leading the effort to intensify pressure on Iran.
Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, the U.S. representative to the Council, told IPS that establishing a special monitoring mechanism for Iran by the HRC is very significant. “Because the council in the past has been resistant to taking initiative on what we call country specific human rights situation,” she said.
“There is a general sense that countries are often fearful of being criticized and therefore they would protect other countries from being criticized by the council so that when it comes their turn to being criticized maybe others stick with them,” she added. Read more
March 21, 2011 Leave a Comment
Reading Ahmadinejad via Wikileaks: A Freedom Lover or a Two-Bit Dictator?
Huffington Post,Posted: 01/31/11 - In a recent article for the Atlantic, Middle East expert Reza Aslan writes that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not be the hard-line president outside observers actually thinks he is. Based on unverified WikiLeaks documents and remarks by the president himself, the author concludes that Ahmadinejad is, in fact, in favor of greater social and political freedoms and the “Persianization” of Iranian society, but is isolated among others in Iran’s current ruling establishment:
[Ahmadinejad]… is actually a reformer whose attempts to liberalize, secularize, and even “Persianize” Iran have been repeatedly stymied by the country’s more conservative factions… But if you oppose the Mullahs’ rule, yearn for greater social and political freedoms for the Iranian people, and envision an Iran that draws inspiration from the glories of its Persian past, then, believe it or not, you have more in common with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than you might have thought.”
Here is why Aslan’s characterization of Ahmadinejad is flawed: Read more
January 31, 2011 Leave a Comment
Reading the Shah, and Ayatollahs in Tehran and What the U.S. Should Learn from the History
Huffington Post- What has been the root of the U.S’. inability to develop a sustainable policy or strategy on Iran for the last 30 years? What was not learnt from the Shah’s fall in 1979 and the nature of the revolutionaries who hijacked a pro-democracy freedom movement? And what are the parallels between the Shah’s regime and the current Islamic government in Tehran?
These are the types of questions that have been raised in my extensive interview with Dr. Abbas Milani, author of the recent book, The Shah, and the Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University in California.
While the Iranian government continues to curb social and political freedom in Iran, particularly after the post-presidential unrests which resulted in killing of dozens and arresting thousands of people, the author of a recent book, The Shah, provides a comprehensive image of parallels that contributed to the fall of the Shah and is now being perpetuated by the Islamists in Tehran.
January 24, 2011 Leave a Comment
A Portrait of Iran’s Shah, in Shades of Grey
SAN FRANCISCO, California, Jan 17, 2011 (IPS) - In “The Shah”, a prominent Iranian author and scholar at Stanford University in the United States offers new insights into Iran’s modern history, including the 1953 coup, the revolution a quarter century later, and the current repressive political situation.
“If you understand why the shah of Iran fell in 1979, we understand why the Iranian government is unstable today and based on that, predict what the future of the country will be,” Abbas Milani told IPS.
Drawing on more than 400 interviews and newly released documents by the U.S. and British embassies, “The Shah” traces the rise and fall of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who died less than a year after his ouster. Read more
January 17, 2011 102 Comments
Iranian Royal Family’s Suicide Tragedy
The Daily Beast- The shah of Iran’s son took his life Tuesday, a decade after his sister died from an overdose. Omid Memarian and Roja Heydarpour on the family heartbreak and what it means for Iran. Plus, Stephen Kinzer reports on the death of the prince.
There is nothing worse for a mother than the death of a child, except, perhaps, the death of two children who took their own lives. That is what the former queen of Iran must endure now that her son, Ali-Reza Pahlavi, 44, was found dead in his home in Boston from a gunshot wound he inflicted on himself early Tuesday morning.
It isn’t the first time Farah Pahlavi has had to grieve a child who committed suicide. Just 10 years ago, former Princess Leila Pahlavi, whose young daughter suffered from anorexia and depression, took a lethal cocktail of cocaine and barbiturates, and died in her sleep at 31. Read more
January 5, 2011 62 Comments
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Brutal Artist Crackdown
The Daily Beast. December 25, 2010- The harsh sentencing of a world-renowned director prompted protests from Martin Scorsese and other artists this week. Omid Memarian on escalating repression in Iran.
When world-renowned filmmaker Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison earlier this week, the verdict reverberated both inside and outside Iran.
Not only did authorities in Tehran hand down an exceptionally harsh sentence, they also decreed that the 50-year-old Panahi will be banned from filmmaking, screenwriting and traveling abroad for the next 20 years. According to his relatives, Panahi has also been banned from talking to the media.
Along with Panahi, Muhammad Rasoulof, another filmmaker involved with Panahi’s movie, was also sentenced to six years in prison. Read more
December 25, 2010 107 Comments
Minister’s Sacking Shores Up Ahmadinejad’s Power Base
SAN FRANCISCO, California, Dec 14, 2010 (IPS) - While Iran gears up for a second round of nuclear talks with Western countries next month, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s abrupt dismissal of his foreign minister on Monday indicates a new power struggle with moderate conservatives that could alter the tone and face of Iran’s foreign policy machinery in the years to come.
Manouchehr Mottaki is the seventh cabinet minister dismissed by Ahmadinejad over the past five years, while two others have resigned. Ahmadinejad sacked Mottaki while he was on an official trip to Senegal.
Mottaki had held the portfolio since 2005. Read more
December 14, 2010 Leave a Comment