Canadian blogger faces death in Iran
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “I was born in Tehran, Iran and I’m now living and studying in London, UK,” posts Hossein ‘Hoder’ Derakhshan, 33, on his blog.
“This is my weblog in English which does not necessarily cover the same topics as my Persian weblog. The titles of these weblogs, ‘Editor: Myself’, clearly displays my motives to start blogging.”
Now Hoder, a Canadian citizen known internationally as the father of the Iranian blogosphere, is facing the death penalty Iran arrested in Iran charged with spying for Israel, says the Middle East News Service.
“Jahan News, an Iranian website affiliated with Iran’s intelligence community, reported on Monday that he admitted to spying for Israel,” says the story.
Derakshan, “moved to Canada in 2000 with his Iranian-Canadian wife, but the couple has since split,” says CTV.
“He began blogging from Toronto in both Farsi and English, helping to jumpstart a movement of online commentary in his native country.”
Ac cording to the Middle East New Service, “Two years ago, Derakhshan did not express any concern about being arrested. ‘Blogging in Iran is not something that gets you into trouble now. It’s a mainstream thing, because religious people, pro-government people have blogs and secular, totally rationalistic people also have blogs,’ he said.”
Says The Guardian »»»
He used his Canadian passport to get into Israel in 2006 on a widely publicised trip to “be a bridge between Iranian and Israeli people, who are manipulated by their own governments’ and medias’ dehumanising attitude, especially now that the possibility of some sort of violent clash is higher than ever”.
Writing in the New York Times that year, he called the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a “hardline reactionary” running one of the “most extreme governments post-revolutionary Iran has ever had”.
However, Israeli commentators noted that he had recently begun to express anti-Israeli views in his postings, defending Iran’s right to possess defensive nuclear weapons and expressing a degree of admiration for Ahmadinejad’s stance against the US.
Meir Javedanfar, a Middle East analyst, wrote on his website that attacks by Derakhshan on the former Iranian president Ayatollah Rafsanjani may have caused him to fall foul of internal power struggles in Iran.
“Derakhshan was aware that his trips to Israel could jeopardise his return to Iran,” says the story, quoting ‘Hoder’ as saying:
“Iran doesn’t recognise Israel, has no diplomatic relations with it … Too bad, but I don’t care. Fortunately, I am a citizen of Canada and I have the right to visit any country I like.”
Stay tuned.
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Middle East News Service – Iranian Blogger Could Face Death Sentence, November 19, 2008
CTV – Iran’s pioneer blogger arrested in Tehran: report, November 19, 2008
The Guardian – Iranian blogger arrested ‘as Israeli spy’, November 19, 2008
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November 20th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
The Isreali governement is a massive pile of shit and criminals and so is the Iraranian governenent.
It is more than time for the citizen of israel and Iran to get ride of these governements For the sake of humanity and the inocent victims of israel and Iran it is urgent for them to do so
or we the citizen of the world will and it will be painful.