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The Iranian Features March 8-12, 1999 / Esfand 17-21,1377 Today * Media: Radio days Recent * Rights: 160 degress * Rights: Molla or not * Elections: All is calm. For now. * Fiction: A new destiny * Cover story: Common sense Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday email us Friday, March 12, 1999 Media Radio days Serving the "Finglishy" community in Virginia and on the Net By Babak Yektafar It started slowly as a one-hour, once-a-week show about three years ago. The first few shows where truly fun. I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn't care because I had no listeners. Aside from producing the content and performing, I had to run the audio mixing board as well. I was going to be irreverent and wild. I would speak perfect Finglish (Farsi-English) since this was to be a program for the Finglishy generation. I would play cool, on-the-edge music of the world. I would talk about Morad Barghi, Live Aid, Motel Ghoo, Lesbian Dial-A-Date, Chattanooga, Planet Hollywood, Gol Gov Zaboon and Chai Latte. I would be the Iranian (albeit less controversial) Howard Stern. Little did I know ... GO TO FEATURE Go to top Thursday March 11, 1999 Rights 160 degrees A reversal of sorts in attitudes towards human rights By Hossein Bagher Zadeh The pivotal themes of the ongoing debates ... are civil society and the rule of law. Both these themes are used by their proponents as instruments to discredit violence - the latter being a hallmark of the revolutionary power since the foundation of the Islamic Republic. And the remarkable thing is that they seem to be actually winning the argument. Today, even the most hard-line elements inside the regime are trying to forward their positions by resorting to the principle of the rule of law, and rejecting violence in words - though not in deeds. This in itself is a major achievement: the language of violence is being discredited under the Islamic Republic. Today, not only the reformists, commonly known as the "2nd of Khordad Front", condemn violence and lawlessness but also their opponents are increasingly trying to distance themselves from any act of violence ... GO TO FEATURE Go to top Rights Molla or not Concern over Mohsen Kadivar's arrest, even though he's a clergyman By Emami Could [the] lack of sensitivity [towards Kadivar's arrest] be attributed to the penchant for the dead and the martyrs which is so engrained in our psyches that even after many years of living in the west one would still react to injustice and brutality when someone is actually killed? Or is it, perhaps, the anti-religious, modernist outlook of so many of us that militates against defending a molla and getting unduly involved in some "in-fighting" that is going on out there? ... GO TO FEATURE Go to top Wednesday March 10, 1999 Elections All is calm. For now. The council elections showed a desire for change By Laleh Khalili Something is simmering under the surface. The recent Council Elections and the extraordinary campaign period leading up to it has been affected by the quiet and not so quiet gathering of forces unseen. While the Tehran elections were a major reflection of the politics at national level, once one steps outside the capital, the election in other cities and towns and villages becomes far more interesting not as political events but as sociological or anthropological ones. I have been keeping in touch with the Tehran elections from afar via the increasingly more brilliant and chaotic "lefty" newspapers, but these papers ("Khordad", "Sobh-e-Emrooz" and "Neshat") take a day to get to Shiraz from Tehran and as such, the temporal distance allows some emotional distance as well, which in turn leads to me paying much more attention to the local elections here in Shiraz ... GO TO FEATURE Go to top Tuesday March 9, 1999 Fiction A new destiny "I was the real exile ... the traveler who would never find her destination." Excerpts from "Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith" (Harcourt Brace), Gina B. Nahai's new novel. Her previous novel, "Cry of the Peacock", received high praise in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. watching my compatriots and how they had brought with them not only their sense of home and community but also their pasts loaded with failed hopes and lost expectations -- on these occasions I would remember what Mercedez had told me and think that perhaps she had been right -- that Sohrab might have done me a favor by sending me away. He had taken away my hope and my family. But he had also taken away the fear I had of being haunted by greedy ghosts, the anxiety of having rabid dogs at the window, the anguish of wondering of Roxanna was buried under the concrete in our yard. He took from me the sadness that had tainted my mother's life, and the limitations of a destiny I could not have avoided in Iran ... GO TO FEATURE Go to top Monday March 8, 1999 Cover story Common sense No one has chronicled Iranian events quite like Masoud Behnoud Masoud Behnoud was born in 1947. He has been writing articles for various journals since 1964. In all he has 300 interviews and more than 1,000 articles to his credit, as well as at least eight documentaries, 50 TV programs and seven books. What's so impressive about Behnoud's body of work is his uncommon common sense and ability to grasp and convey current events in a balanced way. He reflects the mood of a nation; a true journalist, an endangered species in a country that badly needs the likes of him to quench the thirst for reliable and balanced news ... GO TO FEATURE Go to top Copyright © 1997 Abadan Publishing Co. All Rights Reserved. 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