Archive - Sep 21, 2007

Voices that Radio Farda fears

To president of Radio Farda, Jeffrey Gedmin: Below please find my response to your opinion piece, Voices That Tehran Fears, in The Washington Post: Oh come on! You make it out to seem as if Radio Farda is this enlightened beacon that will save Iran and bring about freedom, democracy, and peace to Iran if only it could operate freely. The truth is your programming is mostly silly irrelevant pop songs with the occasional filler of watered down news that has little substance and reaches us here with a scratchy signal that makes it hard to listen to. >>>

A new dawn

I thought the ease of commenting could bring about substantial changes to the way that the site is used in the future. After seeing a couple of comments on one of my recreant photo-essays, I realized that the future has arrived and things have changed already. A simple calculation revealed that since the publication of the article mentioned above only 14% of posted articles managed to remain immune to comments (all articles till 18th Sep were included in this calculation). Let’s not talk statistics, but at the first glance an increase in the number of articles commented on is apparent.>>>

Opening the floodgates

First one was about people. I learned that despite the lightning speeds and freedoms of anonymity in internet communications, people are still the same people. Before that, I had imagined all along that if only the good people of Iran, who obviously all wanted to resurrect their cultural honor and advance the cause of democracy in Iran, could, and were allowed to communicate directly with each other, something would click, leaders would emerge and actions would snowball. Not so. Not so fast, anyway. If there are benefits to communicating freely and spontaneously, it will still take time>>>

Execution of a teenage girl in Iran (MUSIC VIDEO)

See the music video here. This music video was made from a documentary film made by BB2 called "execution of a teenage girl". The song "24" is by Jem. On August 15th, 2004 a 16-year-old girl was hanged in a public square in Neka, Iran. Her death sentence was for "acts incompatible w chastity". Her name was Atefah Rafavi Sahaaleh. The only evidence against Atefah was her own forced confession.

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