Rosie.

Update 10/1/2010

An explanation of why Hoder felt safe to return to Iran is provided here in this interview last week with his mother:

//iranian.com/main/2010/sep/hossein-one-us

Something concrete you can do now beyond the petition Mehrdad provided here is given in my post to Shifteh below this news item submitted by her today:

//iranian.com/main/news/2010/10/01/canada-can-protect-iranians-their-own-government

Various recent submissions on him appear in my tracking.

rosie jan

just to let you know, i think that was a gem of a response. i printed it and read it a few times. very thoughtful and touching.

Peace

Good blog

Thanks

thanks rosie, and do not respond

i just want to say thank you for your honesty and perspicuity on this thread. sharp and painful.

when i read your analysis of hoder's psyche i cried. it rings so true.

it instantly reminded me of the initial impression i had when going through the flickr stream and videos (i saw this at the time, not now, so it may be a hazy memory) where he talked about all the cute telaviv chicks, i don't recall seeing any pics of them, just of one guy who is less attractive than him (a common tactic, maybe even involuntary reflex on his part). and buildings. and headlines of him. an autistic-narcissistic ego trip (not too dissimilar from lots of fb profiles and photoalbums i frequent, including my own -- i have autistic tendencies which are reflected, among other things, in my attraction to pictures of beautiful buildings. i'm not getting charged for them in court, or being forsaken by those who know me just because i'm not so nice).

and a huge risktaking adventure to add frisson to his blog.

so what?! i reiterate, this is not a capital crime.

that, and the loneliness, and the huge risk. maybe he even thought the trip back to iran would produce sensational headlines. i don't know. it doesn't matter.

i'm going to say something very harsh, and ask for advance forgiveness:

 everyone on ic, all those hiding behind their avatars and noms de plume (including myself) where would you be venting out your nationalistic, islamistic, islamic, reformist, labour-movement, bahai, jewishness, anti-jewishness, palestinitis-ridden, social, gastronomical, cultural, chauvinistic, aesthetic, artistic, feminist, sexual, and other frustrations of your emigre existence without blogfathers, without blogging and without ic?

where would you be able to chew out and fine tune suggestions for a new constitution, and to fantasize or even hope with some reality about restoration, and to pine nostalgically, and to create threads of peacemaking and reconciliation -- and to achieve catharsis and comfort from this, each for their own pet peeve, pet obsession, pet perversion, or pet hope? this is a wonderful thing.

where would we be able to practice our own narcissistic and exhibitionistic urges which we so despise in hoder?

where would us outsiders have the chance to engage with you? to learn? to express our empathy?

where would you and we have the opportunity to share, compare and contrast injustices, modify entrenched stances and evolve, publicize them, and spread petitions, some of which have already saved lives?

i reckon each and everyone would jerking off about these issues in the privacy of their own heads, in loneliness, without dialogue. without an outlet.

show some gratitude, some solidarity, or at least some compassion for a very flawed, very human person who has fallen, block your noses from your disgust at each other in the different camps, and organize a petition. 

 rosie you wrote beautifully to np, i will also not continue the discussion, except to apologize individually to anyone i may have offended.

Niloufar,

If you met him just after the trip to Israel, that would've been at the beginning of '07. At that time he was still an ardent and very outspoken reformist and virulently against Ahmadinejad. If you watch the Israeli documentary on him--and I really hope you do, and I hope that anyone would, it's very entertaining btw--you will see that he makes as much sport of Ahmadinejad as you've ever heard anyone do. You expect that at any moment the word 'monkey' is going to come out of his mouth.

At some time during that year his politics shifted, inasmuchas he began to publicly support a lot of Ahmadinejad's policies, and by the time he began blogging here, he was already considered the demon seed by everyone who I would call on the center-right. Of course the 'Reformist' faction wasn't so appalled by him, but he  was considered rather extreme even for them.

He had also gotten to the point of being so accusatory and hostile that he even wound up being sued by Mehdi Khalaji for defamation.

What I really would've liked to know was if anyone who'd been watching his work closely and/or knew him at time (or knew people who did) had some ideas that could account for this rather rapid shift.

There's no question that Hoder was always 'arrogant',as you called him, or 'brash'. But it seems that at some time in '07 he actually became abusive. And he burned a lot of bridges, he turned against a lot of people who had supported him.Then when the lawsuit happened and he wound up with Sardabir: Khodam kicked off of his host server he felt he was abandoned. That nobody was there to support him.

(Something interesting I found out is that a few months after his imprisonment Ahmadinejad apparently tried to intervene with the judiciary to get him released, but was unsuccessful).

 I don't think anyone who is so ambitious and chooses a life on the Internet to achieve those ambitions can be anything but very narcissistic. And I mean this in the clinical sense of lacking a core sense of self and having very poor boundaries, an inability to distinguish between oneself and the environment. An extreme dependency on the validation of others to feel that one actually exists, which makes a tendency toward acting out, toward hysteria, when one does not feel constantly recognized. While compensating with an overblown sense of one's own importance for this fundamental lack of self-worth.

I don't think so because most people who are self-promoting are already somewhat narcissistic, and once you choose the Net for your playing ground you are in a world of mirrors and very fragile boundaries. I remember reading a comment about him somewhere after his arrest that he and other bloggers think that it's all so important, it's all such a big deal, but that blogging is an empty, gossamer thing (I paraphrase of course), and he just didn't realize who and what he was dealing with at all. The reality of it.

From what I can see, he was a bit beyond just 'brash'.

It's interesting if you look at his flickr photostream, all he has are photos of buildings and of himself.  Many many photos of himself. No other people.

All of this would be consistent with your use of the term 'farce' for his trip to Israel in the sense of not so much a farce on his part but a kind of existential farce. His ego just got so big (or more correctly put, so small with the concomitant compensatory mechanisms of grandiosity) that he could not see that in the big picture, the 'Blogfather' was just small potatoes after all.

To have Sardabir: Khodam wiped off the host server must have been an extraordinary lonely shock to his self-inflated fragility after having written it and BEEN it for seven years.

I try to imagine what it was like for him to walk into that courtroom for the first time after nineteen months in a cell and be 'judged'.

_______________

At the same time I do agree with you that (assuming he gets out in one piece) we will hear a LOT more from him. And I agree that he has political ambitions ('political' being interpreted loosely), and that come what may, he will find an arena to play them out in. Obviously, including the Net.

I keep wondering whether he went back to Tehran because he truly believed that he was in so good with the Regime just for having spoken fairly favorably about Ahmadinejad's policies for about a year after having so publicly villified him and the Regime for so many more.. Or if some part of him knew that he was taking a huge risk.

And maybe that he wanted to tempt fate so that he could be in a more substantial world than the grandiose, gossamer cyber one which he'd created for himself, or perhaps better said, created OF himself. You have to remember that at one point he'd actually written a manual for dissidents on how to survive in prison (based I suppose on numerous discussons he'd had with people who'd been in there.

I wonder if at some level he may have actually wanted to test out the waters. Put his money where his mouth was, as it were.

And whether he did or didn't I think when he gets out, he'll probably be a much stronger and more empathetic and more real person. Assuming he doesn't come out completely broken. Which I don't think he will.

___________________----

It is very disturbing that you're really the only person actually participating on this thread. It's very disconcerting to realize that with all those links either no one bothered to open them or if they did no one bothered to say thank you. I am very disgusted by the behavior of people on this website ever since the particular form the factionalizaton assumed since the Uprising. Not that we were angels before but, as I told you on your current thread, the ONLY time I remember things being this bad was during what I call 'the Gaza Thread Wars'.

And that had to be a temporary state. If it weren't finite, it was going to break the back of the community. I remember saying that being on those threads was like being in a pressure cooker. Or an echo chamber. It was like..living underwater. You felt so helpless. Everything was drowning you--all the hate, the abuse--yet everything seemed so far away. I It was absolutely frightening. And thus it was unsustainable. If it didn't have an end it was going to kill the community.

But it did have an end. There was a ceasefire.

This doesn't have any end in sight. Even if IRI falls tomorrow,there will still be the question of how to deal with the guilty parties, how to ensure there won't be chaos. And here in this expat cyber petrie dish, these hatreds are just going to get louder and louder and uglier and uglier. String 'em all up! String up all ugly mollahs and their cyber groupie cheerleaders in the West who didn't even have the balls to go live in their precious IRI!. I sometimes wonder how many people really mean you and would really want to see you strung up.

And if any of those people who do-or who thnk they do-would have the balls to even witness a hanging, let alone pull the noose. Or if they'd just get a stomach ache and vomit. Like 'little wussies', so to say.

The Gaza Thread Wars had a foreseeable end to a situation that was unsustainable.

Are you listening, Jahanshah? This is your baby. This is your life. These are your hopes and dreams. This is you. Did you hear me?

Unsustainable.

__________________

Nilou, I think I've said everything I have to say on this blog and I really appreciate your participation. But if you don't mind, I'd like to end the discussion on this thread.

Thanks.

Niloufar, Fooladi

Well,

Fooladi was the only person I saw on any thread who even mentioned remembering that she had seen somethng here recently that said that one of US who had relatively MINOR differences with the Regime had been imprisoned. (S)he??? was very concerned and I told her about Hoder, and when a new Iranian of the Day came out about him, (s)he? commented very empathetically.

We didn't get along at all at first, to put it VERY mildly, when I came back, but in a relatively short time I began to respect him/her?? a LOT.

I wish you'd stop talking violent talk about the mollahs, Fooladi, as I already told you, because I think it's very dangerous. And as you said, you even have friends in Iran who are basiji-who you respect as indiividuals and who respect you. And so I hope one day you two will get to understand each other a little better.

it would be an utter pleasure

to never meet with you

And the moral of NP's "story" is boys and girls......

Dont "meet" with her if you wanna avoid islamic regime's jails on your next trip back home.

you know what i mean ? nodge nodge, wink wink.....:)

rosie

i met him around 2005 or 2006 but i honestly can't remember. i think it was just after his trip to israel. thing is, i did not really pay that much attention to his stories as i did not know who he was and found him a bit arrogant (on a personal level). but it was that episode (when i met 2 of the leading iranian bloggers) that got me started on blogging. i called the trip to israel a farce for no sophisticated reason really. i think he set himself up for undue punishment in the way he handled it. you know, both israel and iran would have used him for their own purposes with no regard for his rights or ambition, and this is basically what happened. re. his future, i think we should expect the same as how it's been in the past. i don't see him ever going quiet. nor do i think he should. he has every right and am very happy to see another blog on him at this time. let's hope he can get out soon.

Okay, Comrade, lemme try to put it more clearly

I kept saying Hoder's a mirror/rembodiment of you as collective--(and as such he MUST be by definition fractured, damaged  in some fundamental way).

Jahanshah is a mirror too. You're talking about the son of the head of public relations of British Oil whose grandmother was an American nurse who married a Persian and has a mountain named after her in Iran. His aunt translated Shariati into English. And he is the person who faxed the fatwa to Salman Rushdie. And now this...mess...carries all of you on his back in his bag every single day. As you carry him.  

In a certain way I've been a mirror too, or better a sponge. Because  all I've ever been able to do here is Form my vision of Iran by soaking up those of all  of you. (Only recenttly I feel confident to speak with a clear voice of my 'own.

I also see Nur as a kind of mirror because the intensity of his paranoia and his anger and his spiritual search that is ultimately so...poetic yet so barren..are so the collective you magnified a thousand times. And that's why I fought so hard for him to be allowed to stay, nuch to a huge outcry from my Bahai friends and supporters...but he just turned too vicious on me and I had to give up.

We, and Hoder, and other little mirrors/embodiments are about as heroic as a subway token. As noble  as a peanut shell.

Do you understand me a little bit better now?

Well Comrade, succinct though you may be, you opened up EDIT

Nobody should be punished for his/her ideas, and no one should become a dear hero because of an unjustified punishment.

No, I've never wondered, at least not for a long time. It's very clear.

And if I interpret your allusion correctly, I think you're missing some fundamental points:

How am I making a hero out of someone I've characterized as beligerent? (compare to Niloufar's 'brash vs. my 'beligerent'). Someone about whom I've postulated  the very real possibility of having at least  the onset of a serious personality disorder? I didn't even bother to mention his reported bravery in prison until my post below. I said he was 'the Blogfather' and I not only didn't glorify it, I didn't explain it.  I let it speak for itself (which, as I said below to Ben may have been a mistake).

Comrade, there's no hero in my piece as far as I can see.

What I do see, what I'd hoped to convey, is a unique, complex case rendered much moreso for this particular community.

This is a person who, mad as a hatter or lucid as a bell, embodies ALL THREE of what I have referring to as the 'camps' here. All categories being far from perfect, I often refer to them as: the pro-Ahmadinejad, the anti-IRI, and the Reformist  (aka 'apologists' in quotes).

Generally but not always, the anti-IRI people are more pro-Israel or at least less anti-Israel than the other two camps (which they often perceive as one, btw). And with this trip to IsraelHODER EMBODIES ALL THREE. He embodied them SIMULTANEOUSLY at some point in 2007 after he came back from ISRAEL having gone there as a REFORMIST who called Ahmadinejad 'a joke' on prime time ISRAELI tv, and yet had arrived at the cusp of a BIG shift.

Niloufar is basically saying the same thing as I am, but she's saying it from a political/sociological perspective, whereas I'm more interested in depth psychology, individual and collective, the psyche and its symbols and perceptions, its poetry if possible. She and I both see Hoder's 'politics' (I'd call it vison) as a balancing act but I see Hoder as a psychic mirror of this collective here. Which in turn should--note the should--be a mirror of Iran.

HODER WAS ONE OF US. This is an incontrovertible fact. And anyone who has ever been deep inthis community remains so. Someone can vanish for a year and pop up one day and it's like they were never gone.

Comrade-JOON, if you think my seeing Hoder as a mirror or  embodiment of THIS community could be ANYWHERES near heroic, you have a VERY warped vision of how I perceive this community.

If you get my drift.

____________

And what galls me, btw, and the reason I put so much into writing this damn thing is that the deepest layer of complexity is that hardly anyone appears to give a sh-t--r at least any more than your garden variety sh-t. That June Iranian of the Day--take a look at who's on it.And then on the new one you get this..weeell, he's kind of a traitor but I'll support release of traitors,because it'll make IRI look bad...kind of thing.

Don't be fooled, Comrade.  PLENTY of people here know ALL about Hoder.(And those who don't should want to once they find out HE IS ONE OF US). But he's not even really a hot topic. I wrote this. It shouldn't've had to be me. 

Where's the full length article? Where is the genuine outcry?

And the Ahmadinejadis can't have an outcry, because obviously this situation is a terrible embarrassment for them.  And the loosely speaking 'Reformist' camp--where is their outcry?

This is FAR more complex than 'all political prisoners must go free'. A BLOGGING COMMUNITY, where the BLOGfather, a member of the COMMUNITY, after rotting in prison for nineteen months, finally has a NON-trial. The response, the scrunity are being repressed, avoided, rationalized, trivialized, dismissed, wept privately, you name it. But it is unacceptable.

Not just for HIM. For THEM. For their personal and collectiveintegrity (as in integration), and their possibility of ever being an authentic reflection of Iran in all her complexity rather than each reducing her to mantra-like soundbytes to appropriate her all for their very own.

And SOMEONE here reading these words must be understanding them. And if not...well...I sure didn't do any harm because there wasn't any to do to begin with.

No, this has NOTHING to do with heros, Comrade. As far as I can see.

No Paul Bunyans here. .

p.s.sorry comrade. one last thing comrade. over and over i keep saying i want to get to know him. as a real person. the faces of heros,on mount rushmore, cannot be known as people. (and neither can neda's dying face, btwo). but hoder's can. if people would only break the silence and talk about him.

Good, Niloufar. You

know some things about him and you have some ideas. And also a petition!

I want to ask three questons:

--When was it that you met him?

--What do you mean when you say the trip to Israel was a farce?

and

--Although I do have a feeling he'll ultimately prevail, a year in prison is a long time for someone's family not to be told their whereabouts. And then nine more months before a trial begins. None of this is unheard of, but it's a privilege not bestowed upon just anyone. And though no dout the Uprising affected the time frame, it's still an extreme situation.

Saying he has this big future ahead of him may well be true, but for that to happen wouldn't there have to be either profound chanages in the current regime or a new one in its place.

Otherwise it would appear that our Hoder will be persona non grata for some time to come. Don't you think so?

I wonder Rosie, if you've ever wondered

Jan, also written jaan, or sometimes jon is used colloquially which  means dear and is pronounced like John. 

Nobody should be punished for his/her ideas, and no one should become a dear hero because of an unjustified punishment.

visit....//www.tudehpartyiran.org/mardom.asp

rosie jan

thanks for the great blog. the petition was here:

//iranian.com/main/2008/dec/defense-free-speech 

and it appeared in several places like:

//cafenaderi.wordpress.com/page/3/ 

//www.mimnoon.com/archives/000600.html 

I met hossein some years ago by pure chance. i had not even heard of him, but he came to my house for dinner because his girlfriend was a friend of mine. soon after that i went to a discussion forum where he gave a presentation. never saw or heard from him since. all i can say about him is that he is a free spirit, very secular in how he lives, and strikes a balance between iran's internal and external challenges. he was obviously very concerned about american threats against iran, though his trip to israel was more a farce than anything else, in my view.

he gave me the impression that he has big political ambitions for himself, and he certainly has time on his side. his style is a little brash, but he will fix that in time. my guess is that we will hear a lot more of hossein in the coming years.

Peace

Benross: I am fairly sure there is a petition

as I believe I signed it but have not been able to locate it yet.  I will post it once I find the petition.

All political prisoners in Iran and else where MUST be freed expeditiously

Mehrdad

I would imagine there's a petition somewhere ps Ben

but I didn't come across it in my surfing, and as I said curiously the two Free Hoder sites I was able to find are not current. Nor is the wiki article exactly up to date. Maybe someone else here will know about a petiiton.

Or--who knows--maybe even start one.

__________

PS Ben, perhaps I didn't make his significance in blogging clear enough. I thought the name 'Blogfather' plus a cursory look at one of the Iranians of the Day would clarify.

You should be 'interested', Ben

He's called 'the Blogfather' because he was one of the very first political bloggers in Iran and considered the most important for years by MANY, and every Iranian blogger who came after him, regardless of political views, owes a lot to him. Some might even say all. Yes, it's true, if it hadn't been him, it would've been someone else because it was in the Zeitgeist. However the fact remains that it was him.

That Iranian blogging community has become a huge part of the only hope for a transition in government in Iran, for its future. As you know, percentage-wise per the population, and despite initial problems with the sites not supporting Persian font, and the censorship, and more, the Iranian blogging community is one of the most active in the world.

And youtube and tweets and more all follow in the footsteps of blogging. Neda's video is part and parcel of the blogging tradition.

___________

The Mehdi Khalaji lawsuit against Hoder rocked the very foundations of the expat Iranian blogging community who were in the know. It posed questoins about free speech that were deeply disturbing and provocative. Even in the non-Iranian blogging community it was a very well-known case. That's why Harvard studied it.

He was a bright, vibrant, idealistic young man--and god I hope he still will be when (when???) he gets out--and whatever one may think of his political views, he was one of the most outspoken Reformists at the get-go. And it was risky and he was so young, 25. Every human being must be seen in the context of their times.

If he became more 'reactionary' (or more 'progressive', depending on how one perceives these things) by defending Ahmadinejad more later on, that was at a time before the Uprising, and when a real military threat to Iran under Bush was perceived. And anyway, one of the central points of my blog is that we really don't know why that trajectory happened.

He went to Israel to foster communication with Iranians and it was illegal and he made fun of Ahmadinejad and then he dared to go back to Iran. Apparently they've tried to extract a confession from him during his stay at  Evin Hotel but had to give up after the first filming. He wouldn't act. He's threatened hunger strikes. He just won't quit.

He was born four years before the Revoluton. Maybe it's unfair to speak of collective responsibility--so some say--but of one thing you can be sh-t sure: he was not responsible for turning your country into a penal colony. That he's now a prisoner of. For being torn between a desire to protect the autonomy of Iran (as he perceived it) and freedom of expression with rule of authentic law. For reflecting in his being, his ideas, and his current dire situation, all the schisms and contradictions and pain of the Iran that his parents left his generation.

You should be 'interested' in 'this person'. '

Cry the Beloved Country.

i read hoder before i read ic

we are all bloggers, and he is the protoblogger. part of the same species.

i don't think i would have heard about ic if it hadn't been for hoder.

when he stands trial in the court of ic readers he is charged on the following counts: 

human outreach. call it naive. call it reckless. even pathological. i call it human. 

ok, say he was a sensationalist, a provocateur, into rating, whatever. do we all do everything for pure motives? do none of us have egos to feed? do none of us have fantasies of rubbing shoulders with the enemy?

he zigzagged ideologically. are we all doctrinally consistent? what do we know about the timing and the context of these vacillations?

the whole issue with khalaji i confess i still have to read up on.

when he stands for trial in the iri court, he is not standing on trial for any of these counts, and that is what we should remember. let's not kill him by putting him on another trial, for things many of us also do.

if there is a petition, i will sign it.

I don't know this person. I

I don't know this person. I wasn't in IC during his time. I also, have no curiosity about this person. However, he is a prisoner of opinion in IRI and if there is any petition on his behalf, I'll sign it.