Yesterday I went to Darakeh again. The mountains were full of basiji wearing keffiyehs, and women in chadors. Some had green, red and white headbands. People were giving out free saffron drinks, and later free zam-e-zam soft drinks. The reason behind all these strange events was the commemoration of 3rd Khordad 1361/24th May 1982, the victory at Khorramshahr. There are lots of cloth murals up again.

I played some chess there... there was one interesting position, which I should convert to a jpg file in keeping with the new graphic style here!

Iran denies accusations about al-Qaeda. The interesting point about the Guardian article was that it mentioned European diplomats also say al-Qaida is in Iran. Also an Arab newspaper is quoted saying Saad bin Laden is there.

The pictures below are of chelo-kebab at the ali baba restaurant. They are for Mr Plate but anyone else is welcome to look and salivate :-)

Khatami won't resign. I told you this was a "game", didn't I?

"The administration of Mr. Khatami is very hopeful about the future of economic, social and cultural progress and thus the issue of resignation is out of the question."

Yes, everyone I meet is just so full of optimism! They are skipping and bouncing along the street, as money flitters out from their pockets! But they are making so much, it isn't worth their time to stop and pick it up! Happy happy joy joy!

"The future of the regime is very bright." Good good good. The problems are all in your mind! Just keep being happy and everything will be OK!

I intended to write about Iran's forex rate, it seems artificial... here is the first article I found.

Roya on I Believe That wrote about how annoying it is to go to university and have your clothes examined every time you go in, and that Larijanivision had a documentary concluding the problem was with women. Let's look at today's news, and see if men are responsible for any problems in Iranian society.

"Dishonored" truck driver beheads niece in public. I need to step outside myself, and be as objective as possible - is this an "Islamic" or "Middle Eastern" problem? Because I haven't heard about this kind of thing happening outside of these two "cultures" - whereever in the world it happens, there always seems to be some kind of "Islamic" or "Middle Eastern" connection. And another thing - it's always the MALE who's doing it, I've never heard of a story where an aunt/mother cut off her son's head because he was dating or had sex. You can tell me I'm wrong in the comments, if you think I'm wrong. That is, you can say it's just a problem of patriarchy, and certain cultures are backward in these areas. I have been thinking along these lines for a while - when women become emancipated, they have fewer children, and so patriarchal cultures are invariably dominant. I haven't read this idea anywhere, but I'm sure it's been discussed.

After more searching... "Honor killing is an Islamic duty" says the Islamic Action Front of Jordan; what is the Islamic view of honor killing?; "honor killing does not exist in Islamic law"; Anakultur "...organizes 8th of March celebrations in the most remote parts of the region [southeast Turkey] during the minimum of 2 hours celebration programme we talk to both to fathers, husbands, brothers and to the local authorities individually. Trying to explain to them that this practice of honour killing has nothing to do with the religion." So while the murderers and their supporters use Islam to justify honor killings, the majority who are horrified by such killings say Islam has nothing to do with it.

Once, the New York Times interviewed Molla Hassani (an ultra-conservative from Orumiyeh in the NE of Iran) and the journalist noticed that he was obsessed with stoning as a punishment for WOMEN, but never mentioned it once as a punishment for MEN. How can this be? On the one hand, Khamenei condemns honor killings, but on the other hand, this is the land of virginity testing and stoning to death for adultery.

On Sunday night I went to Chelo Kebab Ali Baba, immediately north of Vali-Asr Square. If you want to get away from people, this is a good place to go, because it has been practically empty every time I have been there. Remember that Tehran is like New York with 60 million people. (So why isn't the restaurant popular with young people, and how do they make money with no customers?) On the wall instead of pictures of Khomeini and Khamenei there are pictures of Khomeini and Taleghani. The decor and the pictures have not changed since 1979; in the West it would be promoted as "retro".

Aghdasieh Restaurant is also good. You can buy bread there without standing in line... the reason I'm going to so many restaurants is that while I was in the US, the power failed in my flat (for two months) and everything in my fridge died. I'm still trying to get rid of the smell!

Last Thursday I went to Darabad with a professor and a student visiting from the Netherlands. Because we went the wrong way at first, the way became difficult and my companions became fearful of walking across a sheer dirt slope. I was wearing bad shoes, with smooth soles, but I got to the other side and took amusing pictures of them with my new digital camera! On the way back I talked to the professor about a conference he and I are going to in the UK next month. The professor said recently he was talking to a woman who said getting a visa was easy! He said, "What time did you arrive at the British embassy?" and she said 5am! This seems perfectly normal in Iran, some people had stayed overnight!

Complaining is quite usual of course, this post was inspired by recent stories on Face It about how humiliating it is to obtain a visa, and the sort of humiliation Tehran airport officials put Iranians through. OK. So, I said to the professor, "Let me tell you what it is like to be in the British Embassy. Many diplomats live inside the compound. One day, after Friday prayers, the ansar-e-hizbollah (thugs who Mr Janati pays) turn up and throw bricks at your house, breaking all the windows. Then, they start throwing Molotov cocktails, eggs, tomatos etcetera. This happens very often for a period of several weeks. Another day, someone drives a pick-up truck full of gas cylinders into the wall of your house, killing himself, and then people start handing out leaflets saying he was a shahid/suicide bomber. Remember, it is a diplomatic compound, this is like an attack on the UK itself. And now you are asking why they treat Iranians so badly???" And he said, "but what if you are a head of department at a famous university (like he was) and have been to this same conference four times before? I will ring them to get an appointment and if they don't give me a reasonable time for an appointment then I won't go!" He has obviously developed ways of dealing with the stress in Iran under IRI (and he doesn't have economic problems), but the people like the ones on the Face It blog are desperate to get out, what can they do?

In passing: Mr Zarif doesn't realise that attacks on embassies are attacks on the territory of that country either. (from smccdi).

``M. Javad Zarif, Iran's United Nations ambassador, says Iran "has not invaded any neighboring country" for two centuries.

Since it is international law that a foreign embassy is the sovereign soil of the country represented, the Iranian invasion and hostage-taking of American diplomats from November 1979 to January 1981 stands in stark contrast to Mr. Zarif's assertion.''

The real saving private Lynch (from Face It) it's old but really interesting, I had to link to it.

US claims al-Qaeda operations chief in Iran and that Riyadh attacks ordered from there. Jeddah, Nairobi, Kuala Lumpur, or London, where will the next suicide attack be?

I saw a film last night Deserted Station at Asr-e Jadid cinema. (You can buy tickets on the net there, though I didn't for this). It was a terrible film and at the end I wondered what it was about. It must have been one of those "festival" films.

Iran steps up gas and oil ties with India (note remarks about Gujarat below). Jews of Morocco link. The Register writes about how Lawrence Lessig says the Internet is dying...

Jeff Jarvis gave me a link (Hooman told me about it), so maybe I'll get some visitors. A few days ago I wrote about an article by William Beeman studying the influence of Michael Ledeen. I posted some comments, which I'll repost here, because the article has gone stale now.

My problem with Dr Ledeen is the inaccuracy of some of his reports on National Review Online. Here are two examples:

1. He has written many times that Montazeri issued a fatwa against suicide bombing in April 2002 (Jewish World Review and National Review Online) and was quoted by David Warren, former CIA director James Woolsey, iranian.com, Glenn Frazier, Andrew Sullivan and many others.

Whereas Bill Samii of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported the same statement as:
"Montazeri backs suicide bombers" and Christopher de Bellaigue, the Economist correspondent for Iran, in the New York Review of Books simply
saw the statement as endorsing a two-state solution.

If you can read Persian, you can find the original statement here. There is no condemnation of suicide bombing. He is just saying the two peoples should move towards peace.

2. Along with SMCCDI, he's always writing about huge demonstrations which aren't happening! (The-regime-is-about-to-fall type writing.) Apathy characterises the situation here best. In one article he wrote about a demonstration where women burned their headscarves in public (after SMCCDI). Lots of Iranians reading the blog hoder.com had never heard about it.

I've always found "The Economist" to be the most objective English publication about the size of the demonstrations. The correspondent (who actually lives in Iran, unlike Ledeen) wrote in the New York Review of Books about the hype:

In the November 25 on-line edition of National Review, Michael Ledeen claimed that "something like half a million" Iranians had taken to the streets on November 22, "to demonstrate their disgust with the regime of the Islamic Republic." On December 6, in the same publication, he misrepresented events as follows: "The revolution is being led by students, workers, intellectuals, and military officers and soldiers."

So far as I know, Ledeen hasn't visited Iran since the days of Iran-contra —in which, acting as a consultant to Ronald Reagan's administration, he played a small and inglorious part.[*] His distorted analysis of events in Iran—which conflicts diametrically with my own experience—has unaccountably been given a platform by The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. It would be interesting to know the sources of the information he and other conservative American commentators have been circulating about Iran.

(The de Bellaigue article's criticism of Ledeen has previously been noted at Blog Left and Cobban. But it's supposed to be copyright, so hasn't been noticed much in the blogosphere.)
For someone who has such massive influence, these kinds of mistakes are disturbing. Apart from the language barrier and the closed nature of Iran increasing the likelihood of such mistakes, these errors are the kind of things Westerners would LIKE to believe, so they get propagated extensively in English language media.

It could be just that he is getting wrong information from his sources, of course, but the kind of incidents reported in the NY Review of Books article above really make it clear that on-the-ground sources have much higher credibility. However such sources don't always have the wide distribution that Ledeen does.

Unfortunately I don't get many visitors to this blog, so I told William Beeman about the above and I'll see what happens. (Once in some comments on I believe that I took Ledeen's word on the fatwa, but there's no evidence for it except for Ledeen himself.)

US State Department launches new Persian web site. So, if you're Iranian and you can't GO to the US, at least you can read about it...

Q & A on the Saudi terror attacks. "[The terrorists] want foreigners to leave and to eventually bring down the Saudi government and replace it with a government which adhers much more strictly to the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam." If they succeed, there goes the foreign direct investment, they can all watch as their society goes down the toilet! I wonder how they will make Arabia more "Islamic"? Isn't it already like the Taliban was in many ways? That's the problem with mixing religion and state, you can never have too much religion for some people.

(Muse to self: The Chechen bombing killed more people (>=54 versus >=29), but this gets more attention in the world media. In Chechnya, an order of magnitude more Muslims are dying than in Palestine, but this gets little attention in all media. The Iranian media pays no attention because they don't want to antagonise Russia (nuclear technology), because their state Khomeinist ideology focuses on Israel, and because the whole Israel/Palestine issue is such a wonderful distraction strategy from domestic problems in both the Arab world and Iran. The book "The Tragedy of the Middle East" explains the last point. Similar arguments apply for the 2000 Muslims killed in Gujarat, India in February and March 2002. And for the Arab world's silence on Hama.) Naturally, as I've said before, 5000 Kurds being gassed by Saddam in 1988 also gets less attention than 3000 international deaths on 9/11.

Last night I went to McMashallah. I had a "Double Cheeseburger" for 1800T. A "Happy Meal" was 2000T. Does this sound familiar to anybody?

Mr MRK says MPs won't resign. Why should they, they get a Land Rover, an apartment, and the press reports everything they say. It's all a kind of "head game" with the people.

The sickness at the heart of Iranian society is manifested in the traffic.

Stop at the red light, before changing the government.

Now we DO have internet censorship in Iran.

Umm, the I believe that young women have not written about this. I wonder if it is affecting them and how they feel about it? Mr Steppenwolf is pretty angry about it.

As for me, it is not affecting me at all. Reza Pahlavi, Emrooz, WomenInIran, Golshan, Molla Hassani. Yes, I can see them all. I'll let you know if this changes.

But Mr Steppenwolf, there is no need to get angry. There is something Iranians can learn from Arabs (!), because they have had to deal with this problem much longer than Iranians. Wayne's proxy avoidance will help, Peekabooty is simpler still. If you can't get it to work email me and I'll see if I can help.

Hopes for reform in Iran fading. Mr. MRK is about three years behind the general population... but this is not a democracy.

Stella Artois is called "horse piss" in at least 4 places on the internet, one, two, three, four.

Council's quashing of bill very unexpected to Khatami. Shakouri-Rad said that the bill would not be referred to the Expediency Council; Iran Press Service wrote about a resolution within two months. I predict the survival of the regime, despite the pressures.

Yesterday I went to the book fair again, and bought "Old New Zealand" by Maning, ($US90 on amazon.com, $US18 there); a critical edition of "Emma" by Jane Austen, History of the Twentieth Century, and "Fanny Hill" (Wordsworth)! I was rather surprised by the last one's availability. A wide range of uncensored material is available if you read English. At this rate, perhaps they'll be selling "The Satanic Verses" in a few years! On the way back I stopped by "Kabooky Fried Chicken", the taxi fare to Tajrish was 400T, but 100T yesterday!

State Department transcribes American Enterprise Institute conference. (What's happening there?) Other coverage at Payvand. Michael Ledeen is profiled by Brown University professor William Beeman (like his last article I linked to, quite informative).

Hoder talks about blocking of his site. From my perspective I have never seen any blocking of any site... of course I'll post if that changes.

Thursday, the first day of the weekend. The Tehran International Book Fair is on, and I had cards to buy books to the value of 100,000 tomans. The books are subsidised to the rate of about 300 tomans to 1 US dollar, whereas the usual exchange rate is 800 tomans to the dollar. Building 44 is where the new English books are, nothing older than 2001. Building 41A is older books.

So, I was feeling lazy, so I took a private taxi there (1600T).
All the stalls were full of people, except

"The Institute for the Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini's Works"...which was surrounded by Cambridge University Press, Phaidon, and Gale Group. Today, it ended up that I bought three books, all from Routledge. Iranian History and Politics, usually US$90 but today 31800 tomans ($US38.87); English-only Europe? (about $US10), and Religion Without God.

You see, we have freedom in Iran! You can buy books about atheism now, despite the regulations that say nothing contrary to Islam can be sold. There are two big reasons why: (1) it's not in Farsi, it's in English and (2) the TIBF is a unique event, many things change - taxi fares can be multiplied many times, for example.

On the way home I stopped by Tam Tam Pizza near Tajrish Square. This is where young couples go to intertwine hands and feet and flirt with each other. A disturbing number of Iranian young women smoke now. I don't find this attractive.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has a meeting of its board of governors in Vienna from June 16-20. Iran wants the IAEA to clear it. But the USA wants the IAEA to find Iran in breach of the NPT. I'll be interested to hear the Economist's take on this in a few days. But from the quotes in the articles, it doesn't look good for Iran, because other countries have the same suspicions as the US and Iran only has Russia for its "friend":

A senior Western diplomat who attended the IAEA meeting yesterday in Vienna said Iran's report was unconvincing.

''It was a skillful performance,'' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ''They tried to give the image of transparency without providing substance about their nuclear program. We think they are hiding things.''

China admits supplying Iran with uranium hexaflouride and when you combine that with the Reuters article saying:

Diplomats say IAEA officials had detected that Iran had introduced some uranium hexafluoride into the gas centrifuges, which would be a clear breach of the NPT.

then you have bad news for Iran. The articles say Mr ElBaradei is in a difficult situation.