Taking down the Blogfather of Iran
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To Iran's 700,000 bloggers, he is the Blogfather. Hossein Derakhshan is known not only for his erratic opinions and insinuations but also for having discovered a technical solution that made blogging in Farsi possible. When he was arrested last month in Iran and accused of spying for Israel, Derakhshan disproved his own contention that Iran is the freest country in the Middle East other than Israel.
Derakhshan's true offense was that he visited Israel twice, and in a most public way - giving interviews to major newspapers, participating in a university conference, and expressing idiosyncratic views about society, politics, and political figures in Iran. He lauded the liberty of the Iranian blogosphere; defined himself as an atheist who admires Ayatollah Khomeini and believes Iran's theocratic system should be a model for other countries; said he wanted Iranians to realize Israelis are not devils, and Israelis to learn that their received ideas about Iran are all wrong; and argued that Iran should have nuclear weapons for deterrence - but not nuclear energy plants, because of the danger to the environment.
Whatever Derakhshan's peculiar, fluctuating views may have been, he is clearly no spy. A spy would not make high-profile visits to Israel on his expatriate's Canadian passport, or praise President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before flying into Tehran for the first time in years. The famed figure, who goes by the blogonym "hoder," risks paying a terrible price for assuming that Iran's rulers could be tolerant of the free expression that most bloggers take for granted.
Everyone in the global village who values that freedom should be calling for the release of the Blogfather.
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