Iran

Homay & Mastan Bring “ Soldiers” of Iran to San Francisco

Last night, a very popular and accomplished  traditional Persian music ensemble based in Iran performed at a seemingly sold-out  concert at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco .   The group, Homay and The Mastan Ensemble is on their 3^rd annual North American Tour called Sarbazan or The Soldiers.  In previous years, among other places, they’ve had sold-out performances at Lincoln Center, NY, Walt Disney Concert Hall, LA, Strathmore  in Washington, D.C. and Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto.

Following the Persian tradition of “chameh soraei”, the group’s founder, Saeed Jafarzadeh known as Parvaz Homay writes his own lyrics, composes, and sings.  His lyrics promote non-violence and engage the audience in an inquiry into  principles of consciousness, freedom,  compassion, unity, and transformation.   The group’s exhilarating performances  engage the audience to live with intent into these principles that they view as true spirituality.

Since early 2009, Homay has been banned by the Iranian authorities to perform publicly in Iran.   In his songs, Homay with his poignant lyrics courageously and passionately cries against the oppression of our people and human rights violations in our homeland, all the while amplifying words of optimism.  “… My message is that we …

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Collateral Murder in Iraq

Here’s what you get when death is dispensed from above via machine gun by people who believe that bullets are like candies. Difficult to consider this anything but a a war crime.

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The Stoning of Soraya Demonstrates Women’s Injustices Around the World

“The Stoning of Soraya M.,” is moving film about a woman wrongly persecuted in a rural Iranian village. The film, which opened June 26th, 2009 in a variety of theaters across the country, took the Audience Award for Best Picture at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

This provocative film demonstrates the injustices many women around the world experience in their daily lives through the story of one woman’s struggle to finally let the world know about her small village’s ugliest, most guarded secret.

Around the world, women continue to be discriminated against or attacked outright for the simple crime of being a woman.

In Afghanistan, rates of domestic violence are increasing and schoolgirls are subjected to acid attacks for the crime of attempting to attend school.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, women are the target of an ongoing campaign of rape employed by armed combatants attempting to seize power.

And in Iran, where The Stoning of Soraya M. takes place, women have been subjected to the brutal punitive system of stoning. The film and the work of Women for Women International both demonstrate that marginalized women should be empowered to access their human…

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Six Reasons Why Iran Cannot Be Explained in a Twitter Feed

I’m republishing a new article on Iran written by my friend Jalal Ghazi.

New winds of war are raging over the Middle East, and I think that it’s imperative to give voice to every position on the Iranian uprising .

I must confess that I was never very fond of the Mullah’s Revolution. I still remember arguing about my position with many leftist and progressive Italian friends of mine who in 1979, at the time of the revolution, were totally gang-ho for the Ayatollahs, only to discover years after that the Iranian society had not been completely behind the clerics, as the western media had reported. I had the impression that secularists and lay people, and  people who just did not care about religion, were being smothered by the guardians of orthodoxy.

But I’m digressing here. I sense that something similar, even though of opposite sign, may be happening today. In Washington there are too many people who would be just happy to use any excuse to hurry into a war with Iran and to further destabilize the Middle East. The pressure on Obama to act–militarily–swiftly against the Iranian regime must be enormous, in absence of…

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Twitter, journalism and Iran

Some questions I answered for a newspaper article on journalism and social media, specifically with regard to the Iran uprisings and the use of twitter:

1. Twitter is being used quite extensively at the moment in Iran. Could this be regarded as some kind of turning point for social media?

I wouldn’t call it a turning point. It’s part of an ongoing trend that sees technology and the internet making media and broadcasting more accessible to people on the ground. The internet allows ordinary people to tell their stories through their own media via their blog, their Twitter or Facebook accounts, using their mobile phones or computers. This often happens in partnership with journalists in traditional media. This goes back to the blogger Salam Pax writing about the 2003 Iraq invasion or the 2004 Tsunami crisis which was documented by eyewitnesses, blogging and sending pictures of the crisis via their cellphones. So it’s part of a broader phenomenon of technology progression that has made the production and distribution of media faster and more accessible.

2. Can you comment on the way Twitter has evolved from a tool used to tell others what you are doing, to…

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From Washington to Tehran it’s Happy Hour for Oligarchs

One wonders what an article about the riots in Iran has to do with tales of the global economy. But according to my good friend Jalal Jhazi, a Middle East analyst for New America Media, Iran – a country that even before the beginning of the uprising as on the verge of economic meltdown – is still the backdrop for that old, familiar struggle between the haves and have nots.

This time, the dispute is between a small oligarchy, which has enriched itself at the expense of the rest of society and which is trying desperately to defend its privileges, and tides of young people who are demanding freedom, opportunities, equality, and accountability. It’s a tale of those who disseminated misery maneuvering behind the scenes to manipulate the popular uprising in order to continue benefiting from the status quo. This is a tale full of surprises, where what appears to be true isn’t always reliable, and the villain is not always easily distinguished from the hero. In that sense, it’s a story weirdly parallel to that of the American bail-out of the banking system. I was reading that American banks have started repaying the TARP money. Thanks to huge cash…

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From Washington to Theran it’s Happy Hour for Oligarchs


One wonders what an article about the riots in Iran has to do with tales of the global economy. But according to my good friend Jalal Jhazi, a Middle East analyst for New America Media, Iran–a country that even before the beginning of the uprising was on the verge of economic meltdown–is still the backdrop for that old, familiar struggle between the haves and have nots. This time, the dispute is between a small oligarchy, which has enriched itself at the expense of the rest of society and which is trying desperately to defend its privileges, and tides of young people who are demanding freedom, opportunities, equality, and accountability. It’s a tale of those who disseminated misery maneuvering behind the scenes to manipulate the popular uprising in order to continue benefiting from the status quo. This is a tale full of surprises, where what appears to be true isn’t always reliable, and the villain is not always easily distinguished from the hero. In that sense, it’s a story weirdly parallel to that of the American bail-out of the banking system. I was reading that American banks have started repaying the TARP…

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Question: What Do Christiane Amanpour and Afghanistan Have to Do with the Prom?

I really wasn’t planning on writing about my daughter going to her prom. But sometimes the most unexpected occasions take on political meaning.

Don’t get me wrong. It was priceless, one of those moments you hope your teenager will eventually appreciate you showed up for. Before the dance my daughter and about 20 best friends and their “dates” convened at someone’s house. The guys looked impossibly awkward in their dark, shiny suits. The girls looked like they’d just finished a shoot for America’s Next Top Model. Proving, once again, how much sooner girls mature than boys.

As for me I pretended I was Annie Leibowitz and annoyed my daughter no end by insisting on taking photos. The horror! (In one shot she’s reaching out toward the camera, glaring at me like I’m one of the paparazzi. I probably won’t upload that one on Flickr.)

So what does a high-school prom in Los Angeles have to do with Christiane Amanpour reporting on Afghanistan? Just how different a young woman’s life can be by virtue of geography.

Cut to a few nights later. I’m sitting in a packed ballroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel at the Global Women’s Rights Awards held by…

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