Posted Wednesday, December 10,
2008 | 9:15 PM (EST)
As the American media has been
distracted by charges against Governor Blagojevich of Illinois, I want to
report that 4 days ago, on the “Day of Student” in
Iran, thousands of students took to the streets and protested against
President Ahmadinejad.
Here is the link to the video of
the report from the Farsi section of Voice of America. The report is in
Farsi, but you can look at the images even if you cannot understand the
words.
I was on Air America Radio last
Monday to discuss one of my recent pieces on Israel. It was fun. I’m just
amazed at how many people end up reading some of my articles. The other
day, I got a call from Iran congratulating me on an article.
Posted Friday, September 28,
2007 | 12:23 AM (EST)
I think Hillary Clinton is
wrong for this country.
I’m a democrat, and I know
many democrats and republicans tend to support their front-runner by
default. And I really tried; I really wanted to support Hillary. And until
recently, I did. In fact, she has been the only candidate I have
contributed money to. But for a number of reasons that have now been of
concern to me for months, I can no longer support her. If she wins the
primaries, I will vote for her because she is better than any republican.
But until then, I will do what I can to help her competitors defeat her in
the primaries.
Look out for next article on
The Huffington Post, which will be about Hillary.
I haven’t been writing in my
journal lately because I’ve been extremely busy with the new job. I’ve also
been working on a long overdue self reflection. There are times when you
have to slow down and think about where you want to go. I’m still in the
process of trying to figure that out, but I’ll be writing here more often.
I promise.
I am writing to you today with a sense of urgency and
want to ask you to take action in order to help save the life of an
important scholar.
HalehEsfandiari,
the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars, was arrested in Tehran on May 8 and incarcerated in
the Evin Prison, and on May 29, she was formally
charged with espionage and “endangering national security through
propaganda against the system.” She is an Iranian-American national.
According to The Woodrow Wilson Center, the organization, Haleh's family, colleagues, former students, and many
organizations, are continuing efforts to bring attention to Dr. Esfandiari's unjustified arrest.
Over the years since the 1979 revolution, the Iranian
regime has arrested thousands of scholars, students, activists and
intellectuals and prosecuted them on false and phony charges because in
reality, these individuals promoted the kind of civic discourse that can
help democracy flourish in Iran. Dr. Esfandiari
is one of those individuals.
But there is also a consist pattern in these arrests. In
the vast majority of cases, whenever the arrests of well-known citizens
from the Western countries are well-publicized by Western media and the
American government, Iran refrains from hurting the arrested individuals
out of the fear of retribution.
You can help Esfandiari by
demanding your Senators to publicly call for the release of this American citizen, ask them to not stop talking about Esfandiari until she is released and tell them to
demand that the White House break the silence on this arrest and ask the
Iranian government for the release of Dr. Esfandiari.
We will not get our respect in the world back if we quietly sit by and
allow our citizens to be falsely charged and imprisoned by rogue regimes
such as that of President Ahmadinejad.
Go to http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
to find the contact information of your Senator. And if you choose to write
a letter to your representative, senator or President Bush, please copy and
paste the copy of your letter bellow this post or send a copy of your
letter to saveesfandiari@samsedaei.com.
In addition, please forward the link to this post to your friends and
family so that they can take action too. Copies of the letters will be
compiled and forwarded to The Woodrow Wilson Center and Haleh’s
family.
This action will take about ten minutes of your time.
But not doing so can keep Dr. Esfanidari’s arrest
and her current condition off the front page of newspapers and lead to a
tragic outcome that we may be able to prevent.
I sincerely thank you for your action and sense of
responsibility on this matter.
I am really worried about HalehEsfandiari,
the director of Middle-East program at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars. She was arrested upon her recent trip to Tehran and
was imprisoned in the infamous Evin Prison of
Tehran on the preposterous charges of “spying.”
It is not enough that the
Iranian regime has brought Iran to such low levels of dignity on the world
stage. But they now also arrest Iranian-American nationals who do nothing
more than educating others and contributing to our civic discourse.
I am writing a post about the
issue and want to ask Americans to take action by asking their
representatives to take action. I truly believe that Esfandiari
will be safe if she gets sufficient attention from policy-makers and the
news media from the west.
When I heard that a bridge
collapsed in Minnesota, I knew major news channels were going to stop
covering any other national or international news for the next three days.
Don’t get me wrong; It was certainly a tragedy to lose four people to such
a horrific incident with the death toll expecting to rise. Nonetheless, I
don’t understand why someone who is sitting here in Washington DC would
want to know or care for so many details of the incident unless his or her
professional life directly relates to the safety of the bridges in the
country.
I saw Michael Moore’s new documentary last night. I
wanted to write a few lines about it here, but it ended up being about 4
pages long, so I submitted it to The Huffington Post for my next blog post!
The
main reason that I write regular journals and blogs is that I regularly
look for feedback as to what others think about my solutions to current
problems. The feedback I have been getting has been mostly very productive,
but there have also been a few exceptions, which demonstrate an underlying
reason for why politics has not been solving people’s problems. This has to
do with people themselves.
Last week when I wrote a piece
on presidential pardons and why I believed Congress should confirm who is
to be pardoned, there were people who presented
well-reasoned arguments for and against my position. But there were a few
responses that simply consisted of a high level of pessimism and distrust
toward everything government – regardless of who has been, is or will be
taking on the duties in it.
As someone who considers
himself liberal, it is heart-breaking to see this general lack of faith in
politics, especially among the youth in the left. While this country has
seen lots of policymakers who have repeatedly presented people with false
choices, there have also been many who have served their country with honor
and intellect. I believe there is no justification for this anti-government
and almost anarchic view. This shows a sheer lack of faith in politics, and
I believe if we want our politics to work, the first step for us is to
believe that it can succeed and take a more reasoned and detail approach to
criticizing politics rather than take a general and categorical stance
against government as a whole.
Today, Senator Lugar, ranking Republican member of
Senate Foreign Relations Committee was on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer,
discussing his decision to join the growing Republican chorus against
President Bush’s policy in Iraq.
There was a time when republicans were actually getting
away with being a rubber stamp for the President and whatever he did. I
think it is absolutely incredible that Bush has demonstrated such level of
incompetence that Republicans are breaking ranks with him and joining the
effort to bring our troops home. But I wonder if any number of dissenting
republicans would ever lead this administration to realize that even if Iraq is going to endure more
violence if the U.S. withdraws, we still have no justification for staying
in that country after the majority of the Iraqi factions and the people in
that country want us out.
It is also interesting that republicans constantly say
that if we leave, the situation can become a whole lot worse. There were
also many people who were using the exact same arguments when debating
whether to stay in Vietnam and claiming that America’s departure can result
in the entire South East Asia to fall to communists. That did not happen,
and I have every reason to think that their prediction on Iraq will be as
inaccurate.