Iran Archive

Every Monday at 10 p.m. for the past several weeks, millions of Iranians have been hunkering down in front of the “Bearded Box” — as Iranians like to call Iran’s state-controlled television, since bearded clerics are so often all there is to see on it. They are tuning in, however, not in order to listen to yet another representative of the state clergy, but rather to follow a TV series on the persecution of the Jews in the 1940s. Even the Wall Street Journal has enthusiastically reported on the series: underscoring thereby that Iran’s state-controlled television — unlike the President […]

Editor’s Note: Rights & Wrongs is a weekly column covering the world’s major human rights-related happenings. It is written by regular WPR contributor Juliette Terzieff. DETAINED IRANIAN-AMERICAN LOOKS TO HEAD HOME — A spokesman for Iran’s judiciary confirmed detained Iranian-American consultant Kian Tajbakhsh likely will soon be free to return home after months in Iran’s Evin prison. The statement from Ali Reza Jamshidi came during a state-organized visit for journalists to view conditions at the much-maligned facility, where brief interaction with a reportedly well-looking Tajbakhsh was allowed. Authorities have not filed official charges against Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant for […]

When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran described the Holocaust as a “myth” and hosted a Holocaust revisionist conference in Tehran in December 2006, he was warmly cheered in the Third World and severely castigated in the United States and Europe. Yet most Western pundits largely failed to grasp the significance of the assault. They limited themselves to outrage and righteous indignation. Ahmadinejad’s fulminations were, on the one hand, jeered as “paranoid” and, on the other, described as on par with his other threats to destroy Israel — pardon, “the Zionist entity.” In other words, Western commentators dismissed the Iranian President […]

At the end of August, Iranian presidential spokesman Ali Akbar Javanfekr threatened to turn to “other candidates” to complete the country’s long-delayed nuclear power plant at Bushehr if “problems arise again” between Tehran and Moscow over the project. The previous month, European officials related that the Russian government had informed Iran in July that Moscow would refuse to supply nuclear fuel for the Russian-built nuclear reactor until Tehran provides more details about its past nuclear activities to the international community. These reports might indicate that the Russian government has finally decided to suspend cooperation with Iran’s nuclear program until Tehran […]