My Commentary on Aljazeera's "Listening Post"

Quoted from Listening Post program blog: 

Over the past couple of months, Iran has been in the news, and the news has not been good. There was the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate a Saudi diplomat. Then came the International Atomic Agency's latest report on the country's nuclear programme. And in November, hundreds of Iranians stormed the British embassy in Tehran. Behind the headlines however, there has been another story - Iran's media conflict with the West, especially the UK.

Within Iran, BBC's Persian service is on the authorities' blacklist and the channel's signal into the country is regularly jammed. Journalists can be arrested on mere suspicion of working for the BBC. On the flip side, Iran claims that Britain inflicts unfair fines and regulations on its state-funded international news channel Press TV. The war between the countries and the broadcasters has a long history and is getting progressively more heated. In Our News Divide this week, we take a closer look at the media crossfire between London and Tehran. 

Fighting for Women’s Rights: An Interview with Mahnaz Afkhami

This interview was originally published on Arseh Sevom Civil Society Zine. 

Link: http://www.arsehsevom.net/zine/?p=151

Hooman Askary reports on his discussion with the former minister of women’s affairs in pre-revolution Iran, Mahnaz Afkhami. She links the century long struggle of Iranian women for equal protection under the law to the demonstrations that emerged in 2009 after the flawed presidential elections in Iran. Afkhami states, “The green movement in Iran is the continuation of what had been started nearly a century before and gone through ups and downs, changes and evolutionary and revolutionary transformations.”

For more than three decades, the rare images of women coming out of Iran primarily showed them in the required Islamic hijab, implying absolute compliance and complacency. Disparate accounts seldom raised doubts about the way women saw their role in society. Information and communication technologies altered that image once and for all. The world was able to see different images of Iranian women through the lens of netizens. It appeared that the imagined complacency had never even existed in the first place. In 2009, Iranian women really made the world stop and notice. They were the pioneers of the national opposition and demonstrations against the Islamic Republic which became known as the Green Movement. That movement soon became personified by a young woman who lost her life to a bullet from the Basiji militia. Unlike most of the national heroes of Iranian patriarchal society, a young woman, Neda, became the face of the nation. She was special because she was not special at all. She was the Iranian girl next door; one worlds apart from the image endorsed by the Islamic Republic.

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