New Jersey to Iran (and Back Again): The Activism of Mehdi Saharkhiz

I first encountered Mehdi Saharkhiz as "onlymehdi" on Twitter last June. He has been one of the most important sources of information, especially photos and videos, for EA and many others on the post-election crisis.

From Ashley Kindergan at NorthJersey.com:

From coffee shops in Ridgewood, his home in Wayne and anywhere there is cell service, a 28-year-old Iranian is broadcasting the ongoing uprising in his home country — one of a growing number of people intent on helping share with the world what happens on the streets of Tehran.

Iran: Greening YouTube — An Interview with Mehdi Saharkhiz

Mehdi Saharkhiz — known as "onlymehdi" on his blog, YouTube channel and Twitter feed — has been posting photographs and videos of opposition protests in Iran since the disputed Iranian presidential election last June sent thousands of protesters into the streets and triggered a brutal crackdown by the regime.

"For me, it's about getting the word out there," Saharkhiz said.


Videos and images like the ones Saharkhiz posts have become crucial to scholars, journalists and ordinary people who want to know what's going on inside an increasingly closed-off Iran.

"I think it's been critical, and we've seen what may in fact be a real birth of citizen journalism," said Gary Sick, an Iran scholar and adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. "The coverage basically after the initial demonstrations in June has been extremely sparse except for the things that people are sending out."

Indeed, much of the post-election media coverage has centered around Iran's military ambitions and the possibility of imposing more sanctions on the country. Just a few days ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautioned that Iran's armed forces were becoming increasingly important in the country's decision-making. And a recent report by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency accused Iranian leaders of having worked to produce a nuclear warhead.

But the story of the opposition movement continues, recorded and shared by an online community.

For example, on Feb. 11, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was largely successful at keeping demonstrators out of a main square in Tehran when he gave a major speech celebrating the regime's anniversary.

Satellite images available through Google — not television cameras — showed a square that wasn't filled and buses that brought in supporters from outside Tehran. Saharkhiz showed photos of the buses on his site, too.

Sick noted that the Iranian regime has closed down many newspapers, especially those affiliated with the opposition. There are 47 journalists — including Mehdi's father, noted reform writer Isa Saharkhiz — imprisoned in Iran, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Getting information out of the country has also been made difficult by technological roadblocks and fears of government spying. And the fear reaches beyond Iran's borders, with Saharkhiz being careful about identifying his home and other North Jersey Iranians reluctant to even speak about communication with their home country.

The Iranian government recently blocked Gmail, Google's popular e-mail service. The regime has also frequently disrupted Internet service by slowing it to a crawl or shutting off some servers altogether, experts and Iranians here say. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are reportedly monitored by the government to track the opposition.

"They've been trying to effect another blackout where nobody knows what's going on," said Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, a Boston-based Iranian-American journalist who started a Web site, Tehran Bureau, as an independent source of in-depth Iran coverage. "[People] have to be really sophisticated and keep on top of everything to continue to surf the Web and occasionally access a Facebook page or whatever."

Niknejad and Saharkhiz were both reluctant to talk about the specific ways in which their sources got around cyber obstacles in order to communicate. They didn't want to put sources in danger or to risk getting the avenues of communication shut down. But both said that people seem to adjust to each new obstacle.

"Seventy percent of Iran's population is under 35 years of age," Niknejad said. "The young population came of age with the Internet. … They have just had to get more sophisticated."

A 'conduit' to Iran

Mana Mostatabi, an online community organizer with the San Francisco-based United4Iran.org, said Saharkhiz's videos have been critical to spreading information, even as she hears from her own friends and relatives about increasing difficulty accessing Web sites.

"Mehdi has been such a key figure in getting that footage in and out," Mostatabi said. "He's acting as a conduit to people who are just snapping it on their cellphones."

Saharkhiz said he was not interested in Iranian politics before the 2009 elections. But then he saw footage of a crackdown on university students.

"These are just normal students going to school," he said. "They went out and voted … and now they're being massively arrested. That's when I feel it's my duty as an Iranian citizen to get their word out."

Isa Saharkhiz, Mehdi's father, worked as a journalist for many years, bringing his family to the U.S. in 1994 when he headed the New York office of IRNA, the official Iranian news agency. Isa Saharkhiz served as head of domestic publications under former President Mohammad Khatami and later published a monthly reformist newspaper that was shuttered in 2004.

In 2009, Isa Saharkhiz was active in the presidential campaign of opposition candidate Mehdi Karroubi. He was arrested eight days after the election.

Mehdi Saharkhiz, who moved to the U.S. permanently in 2001, said his family suspects that his father was tracked down on his Nokia cellphone.

Hiding Internet use

People are working on solutions to make communication safer.

Austin Heap, executive director of the Censorship Research Center, has monitored the blocks placed on the Internet by the Iranian government. The center is now waiting for a license to distribute a technology called Haystack that would allow users inside Iran to hide their Internet use.

"Haystack does two things: First, it encrypts the data and, second, it coats the data to look like normal traffic," Heap said. "It just removes the middleman's ability to filter."

That would be a boon for Iranian-Americans in North Jersey who track the news. Several people interviewed said they read multiple news sources and keep in close touch with friends and family to hunt out credible information about Iran.

Still, getting information has been more and more difficult.

Mehdi Shahpar, a West Milford resident and president of the New Jersey-based Persian Cultural & Humanitarian Association, said he watches CNN and reads American newspapers, and also checks sites written largely by Iranians, such as Iranian.com. But the best sources are the firsthand ones, he said.

"The best sources of information are those videos that are coming out from individual people that are taken by cellphone cameras and smuggled out," Shahpar said. Friends and family "used to be able to talk more, but recently they're afraid of talking on the phone because of the phone tapping and checking everything."

Shahpar said he had no problem using e-mail when he visited Iran before the elections, but his sister had enormous trouble accessing the Internet on a recent visit.

Nahid Ahkami, a Clifton resident and co-founder of the Persian Cultural & Humanitarian Association, said she reads Tehran Bureau and her husband runs his own Web site that gathers Iranian news.

Ahkami said she believes the opposition movement will ultimately succeed.

"It's going to flourish," Ahkami said. "It's not going to go away. Iranian people are very resilient people and patient people."

Afghanistan: Is It A Battle If No One Shows Up?

It has been eerie to watch the first few days of Operation Moshtarak, the US-Afghanistan-ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) military offensive against the Taliban in Helmand Province. It is not just the observation of the battle from thousands of miles away; it is that this encounter has been scripted.

The offensive was signalled weeks ago in declaration from US military and political headquarters, reporters were suitably embedded, and the ritual proclamations were issued. BBC radio even turned over several minutes of prime-time programming to the speech, in full, of a British commander to his troops on the eve of battle. (Ever since William Shakespeare put words in the mouth of Henry V at Agincourt in 1415 --- "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers" --- this has been required in presentation of English/British wars.) Yet all the scripting could not set down the final-act resolution of this question:

What if you threw a war and no one showed up?

The Afghanistan Occupation: 700 Military Bases (and Counting)

This morning an Afghan official is declaring that 12 Taliban were killed on Sunday. That makes it a score draw with number of dead civilians, as 12 perished in an American rocket strike. In total, about 40 Taliban are reported dead since the start of the offensive. That's 40 bad guys in what was supposed to be a showdown battle for the Taliban "stronghold" of Marja and in what The Washington Post, voicing the words of a US Lieutenant-Colonel, is calling "last-ditch efforts" by the enemy.



The official line of victory was offered by a British general, "The operation went without a hitch. We've caught the insurgents on the hoof, and they're completely dislocated." Now, the narrative goes, US-British-ISAF forces will bring in 2000 Afghanistan police to restore order in Marja.

Hmm.....

An alternative interpretation would be that the Taliban chose not to fight in the "stronghold". Indeed, if you go with the concept of "asymmetrical warfare", that would be the expected move. Faced with the overwhelming firepower of the US and ISAF, most of the insurgents would disperse and resume the battle --- explosive devices, guerrilla attacks, moves against the Afghan Army and police --- when the US-ISAF threat had dissipated.

One of the misleading analogies in the US-UK press this week has been that Marja 2010 is not Fallujah 2004, the Iraqi town that was the arena for two major battles between US troops and Iraqi insurgents. The script reads that, unlike Fallujah, there has been little confrontation, little bloodshed, and relatively little damage. That "victory" story misses an important point. In both the Fallujah battles, most of the top insurgents had left the town in advance of the US attack. Those who stayed behind effectively provided violent cover for a tactical retreat.

So here's the twist in the script. The US-led forces probably did not want a fight. That is why the offensive was signalled so long in advance. Speaking a few minutes ago on the BBC's top radio programme, Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup, the head of Britain's Defence Forces, declared, "We are not battling the Taliban. We are protecting the local population."

And that takes this play beyond any immediate staging. The issue moves to whether Marja and other Afghan towns can be held, and that in turn brings up all the questions beyond US artillery: the strength of the Afghan police force, the significance of development, the legitimacy and competence of local government, the policies of Kabul. (Those who would like a sobering lesson in what may be involved can check out the story of the northern Helmand town of Musa Qala, which has bounced back and forth between Taliban and British control since 2006.)

No doubt we will hear, over and over, in forthcoming days about "the battle for hearts and minds". (Let me correct that: I just saw the article, "Troops Fight for Hearts and Minds in Afghan Assault", published by Agence France Presse and being pushed by the ISAF public-relations staff via Twitter.)

Already, however, The New York Times has shifted its headline from Rah-Rah-Victory to "Errant U.S. Rocket Strike Kills Civilians in Afghanistan". And the BBC shifted from glorification to tough questions this morning, challenging Stirrup over the dead civilians and "victory". His response? "We will know in about 12 months" whether success had been achieved.

Operation Moshtarak ("Together") was a showpiece. If you want a battle, look for it not in the biff-bam-boom of this telegraphed offensive, but in the less dramatic but more important contests to come.

A Response: Why Venezuela Isn't Iran

The folks at The Flying Carpet Institute respond to Josh Shahryar's article, "Venezuela: Twitter Revolution’s Next Stop?":

Some pundits have recently tried to compare the recent upper middle-class mobilizations against the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to the ones occurring in Iran since last summer’s Presidential election. As proof of the similarities, the author notes the technological aspects of the mobilization, such as activity on Twitter. He furthermore notes that Venezuela is "a population subjugated to ill-planned economics, a strongman unwilling to leave power, and a government ever more keen to restrict its citizens' rights to freedom of speech".

Venezuela: Twitter Revolution’s Next Stop?

This is a very superficial analysis of events that can be overturned with a range of empirical evidence. However, I will confine myself to some obvious facts. For instance, the Chavez Government hasn’t resorted to executions of opposition members like the Islamic Republican regime in Iran. The "curbed free press" of Venezuela isn’t actually that curbed. In no other country in the recent years has the ruling class shown its teeth so openly against a popular reformist government, through "Chilean" methods like assassinations, employer lock-outs, and pot-beating upper middle-class housewives. What Western media reports also fail to show are the (even if somewhat modest) attempts of the Chavez Government to support the growth of communal radio programmes that are intended to challenge the corporate media monopoly.

Let us now turn our heads to Iran. Here, the neoconservative Ahmadinejad regime, elected by the narrow confines of the system of Velayaat-i-faqih (ultimate clerical authority), has followed a policy not unlike the one followed by neoliberal governments throughout the rest of the world: it has privatized enterprises and tried to crush unionized labour by introducing contract labour. At the same time it has tried to cushion the results of its policies with populist measures. In Iran, those populist measures are called "free potatoes", in the US and elsewhere they are called "No more taxes!" or "charity".  Chavez was instrumental in forming the UNT trade union federation, the backbone of the Left in the Chavista movement. Ahmadinejad on the other hand, was responsible for the severe crackdown on organizations like the Tehran Bus Drivers´ Union.

So what does bring Venezuela and Iran together? One can and should criticise Chavez´s praises of Ahmadinejad. They have no relation to reality and are based on a completely absurd understanding of the situation. Ironically, they resemble the West’s depiction of Ahmadinejad as an uncompromising "radical", something that is far from the truth.  Islamic Iran has shown that it is able and willing to cooperate with the US and Israel on a number of issues when this suits its interest (Iran-Iraq War, Afghanistan, Iraq).

But it’s not the similarities of the systems that brought the two countries together. It’s the fact that they are both faced by an American onslaught. The Obama administration has shown its real colours by silently embracing the Honduran coup against Manuel Zelaya, making obvious that it is prepared to follow the same ends in Latin America as the previous Bush administration but with different means. Meanwhile, not a week goes by that doesn’t see verbal threats of sanctions (the US) or the possibility of an upcoming war in Lebanon (Israel) to finish off the Iranian challenge.

One should not forget that the US --- or anybody else in the West --- isn’t diametrically opposed to the concept of political Islam. Instead, what any imperial hegemon fears most is the concept of resistance, irrespective of its colours. To equate Venezuela with Iran is false. It implies that the Islamic regime is a consistent anti-hegemonic regime that empowers organized labour and supports forms of democratic self-organization, while enjoying genuine popular support among the mass of people.

Venezuela: Twitter Revolution's Next Stop?

EA correspondent Josh Shahryar writes:

First, it was watching retweets of news from Iran in Spanish. Then I slowly started seeing "hashtags" for both Iran and Venezuela in the same tweet. Finally, I saw the Twitter account of a collective. Reading the profile helped me grasp the enormity of what I was witnessing: a student movement like Iran’s is relying on the Internet to inform people of what is happening inside Venezuela.

A few months ago, as I was tweeting about a protest in Iran and live-blogging, I noticed former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations Diego Arria, a Venezuelan, tweeting information about the protest in Iran. While it surprised me to see such a revered diplomat taking key interest in Iran’s Green Movement, I soon also began to witness mass support from Venezuelan students for the Iranian cause. But most interesting and heartening to me was that they have been on Twitter and other social media outlets for more than a year fighting for their own rights as well.

For those who oppose the rule of President Hugo Chavez, theirs is a story much similar to Iran's: a population subjugated to ill-planned economics, a strongman unwilling to leave power, and a government ever more keen to restrict its citizen's right to freedom of speech. As protests rocked Venezuela two weeks ago, news of the protests made its way out not only on the backs of the traditional mainstream media outlets but also on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Photobucket, and other websites once used for entertainment, killing time, or just plain ol' finding a date.


This week, after coming back from a short vacation, the first thing I noticed on my Twitter account was the varying articles, pictures, and videos of Venezuela’s students protesting against the banning of Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) and five other stations for not broadcasting a speech by Chavez. No need even to log onto my usual news websites: the story was right there in front of me. If anyone has doubts about the success of this movement, they do not need to look too far for evidence. Already Twitter users who have come out in support of Iran have started tweeting alongside their friends in Venezuela.

Furthermore, the movement is not disorganized. They have clear outlets on Twitter especially under the account "studentsvzla" and the eponymous website Venezuela Students Movement. They have a Facebook account "Chavez Tas PonCHAO" with more than 180,000 followers. Already on-line contacts are being established between supporters of the Green Movement online and Venezuelan students. When I asked for information on the recent protests in Venezuela, supporters of the Green Movement were the first to link me with up-to-date news.

The movement has been so successful that even Chavez himself has acknowledged its importance. An article in Business Insider reports:

Chavez has fought back by declaring that "using Twitter, the internet (and) text messaging" to criticize or oppose his increasingly authoritarian regime "is terrorism", a comment that recalls the looming threats of his allies in Iran, whose bloody crackdown on physical and electronic dissent may be blazing a trail for the Latin strongman.

Venezuelan journalist Nelson Bocaranda told El Nuevo Herald that the government has launched an army of Twitter users to bring down online networks and try to infiltrate student groups.

As in the case of Iran, the Venezuelan cause is slowly becoming more confrontational. But perhaps the most important lesson the Venezuelan movement online teaches us is the Twitter Revolution is not one that is going to remain confined to Iran or China. It is here, it is growing in scope, and it will soon be used by other groups fighting for their right to freedom of speech.