Geography Archives: Iran

  Rouzbeh Rashidi, born in Tehran in 1980, is an independent Iranian filmmaker.  He has been making films since 2000 when he founded the Experimental Film Society in Tehran, devoted to avant-garde, experimental, and low-budget filmmaking.  He is currently based in Dublin.  Strand (Iran-Ireland: Experimental Film Society, 2009) was shot in Iran in 2008.  For […]

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said earlier this week that the Islamic Republic is prepared to stop enriching uranium to the nearly-20 percent level required to fabricate fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR), if others agree to provide new, finished fuel for the TRR, in line with the Joint Declaration that Iran negotiated with […]

  In international politics, if an action seems reckless or callous and the ones taking it are not certified loonies, usually it’s because it was made to look that way, on purpose.  To send a message. Take Israel’s attack in international waters on a civilian flotilla that resulted in the death of nine Turkish passengers. […]

FYI, on 22 July 2010, the worst lunatics in the mad House introduced H.RES. 1553: Expressing support for the State of Israel’s right to defend Israeli sovereignty, to protect the lives and safety of the Israeli people, and to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of […]

The decrepit Arab establishment gets jealous as Iran and Turkey woo the Arab people. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 23 July 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi.  | Print

I recently returned from the quadrennial International Sociology Association’s World Congress held in Gothenburg, Sweden.  It’s kind of like the World Cup of sociology.  There I sat in on a session organized by the Iranian Sociology Association, where a few presenters, including its president Hossein Serajzadeh, discussed the state of social science in Iran.  I […]

No medium of propaganda is as powerful and effective as film.  Think of the classics, the most notorious efforts to sway the public with the electrifying and collective passion of cinema: racial apartheid was justified in the US with Birth of a Nation.  The Soviets glorified their revolution with The Battleship Potemkin.  Then there was […]

  Executive Summary: This report concludes that military action against Iran should be ruled out as a means of responding to its possible nuclear weapons ambitions.  The consequences of such an attack would lead to a sustained conflict and regional instability that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran […]

There is one video Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, must be praying never gets posted on YouTube with English subtitles.  To date, the 10-minute segment has been broadcast only in Hebrew on Israel’s Channel 10. Its contents, however, threaten to gravely embarrass not only Mr. Netanyahu but also the US administration of Barack Obama. […]

Coverage of Shahram Amiri’s departure from the United States and his return to Iran has focused, rather superficially, on the question of whether he was kidnapped or defected and then changed his mind.  Frankly, we are more interested in what reports that the CIA tried to pay Amiri $5 million say about the current political […]

When the Soviet Union was in terminal crisis in 1990 and the prospect emerged of the United States establishing long-term domination of the international political system, the influential Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer sought to capture the character of the unfolding geopolitical era. The term he used became a buzzword in then-emerging neo-conservative circles, and […]

  The countries comprising the “Vienna Group” (i.e. USA, France, and Russia, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA) have expressed their “Concerns about the Joint Declaration Conveyed by Iran to the IAEA.”  Iran has repeatedly declared that the Tehran Brazil-Iran-Turkey Joint Declaration was never intended as a final binding document, but as a basis […]

“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned . . . everywhere is war.” — Bob Marley, “War,” 1976 (lyrics adapted from a speech by Haile Selassie I at the UN in 1963) Every few months the specter of a new American war in the […]

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States last week was capped off on Sunday with the broadcast of a previously-taped interview on Fox New Sunday.  The interview covered a range of important topics, including the state of the U.S.-Israel relationship and prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace.  But it is the Prime Minister’s remarks […]

I affirmed on July 4 that neither the United States nor Iran would give in; “one, due to the pride of the powerful, and the other, out of resistance to the yoke and the capacity to fight, as has occurred so many times in the history of humanity…” In almost all wars, one of the […]

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides relates how Pericles, in the fifth century BC, imposed economic sanctions against the city of Megara, which had allied itself with Sparta.  Athens prohibited trade with this city state and sent a message: if Megara did not break its alliance with Sparta, it would be punished.  Megara […]

The Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the United States, Yousef Al-Otaiba, is in the news for comments he made yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival — comments in which he apparently expressed some measure of support for a U.S. military attack on Iranian nuclear targets.  We have known Yousef since before his […]

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had sent Syria a “sophisticated radar system that could threaten Israel’s ability to launch a surprise attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”  The story cited reporting from “two Israeli officials, two U.S. officials and a Western intelligence source,” and was “confirmed . . . by […]

  As the United States government does what it can to halt Iran’s nuclear program, it may be suspected that it is seeking to build up its own nuclear industry, denying Iran the capacity to develop its own technology while pressuring it to open itself up for US technological export and to become dependent on […]

I promised that I would be the “happiest man in the world if I was wrong” but, unfortunately, my happiness was short-lived. The World Cup has still not ended. There are six days left to go before the final. What an exceptional opportunity the yanki empire and the fascist state of Israel might miss for keeping […]