The Skeptic الشكاك

1014 Where’s Hoder?

Where’s Hoder? If the Iranian government has detained him, they should say so. If he is free, he should say so.

A few days ago, Jahan News reported that Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, better known on the Internet as Hoder, had been arrested soon after his return to Iran, and that he had confessed to spying for Israel. On November 17, the official Islamic Republic News Agency ran the first part in a series of “confessions” from a “Hossein D, one of the people misled by the reformist movement.” (Global Voices has helpfully translated the full IRNA item. It should sound familiar to anyone who has seen previous propaganda “confessions“).

To date, there has been no independent confirmation of Hossein’s arrest, and I understand that his family and friends have not appealed for help. Jahan news, the only source for the story, has been described as “close to Iranian intelligence” and “not a reliable source of information.”

Rancor and Rumor
What we have, then, is a single, alarming rumor from a Web site of dubious reliability. But reaction to the rumor has brought into focus the Iranian-Israeli confrontation and the fault lines within the paranoid, sometimes poisonous world of Iranian diaspora politics. Rumor and paranoia are natural companions, and the original rumor has already multiplied many times over, into more rumors, insinuations, and hints of schadenfreude.

Look at the comments readers left on Brian Whitaker’s report. There’s the usual huffing and puffing that accompanies talk of Iran, Israel, and especially the two together. There’s a distracting thread about Mordechai Vanunu. There are suggestions that this whole thing is just an attention-grabbing stunt. And I’ve heard worse insinuated. How to account for the rancor and the rumor?

Hossein moved to Canada in 2000 and began blogging in 2001. He figured out how to use unicode on blogger to write in Farsi and published a how-to guide for the benefit of others. The Iranian blogosphere quickly ballooned, and Hossein became a well-known proponent of the Internet as an engine for free speech. Journalists called him the “Blogfather.” This sparked resentment from some Iranian bloggers, who felt he took too much credit.

In 2006, Hossein went to Israel on his Canadian passport on an invitation from Lisa Goldman. He explained:

I’ve publicly come to Israel to break a big taboo and to be a bridge between Iranian and Israeli people who are manipulated by their own governments’ and media’s dehumanizing attitude, especially now that the possibility of some sort of violent clash is higher than ever.

Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post loved it, and The New York Times published an op-ed of his with a Tel Aviv byline. Iranian bloggers, Hossein admitted to the Post, were less enthused. Nationalists reacted as anyone would expect. Critics of the government feared guilt by association.

Considering that he had been briefly detained on his last trip to Iran and forced to sign an apology for his writings, and considering that visiting Israel is a crime in Iran, Hossein knew that he would likely face some repercussions if he attempted to return to Iran. But he was already talking about going back one day.

Hossein had always argued online a lot: on blogs, on listservs, in articles. He made accusations and alienated a lot of people. In some cases, his attacks could have put activists in danger.

Over the course of 2006, as U.S. policy on Iran became more bellicose, Hossein became more defensive of the Iranian government. In September 2006 he argued that Iranian-Canadian academic Ramin Jahanbegloo’s “recantation” after four months in an Iranian prison had been sincere, that Jahanbegloo regretted that his work had “indirectly help[ed] the Bush administration in its plans for regime change in Iran through fomenting internal unrest and instability,” and that Iran’s government had “moved beyond state terror.” Some received the article with “bewilderement and outrage,” others as “a slap across the face.”

Around this time, Don Butler wrote in The Ottawa Citizen, “Interview requests from western-based Iranian media… dried up, as [did] invitations to ex-pat events and panel discussions.”

Undeterred, Hossein argued that “The Islamic Republic is worth defending. Even at its worst, it is way better than anything the US or anyone else can bring to Iran,” and added that he “would definitely support Iran if it one day decided it would start making [nuclear] weapons.”

It was also around this time that Hossein officially pulled the plug on stop.censoring.us, where he had formerly monitored Internet censorship in Iran. “Internet censorship exists in Iran,” he wrote, “As it does in many other parts of the world, especially in the Middle East.

But it has recently become another pretext for the United States and its allies to further demonise and delegitimise the government of Iran.

Despite all problems and challenges, I believe that Islamic Republic is a legitimate, sovereign and democratic system and I reject any attempts to participate in such nasty demonising campaigns, which ultimately try to justify the Western intervention.

I believe that Internet censorship is an internal problem and the only way to solve it should also come and develop from within. Taking such efforts beyond Iran and into the international scene will benefit the American politicians more than the Iranian internet users.

Therefore, although this website has not been updated for almost a year, I now officially shut it down.

In October 2007, Mohammed Mehdi Khalaji, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, sued him for $2 million, alleging that he had defamed him in a series of blog posts beginning in 2005. In response to the lawsuit, Hossein’s hosting company asked him to remove the posts. He refused, and, after an exchange of emails, the hosting company eventually canceled his account. Ethan Zuckerman, who has long experience with Hossein, defended him on principle, but had to admit “that Derakhshan can be abrasive and difficult.”

Where’s Hoder?
None of this answers the question, “Where is Hoder?” But it does help explain some of the rancor.

So where, indeed, is Hoder? It’s been days now since this rumor started. If he were near a phone line, you would think that he would have noticed the noise and written to say he’s alright. This is a man who monitors Technorati links to his op-eds. Hossein’s family and friends have not come forward to ask for help, but before he returned to Iran this last time, Hossein asked people not to campaign on his behalf if he were detained in Iran because he expected he would not be held long, and that nothing serious would happen to him. I sincerely hope he is hiking in the mountains of Iran, blissfully unaware of the brouhaha.

To those who believe Hossein should be given the same consideration he showed previous detainees, consider these words from H.L. Mencken: “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

If the Iranian government does have him (and pardon me for saying so, Hossein), it should say so and release him. Given Hossein’s high profile and his expressed views, he’d make a funny kind of an Israeli spy.

Disclosure: I first met Hossein Derakhshan at a 2004 conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he spoke about blogs and censorship in Iran. We have crossed paths at least once a year since, each time in a different city. I last saw him in June, in Budapest, where we had a cordial argument about whether international human rights organizations were pawns for Dick Cheney and the Israel Lobby (I argued against).

7 Comments »

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1. Thanks for this incredibly comprehensive summary of Hoder’s case. This was really needed in the dust of opposing statements that have been uttered throughout the last days.

   Comment by Simon Columbus — November 22, 2008 #

2. I have no doubt that hossein has been detained, and while a lot of times he drives me nuts and while I have disagreed with many of his tactics, the fact is that he has been brave enough to call out a lot of phony “human rights activists” and “political analysts” who justify taking money from various governments or lobbies in exchange for “information” about Iran. Hoder threatened all these people, which is why they can’t hide their delight at the prospect of him being in trouble.

   Comment by niki — November 22, 2008 #

3. I am just wondering how the links on the right side of his blog are being updated everyday?
   If he has access to internet why doesn’t he write a post? if some one else is doing it for him, then they have an agenda and are not willing to get others involved?

   Comment by iman — November 22, 2008 #

4. Most of the accusations against Hossein Derakhshan are unfounded. They used to accuse him of being a spy of the Islamic Republic. So how come he’s now sitting in an Iranian prison and being interrogated? They accused him of working against the so-called Iranian dissidents and human rights groups. They accused him that he was helping the Iranian intelligence apparatus by disclosing the activities of the dissident groups. Iranian intelligence apparatus is very sophisticated. That’s the main reason the Islamic Republic has been able to survive for 30 years despite of all the threats and intimidations. Despite of a devastating war that destroyed the country. They don’t need someone like Hossein to gather information for them. What Hossein was doing is something all of us can do. We can Google on anyone and gather public information about them. A lot of people got pissed by what Hossein was doing and tried to silence him, including his buddies in the Iranian Blogesphere. I don’t agree with everything that Hossein did or wrote about, but he had a RIGHT to express his opinions. Many times he used documents and links to prove his points, and that’s what really pissed people. That’s the main reason they tried to silence him.

   Comment by Mohammad — November 23, 2008 #

5. […] Iranian reader wrote in to chastise me for writing about Hossein Derakhshan’s possible detention and ignoring two less ambiguous detentions. I am much […]

   Pingback by The Skeptic ?????? » Riots, Detentions, and Harassment — November 25, 2008 #

6. Excellent write-up.

   Comment by Nart — November 30, 2008 #

7. […] bloggers are reporting that Hossein Derakhshan’s family says he is detained in Eshratabad, “where he is at the mercy of Saeed […]

   Pingback by The Skeptic ?????? » Free Hoder — December 10, 2008 #

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