Monthly archive : "July, 2014"

Kourosh Ziabari: A world-renowned Canadian philosopher argues that the United States holds the world record of illegal killings of unarmed civilians and extrajudicial detention and torturing of prisoners who are detained without trial. Prof. John McMurtry says that the U.S. government is a gigantic mass-murdering machine which earns profit through waging wars, and is never held accountable over its unspeakable war crimes and crimes against humanity. He also believes that the U.S. has become a police state, which treats its citizens in the most derogatory manner. “I have travelled alone with only backpack possession through the world, and have found no state in which police forces are more habituated to violent bullying, more likely...

Kourosh Ziabari: Prof. George Bisharat, a renowned Palestinian-American professor of law, is of the opinion that without the US moral support, the Israeli regime would not have been able to massacre the Palestinian people so ruthlessly. "The United States’ veto power in the United Nations Security Council is the single most important factor in enabling Israel’s decades long impunity from international law," Prof. Bisharat said in an exclusive interview. Prof. Bisharat whose commentaries on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict regularly appear on the academic publications and major newspapers in the United States says that there's no elctoral advantage for the politicians to criticize Israel for its war crimes, instead, they can raise...

Kourosh Ziabari - Tehran Times: As Iran and the group of six world powers are engaged in a marathon of intensive and breathtaking negotiations in the Austrian capital Vienna to find a solution for ending the decade-old controversy over Tehran's nuclear program, it becomes more important to ask the experts and scholars how a comprehensive agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States) looks like and how the two sides of the dispute should approach the talks to obtain significant and substantive results. A prominent American nuclear expert believes that the coming to power of the moderate politician Hassan Rouhani as the President of Iran and the subsequent recommencement of nuclear...

Kourosh Ziabari - Tehran Times: The new opportunities created by the coming to power of a new government in Tehran has instigated the European Union officials to think of ways for solving the nuclear controversy with Iran once for all, reconstructing the damaged bilateral and multilateral relations with the oil-rich country and returning to its lucrative market as permitted by the step-by-step removal of the economic sanctions. The Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn was the 9th EU foreign minister who traveled to Iran following the election of Hassan Rouhani as the President of Iran in June 2013 elections. Jean Asselborn's trip to Iran earlier in June was the first trip by a high-ranking Luxembourg official to the country in...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: Jack Straw is not an unknown or unfamiliar politician to the Iranians. When the current President of Iran Hassan Rouhani was the country’s lead nuclear negotiator with the EU3 (Britain, France and Germany) under President Mohammad Khatami, Jack Straw traveled to Iran several times as the British Foreign Secretary and conferred with him on a number of occasions. Straw is a veteran politician who has experienced working at the different administrative and law-making levels in the British politics. From 1987 to 1992, he was the Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Science and for the next two years, he served as the Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment. From May 1997 until June 2001, he...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: As the people of Afghanistan gear up for electing a new president, their security concerns for the future of the war-torn country also grow. In the recent decades, Afghanistan has gone through consecutive ups and downs and there have been few moments of peace and tranquility in the landlocked country which has been long coveted by the Eastern and Western powers because of its strategic and geopolitical importance. Afghanistan, which has begun striding on the path of democracy, is now rising from the ashes of the dark years of tyrannical rule by the Taliban fundamentalists who had turned the lives of the Afghan citizens into a state of constant trepidation and anxiety throughout the years they were in...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Tehran Times: Janko Veber, the president of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia, visited Iran in early May 2014, in the first trip by a European parliament speaker to Iran in more than a decade. Veber had travelled to Iran at the invitation of his Iranian counterpart Ali Larijani and was one of many high-ranking EU officials who came to Iran following the election of Hassan Rouhani as the President of Iran in June 2013. Like the majority of the EU officials who travelled to Iran recently, including 9 foreign ministers of the 28-member bloc, Mr. Veber voiced his optimism about the further expansion of ties between Iran and the international community and the diplomatic settlement of...