Interviews

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...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: Although Iran and the United States have not had close diplomatic relations for more than three decades, and despite the fact that the two countries have been at loggerheads over many grievances, academic and cultural exchanges have usually brought the two nations closer together and created opportunities for increased mutual understanding between the two peoples that in spite of their greatness and magnificence, have usually failed to take note of each other’s concerns and sensitivities. It’s possible to remove the acrimonies of the past in the Iran-U.S. relations through constructive and meaningful dialog and negotiations. Academicians, scholars, intellectuals and media people can play...

Kourosh Ziabari: Prominent American sociologist Prof. William I. Robinson believes that the United States government is the biggest perpetrator of terror in the world and its military adventures across the globe have claimed the lives of millions of innocent citizens. According to Prof. William I. Robinson, “if we define terrorism as the use of violence against civilians for political objectives, then the US state is the world’s leading terrorist.” “US intervention abroad in the 20th century – the forging of a US empire - claimed tens of millions of victims, inflicted untold suffering, and set back the aspirations of freedom and democracy in dozens of countries,” said Prof. Robinson in an exclusive interview. Prof....

Kourosh Ziabari: Prominent American peace activist and FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley believes that the United States is violating the international law by supporting the rebels and terrorists in Syria. According to Coleen Rowley, “the US funding and arming” of the terrorists and insurgents in the crisis-hit Syria “mostly through US’ ties with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, to help the Syrian opposition fighters topple Assad, are all acts of war and actually also violate international law.” “Even threats to bomb are supposed to be illegal under international law, i.e. under the Kellogg-Briand Treaty, later engrained in the Nuremberg Principle that wars of aggression be considered the ‘supreme crime’, and the UN...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: For more than three years, Syria has been engulfed in a deadly conflict that has so far claimed hundreds of lives and displaced, orphaned and widowed thousands of others. At the outset, there were people who claimed that the unrest in Syria was part of the democratic, revolutionary wave sweeping the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring, but it’s now clear to everyone, both friends and foes, that the unrest in Syria is a proxy war to which tens of countries are contributing for one end: bringing down the government of President Assad. Syria has now turned into a battlefield for the face-off between the government forces and ordinary people loyal to President Assad and trained...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: When Emma Bonino visited Iran in December 2013, she was the first European Union foreign minister who would travel to Iran in nearly one decade. Her trip was applauded by those who favored a peaceful settlement of the disputes between Iran and the West over Tehran’s nuclear program, and irked those, including the Israeli regime, who find their interests in the continuation of the conflict and animosity between Iran, the United States and the European Union. Following the resignation of the Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, President Giorgio Napolitano named Matteo Renzi as the new Prime Minister in February 2014, and the cabinet was reshuffled. As a result, Emma Bonino is not the foreign minister...

Kourosh Ziabari: Award-winning American journalist Robert Koehler says the conscious members of media should resist the warmongerings of the conservative politicians and work to promote peace and stability globally. “The idea that a war can be waged justly is the beginning of the problem. Every leader who has an interest in waging a war will, of course, claim that this war is absolutely necessary and absolutely just. That’s how it was a decade ago when the “war on terror” got underway,” said Robert Koehler in an interview. “Forget all those other wars, forget Vietnam. These wars are necessary. And the corporate media always goes along with the present justification, which always requires inattentiveness to the deaths of...