Posts tagged : "anti-Iran sanctions"

Kourosh Ziabari - It’s been almost a decade that the United States, Israel and their European allies have been pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear program. Economic sanctions, threats of military strike, assassinations and cyber attacks were all the options which they have resorted to in order to ruin Iran’s nuclear program. At the same time, Israel, which admittedly possesses up to 200 atomic warheads, has been unconditionally supported by the United States and Europe and every effort to investigate Israel’s nuclear arsenal by the international organization has been stalled by Washington. Simultaneously, the ever-increasing animosity between Iran and Israel has embittered the Iran-West relations more than before. To further...

  Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian journalist, author, polyglot, and contributing columnist and correspondant for numerous publications worldwide, including the Netherlands, Canada, Italy, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, South Korea, Belgium, Germany, the UK and the US. At the age of 14, he was selected as the world's youngest journalist by International Federation of Journalists and, in 2010, was honored by Iran's National Organization of Youths for his outstanding contributions and achievements in the field of "Media Activities." Ziabari has conducted interviews with politicians, Nobel laureates, journalists, authors, among them political commentator and linguist Noam Chomsky, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, former U.S. National...

Kourosh Ziabari - The fate of longstanding conflict over Iran's nuclear dossier, the duplicitous stance of the West towards the Israel's atomic program, the prospect of Iran – EU relations and the role of Iran in the world's political equations are the topics which the international community is immensely interested in knowing about. Josef Havlas is the ambassador of the Czech Republic in the Islamic Republic of Iran. During his diplomatic career, he served as the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Czech Republic to Japan (1995-2000) and Ireland (2003-2008), as well as Deputy Director of the Dept. for External Economic Relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2000-2003). He has been chairing the Czech embassy in...

  Kourosh Ziabari - The economic sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and its allies are being intensified every single day. The United States brags about diplomacy, détente and reconciliation with Iran, but it tightens the grip of sanctions around Iran on every occasion and especially once Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) are slated to meet. It not only imposes new sanctions on Iran’s finance, oil, insurance and media sectors, but incites the European countries to impose sanctions on Iran, as well. The sanctions have made trade, business and daily life difficult for the Iranian people, but they haven’t surrendered yet. In order to discuss the different...

  Kourosh Ziabari - It’s less than 10 days that the Iranian New Year has started. People across the country are celebrating the arrival of spring and the commencement of New Year. The past year has been a very difficult and tough year for the Iranian nation. The United States and its European allies, under the guise of preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, imposed a set of harsh and backbreaking sanctions on Iran. The sanctions were decried by conscientious and independent thinkers, scholars, authors and politicians. However, the U.S. and its European partners callously defied the international calls to lift the sanctions and mitigate the pains of the Iranian people. The Iranian people, however, withstood the...

  Kourosh Ziabari - For more than 35 years, the United States has been imposing harsh economic sanctions on Iran based on unfounded and unsubstantiated charges for which it has never presented any reliable evidence or convincing reasons. Regrettably, the United States has never felt responsible for presenting a logical justification for its confrontational and hostile attitude toward the Iranian people; an attitude which has been stiffened and hardened over the past decade as Iran’s nuclear program was irrationally turned into the scene of an erosive conflict between Iran and the West. Aside from the sanctions the UN Security Council has imposed on Iran, the U.S. has prodded its allies in Asia, Africa and Europe to impose...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Abolghasem Bayyenat is an independent political analyst writing mainly on Iran’s foreign policy developments. Over the past decade, his political commentaries and articles have appeared in numerous popular media and online journals, including Foreign Policy Journal, Foreign Policy In Focus, Monthly Review, Eurasia Review, AntiWar.com, Tehran Times, Middle East Online, San Francisco Chronicle, Online Opinion, American Chronicle, and a number of other national newspapers and online journals across the world. He has also published a number of book chapters and articles in academic journals. Besides academic studies in political science and international relations, he has also practical experience in international...

Kourosh Ziabari - Many independent and conscientious thinkers and scholars in the world agree with this assumption that the sanctions which the United States and the European Union have imposed on Iran over its nuclear program are inhumane, unjust, contrary to the principles of human rights and constitute an act of war and collective punishment. The United States says that the sanctions are put in effect in order to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear bomb but ironically, the United States is the largest possessor of nuclear weapons in the world itself. Even the intelligence agencies of the United States have published official reports which indicate that Iran does not have the intention to build nuclear weapons. In order to...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Much can be said about the enormous amount of sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and its European allies. Apparently, the purpose of the sanctions is to frustrate the Iranian people and turn them against their own government, but it seems that this objective is not going to be realized, as it failed with regards to Cuba when the United States began to impose sanctions on the Latin American country in 1960. It cannot be denied that the sanctions are harming Iran’s economy at the detriment of the ordinary people who should buy foreign goods at increasingly unstable and unusual prices, but at the same time, the sanctions are igniting anti-American sentiments among the Iranian citizens who blame the...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 which removed from power the close U.S. ally Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the United States virtually stopped all its trade and business transactions with Iran after branding it a state sponsor of terrorism. Iran’s economy was not significantly dependent on the United States, and it could make important achievements with time, even to the extent of becoming the world’s 15th economic power in terms of nominal GDP in 2009. However, as the controversy over Iran’s nuclear program become more serious in the early 2000s, the United States used the West’s skepticism on Iran’s nuclear program as an opportunity to ratchet up the sanctions and mount pressure on Iran with the...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Pepe Escobar is unquestionably one of the world's leading progressive, anti-war journalists. He is Brazilian and has lived in several countries across the world, including the United States , France , Italy , Singapore , Thailand and Hong Kong . He runs a regular column on Asia Times Online titled “The Roving Eye” in which he writes commentaries and articles about the Middle East and Asia affairs and the U.S. foreign policy. He has been interviewed by Russia Today, Press TV, Al-Jazeera and The Real News Network. Pepe's articles have also appeared on such magazines and news websites as Huffington Post, Tom Dispatch, The Nation, Voltaire Net, Salon, Common Dreams, Information Clearing House and Antiwar.com....

  Kourosh Ziabari - The United States claims that Iran is after developing nuclear weapons, and has been repeating this allegation for nearly one decade. Although it has constantly failed to confirm its claims by presenting reliable and valid evidences and witnesses, it has imposed hard-hitting economic sanctions against Iran which have taken a heavy toll on the ordinary Iranian citizens, but interestingly haven’t demoralized them or undermined their solidarity and resistance. Hundreds of academicians, peace activists, journalists, media personalities, authors and thinkers have admitted that these sanctions are criminal and tantamount to a gross violation of human rights, but the United States officials have been relentlessly...