Posts tagged : "freedom of speech"

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: The countdown has started for one of the most theatrical presidential contests of recent times in the United States. While the entire world is fixated on a thus far incurable pestilence that has claimed more than a million lives, even the pandemic cannot divert global attention from the showdown between two heavyweights vying for the most powerful office in the world. The race features a recalcitrant former business tycoon turned politician considered by 27% of American adults as the biggest threat to world peace, intermittently described as “racist” and “misogynist,” up against his 77-year-old rival from the Democratic Party, endorsed by his former boss, ex-president Barack Obama, as a...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Anti-Muslim bigotry is on the rise globally. Let’s call a spade a spade. Islamophobia, even though some people prefer to tiptoe around using the term so that they don’t acknowledge the gravity of this gruesome form of racism, is an undeniable reality in the 21st century, casting a dark shadow over the lives of the nearly 1.8 billion Muslims dotted across the four corners of the globe. From burning down and vandalizing mosques to physical attacks on people appearing to be Muslims walking down the streets, hate crimes against Muslim students on university campuses, verbal abuse and death threats directed against Muslim citizens and the Islamic faith being constantly slandered in the media,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s official coronavirus death toll, which topped 20,000 on Monday, is under domestic scrutiny after a reformist newspaper was shuttered for suggesting the real toll was 20 times higher. On August 10, Iran’s Press Supervisory Board issued an order temporarily revoking the publishing license of the Jahan-e Sanat newspaper, which has been in print since 2004. The reason cited for the decision was an interview run by the paper the previous day titled “No Trust in the Government’s Statistics”, in which an epidemiologist alleged the real coronavirus fatality numbers could be at least 20 times higher than the government’s official tally. The official toll as of Monday was 20,643 deaths...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: November 2019 marked one of the gloomiest junctures of the 21st century for Iranians, when in a timespan of less than two weeks, angry protests by large groups of people against the overnight spike in the price of fuel triggered a violent response by the government and some 230 people were killed, according to the official statistics, while a report by Reuters put the number of casualties at 1,500. The protests, which first erupted in oil-rich Khuzestan province and quickly mushroomed across the country, were initially an expression of outrage over the 300% rise in the price of gasoline, in a country gripped by international sanctions and deep-seated economic disparities. However, they soon...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: The detention of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by British police on April 11 has generated an international media frenzy. Assange has been sheltering in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012, having sought asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden where he was facing sexual assault and rape charges. The government of President Lenin Moreno revoked Assange’s Ecuadorian citizenship and, after months of coordinated efforts, asked the Metropolitan Police to remove him from the embassy premises. Julian Assange founded the whistleblowing website, WikiLeaks, in 2006 to expose corruption, human rights violations and war crimes. The publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, as well as a trove...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: On the second day of the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum 2015 held from June 22 – 24 in the German city of Bonn, a group of journalists, including me representing Iran Review, had the chance to talk with Dunja Mijatović, a prominent European expert on media law and regulation and OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media. OSCE is the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and is known to be the world’s largest security-oriented intergovernmental organization, working on a range of issues including arms control, human rights and freedom of press. OSCE’s member states come from various geographical regions; from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in...

Kourosh Zibari: David Barsamian, a leading Armenian-American radio journalist, believes that as a result of the good performance of alternative press, young Americans don’t pay attention to the propaganda of the corporate, mainstream media anymore. David Barsamian, who is the founder and director of Alternative Radio broadcast from Boulder, Colorado, says the journalists in the United States don’t need to be censored or monitored by the government, because they are accustomed to a full-fledged self-censorship. Mr. Barsamian says that the US government orchestrated a large project of media propaganda against its own people to rationalize and justify its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq: “f course the case of Iraq is very instructive...

Kourosh Ziabari - Press TV: Like the story of all those freedom fighters and conscientious people who struggle for realizing true democracy and freedom in the United States but are punished because they purportedly threaten the “national security,” the story of Jeremy Hammond is a painful and moving one. The mainstream media in the United States gave coverage to Jeremy Hammond’s case critically and analyzed it within the borders of their dogmatic stereotypes. They never alluded to the fact that Hammond lost the joy and peace of his youth days in an audacious attempt to defeat tyranny and autocracy and that although his bargain cost him his liberty, he once again attracted the global attentions to the stirring realities hidden...

Kourosh Ziabari - Madiba is not among us anymore. This is something which we should believe, or somehow convince ourselves to believe. However, the “grandpa”, who was a source of inspiration for the entire world throughout his fruitful life, can still be seen as an icon of freedom, struggle for peace and dignity and disobedience to oppression and tyranny. The South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs has confirmed that dignitaries and leaders from more than 90 countries have diverged on South Africa to attend the memorial service of the late anti-apartheid South African leader Nelson Mandela who passed away on Thursday, December 5, after struggling with respiratory infection for many years. Nelson Mandela is not simply...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Tehran Times: According to the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Viviane Reding, all the democratic states need free press and media and it’s a necessity for all the member states of the European Union to improve their press freedom record. “I believe that Europeans enjoy one of the freest and most diverse media environments in the world. But this does not mean we can be complacent. That is why in the past two years the Commission has stood up for freedom of the press and certain media practices in various countries such as Azerbaijan, Hungary, Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. A Europe without the freedom of press is inconceivable,” said Viviane Reding in an...

Kourosh Ziabari - Ernst Zundel is a German author and historian who has spent seven years of his life behind bars as a result of expressing his controversial viewpoints and opinions. He is a revisionist who has denied the Holocaust as described by most historians. He has been one of the most prominent political prisoners in Europe and has been jailed in three countries on two continents. After his arrest in the U.S. in 2003, he was deported to Canada, where he was kept in prison as “a threat to the national security” for two years. After deportation to Germany in March 2005, he was convicted and sentenced in 2007 to five additional years of imprisonment on charges of holocaust denial.  He was finally released on March 1,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Just a few hours before the midnight deadline of May 26, 2011, the US President Barack Obama signed a 4-year extension of the controversial USA Patriot Act to prove that his strategic plans are not significantly different from those of his hawkish predecessor, George W. Bush, who showed to the international community the real face of the American democracy with his warmongering policies. Patriot Act is an Act of the US Congress which allows private security firms under the supervision of the government to monitor and search American citizens' phone conversations, email communications, medical, financial and official records to discover potential terrorism-related threats and foil the probable plots which can jeopardize...