Posts tagged : "Iran-U.S. relations"

Kourosh Ziabari - Afshin Rattansi is an award-winning journalist who has worked at the BBC Today program in the run up to the war on Iraq in 2003, CNN International, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera Arabic, Press TV and a number of Channel 4 (UK) commissioned production companies. Afshin has been a columnist for Guardian between 1986 and 1992. He has written articles for the New Statesman, Attitude, Flaunt and The Oldie. He has anchored news for Press TV from Tehran and was was one of the first English-language employees of Al Jazeera and worked at the Arab satellite station’s flagship programme, ‘Top Secret’ which uncovered the Al Qaeda plot to attack Washington and New York in 2001. Rattansi is currently hosting the Double Standards show...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Alan Hart is an indispensable name in journalism. Unquestionably, he has been one of the most influential British journalists with an expertise in the Middle East affairs. A former BBC Panorama presenter, Hart was a close friend of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Hart has interviewed several prominent leaders including Saudi Arabia's King Faisal, Jordan's King Hussein and Egyptian Presidents Nasser and Sadat. He was a media correspondent for the Independent Television Network and has covered the Vietnam War and Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well. He is a vocal critic of Israel and its expansionistic policies and has repeatedly reprimanded the Arab leaders...

Kourosh Ziabari - Mark Vorpahl is an American social justice activist, union steward and anti-war writer. He mostly writes for the Workers Compass but his writings have also appeared on a number of international journals and news websites such as Common Dreams, Global Research, CounterPunch and Counter Currents. He is opposed to U.S. military expeditions around the world and believes that the United States is not in a position to tell Iran to abandon its nuclear program. With regards to the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement he opines, “The Occupy Wall Street Movement was a damning critique of the policies of President Obama. It would not have come into existence if it weren’t for his continuation of the same policies...

Kourosh Ziabari - You would certainly know Yvonne Ridley or at least heard of her name if you have been a regular follower of Press TV, especially in Britain, albeit before the state-run media regulator Ofcom took the news network off the Sky platform, depriving millions of Britons of the opportunity to watch a TV channel which has always tried to shed a light on the obscured, concealed aspects of the events and tell the truth about what's happening around the world. Ridley is a renowned British journalist, war correspondent and TV host. She made the headlines on September 28, 2001 when she was arrested by the Taliban members in Afghanistan while working for the Sunday Express. She converted to Islam after she was released by Taliban on...

Kourosh Ziabari - While the United States and European Union are vehemently competing with each other in the seemingly endless race of imposing sanctions on Iran, the ordinary Iranian citizens are experiencing the most breathtaking, agonizing impacts of the crippling embargoes. On July 31, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) sent a letter to all members of the U.S. Congress, demanding a concerted action to approve The Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act which imposes a new set of sanctions on Iran's energy and transportation sector. On August 1, the media reported that the Congress has ratified the bill and it's waiting to be signed by the president. Iran is already under 6 rounds of sanctions...

Kourosh Ziabari - It’s not all about Iran’s nuclear program. When Iranians removed from power the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who carried the accolade of the closest ally of the White House in the Persian Gulf region, the first flames of hostility between Tehran and Washington were fanned. For more than three decades Iran and the United States have failed to sit at a negotiation table and settle their disputes and come to a comprehensive agreement over forgetting the grievances and starting a new era of reconciliation, mutual understanding and rapprochement. The Iranians every year storm into the streets to chant “Death to America,” and the United States every year intensifies the anti-Iranian sanctions, funds...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Prof. Rodney Shakespeare is a renowned political commentator and visiting professor of binary economics at Trisakti University in Jakarta, Indonesia. A co-founder of the Global Justice Movement, Shakespeare is a member of the Christian Council for Monetary Justice. Mr. Shakespeare has written several articles on the Middle East affairs, with a special focus on Iran, Bahrain and Syria. His latest book "The Modern Universal Paradigm" was published in 2007 by the Trisakti University publications. He is a strong advocate of Iran, its people and its culture and in several articles has decried the unilateral, unjustifiable pressures of the United States and its allies on Iran. What follows is the complete...

Kourosh Ziabari - American journalist and photographer Nile Bowie believes that the reality of Iran is absolutely different from what the Western mainstream media portray of it. "I would stress that Iran is an extremely safe country to travel through, and anyone who visits will certainly leave with more accurate perceptions than what Western media attempts to depict," he said in an interview with Tehran Times. Based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Nile Bowie writes for the Canadian Center for Research on Globalization. Last week, Bowie and a group of American tourists traveled to Iran to visit the country's different cities, historical villages and cultural sites. He took numerous pictures of Iran and provided us with some of them for...

Kourosh Ziabari - The fact that the inhumane sanctions of the United States and its European allies against Iran are taking a heavy toll on the ordinary Iranians is still hard to believe for many Western citizens who suppose that their governments are sincere in their claims of being concerned for human rights and freedom. In different articles, I've pointed out this fact that the economic sanctions against Iran have become so intensive and rigorous that they have nothing to do with Iran's nuclear program anymore; rather, they are aimed at paralyzing the daily life of the innocent civilians in the country with the ultimate goal of persuading them to revolt against the government to protest the deteriorating living conditions, hence...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iranian media reported on Tuesday, December 4 that the naval forces of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have successfully hunted down an American Scan Eagle surveillance drone which had violated Iran’s airspace while on an espionage mission over the Persian Gulf island of Khark on the southern coasts of Iran. The U.S. military officials and people in the Obama administration rushed to categorically refute the claims that Iran has captured the American drone. Immediately after Iran’s English-language Press TV aired an 11-minute footage showing some Iranian commanders inspecting the intact Scan Eagle drone in an undisclosed location in Tehran, the U.S. military officials released statements and denied the...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Prominent American political scientist Prof. John J. Mearsheimer believes that as a result of the enormous influence of the Israeli lobby on the U.S. politicians, one can hardly think of rapprochement between Iran and the United States in short-run, but they can move toward reconciliation by recognizing each other’s rights and responsibilities. “What the Americans and Iranians have to do is to reach a compromised agreement, where the Americans would recognize the fact that Iran is allowed to have a nuclear enrichment capability and we should recognize that, and at the same time, Iranians should accept the fact that there have to be limits on this enrichment capability, so that they don’t march up to the...

  Kourosh Ziabari - Iran’s nuclear program seems to have reached a dead end. Iranian officials have politically invested a lot on the country’s nuclear program, which was initially set in motion 6 decades ago when President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to help his close friend Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi construct the first nuclear reactors in Iran, and it seems to be embarrassing for the Iranian government to announce out of the blue that they don’t want to pursue nuclear technology anymore, which will give the West a pretext to launch a new psychological war against Tehran and trumpet this victory that it has retreated from its position. And from the other hand, the obdurate United States and its European allies have not...