What surprised me about Hossein Derakhshan when I interviewed him in a café on Jerusalem’s Emek Refaim Street two years ago was that the self-exiled Iranian, who was arrested this month during a visit to Tehran on suspicion of being an Israeli spy, favored a nuclear-armed Iran and a religious Islamic regime.
What isn’t surprising is that Derakhshan has now been arrested. He was arrested for a most serious crime.
The object of his visit, Derakhshan said, was to show his countrymen Israel’s human face and to detoxify relations between the two peoples after Ahmadinejad called for Israel’s elimination.
“I want to humanize Israel for Iranians and tell them it’s not what the Islamic propaganda machine is saying – that Israelis are thirsty for Muslim blood,” he said. “And I want to show Israel that the average Iranian isn’t even thinking about doing harm to Israel. I want them to see Iranians who don’t look like Ahmadinejad.”
Damn him, trying to humanize Israel.
Do you figure that the Committee to Protect Journalists will be as keen to protect him as they were to protect Bilal Hussein?
Unfortunately, Iran has just executed someone else for spying for Israel.
The agency reported that Ali Ashtari was executed by hanging on Monday. It said he was arrested in 2006 and confessed during his trial in June to spying for Israel through security and telecommunication equipment.
Iranian news media reported in June that Mr. Ashtari, 45, had received a death sentence for spying. At the time, newspapers said he had been the manager of a company selling communication and security equipment to the Iranian government.
It’s hard to know if Ashtari was guilty, but my suspicion is that he ran afoul of the regime for some other reason and they charged him with espianoge. It was never clear how Mr. Ashtari would have gotten knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program. Even Al Jazeera sounds skeptical. Alas the Washington Post does all it can to make Iran seem reasonable by interviewing an Iranian counterintelligence official but not expressing much skepticism about the official’s claims.
It’s hard to feel a lot of sympathy for Iran, that its actions are being suspected.
The cleric, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is also a former president, said at Friday Prayer that a report released Wednesday by Mohamed ElBaradei, the atomic energy agency’s director general, was ambiguous.
“Unfortunately, Mr. ElBaradei always talks ambiguously,†Mr. Rafsanjani said. “We expect the agency to be fair and impartial.†Dr. ElBaradei said in the report that Iran needed to provide the agency with substantive information to support its claims that the country’s nuclear program was intended to produce only nuclear power, not nuclear warheads.
And I wish that Mr. Rafsanjani’s regime had been “fair and impartial” to Mr. Ashtari. Maybe they’ll show some of that to Hossein Derakhshan. Not likely.
Highly publicized executions and arrests might be one way to rally support when faced with falling popularity.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
