Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts

Saturday, 5 December 2009

Justice!

It was in the middle of post-election days in Iran that my supervisor put a paper on my desk which was news about Tariq Ramadan being fired from the university and it was because he ran a program in Press TV which is a channel funded by Iranian government. Apparently the program was not political or in support of the Iranian regime. My supervisor who's Dutch was against the university's decision. Later on, there was news on Maziar Bahari's case; an Iranian-Canadian journalist who works for Newsweek. He got arrested during the post-election days in Iran and spent months in Prison before being released. Working for a western media apparently was enough for him to be suspected of espionage!
Now, Tariq Ramadan left Holland to where he found open arms in Oxford university and Maziar Bahari is back to Newsweek.
The scale of troubles that the journalist went through is beyond my imagination but I cannot help but wonder how different the logic supporting each condemnation was in the first place. I don't expect the governments in Iran to be fair as unjustness is one of the very ugly angles they are defined with but from academia in a democratic country it was surprising to observe what I was observing.

Friday, 1 May 2009

Royal attack: the end of an illusion

...Foreigners who are surprised by ministers who cycle to their offices, a prime minister eating a herring alone at the fish stall next to parliament - it is all gone... Read more

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Irrelevant update: A different look at racism conference in Geneva, different from what I've heard/read so far, it's in Farsi I'm afraid.