IRAN'S PRES. AHMADINEJAD LAUNCHES HIS OWN BLOG

Not satisfied with the Tehran regime's attacks on websites and bloggers -- a number of whom have been jailed -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (photo left) has now started his own blog. Reuters reported yesterday that Ahmadinejad "used his first entry to recount his poor upbringing and ask visitors to the site if they think the United States and Israel want to start a new world war....But he admitted his opening blog, which runs to more than 2,300 words in the English version, was too long. 'From now onwards, I will try to make it simpler and shorter,' he wrote."

(Left, Ahmadinejad's blog masthead)

Reuters said that the website will be available  in Persian, Arabic, English and French. However, when I visited the blog this morning, the French version did not appear to be working, and the English version was very truncated, and contained only a short excerpt from the 2300 word first blog-post by Ahmadinejad about which Reuters reported. To read the full Reuters dispatch, click here. And, if you want to visit Ahmadinejad's blog, click here.

Meanwhile, "Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, a prominent human rights lawyer, estimates that at least 50 bloggers have been detained since last year.Iranian bloggers first started proliferating about five years ago," according to Business Week., which also quoted "Isa Saharkhiz, a member of the Iranian branch of the Committee to Protect Journalists, [who] said: "The crackdown on bloggers is part of a growing censorship policy by the state."

Ahjadinejad's blog does have a comments section -- it will be interesting to see whether critics of the regime will begin posting comments on it, and whether they will be displayed. One might well imagine that opponents of the regime will stage a "blog-in" and flood the site with comments.

The website StopCensoring Us--Watching Internet Censorship in Iran had nothing on Ahmadinejad's blog on its website today -- in fact, this website, which used to be posting useful news, hasn't had an entry since May 11, which suggests it's a bit moribund. The editor of StopCensoringUs is Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder -- considered by many the "blogfather" of the huge Iranian blogging movement, he is now based in Toronto).. But Hoder (photo right) seems to be putting his energy into Editor: Myself, his own blog (giving much less time to StopCensoringUs..

On his personal blog, Hoder comments today on Ahmadinejad's debut: "Ahmadinejad is a populist rather than a fundamentalist. Yet, I can't really convince myself that he's really taken up blogging.The website has only one post now and it's not clear if he's written it specifically for this 'blog.' We should wait and see how it goes and then decide to call it a blog..." You can read the rest of this post and Hoder's other recent offerings on his blog by clicking here.

If you saw Mike Wallace's long interview with Ahmadinejad in Tehran last night on CBS's "60 Minutes," you'll know that Mike didn't lay a glove on him. The Iranian president simply fillibustered and ignored the questions he didn't want to answer by changing the subject. Mike tried to ask Ahmadinejad about his statement that the Holocaust was a myth, but the Iranian president pirouetted away from the question, as he did when asked what he thougt of George W. Bush. Obviously well-briefed on Wallac'es interrogatory style, Ahmadinejd gave deliberately long answers that kept the number of questions short. In all, little of substance was learned, Mike questions were as easy to hit as Nerf-balls, and Mike came way with very little "hot copy" from his interview.

If you want to visit the home page for Ahmadinejad's blog, click here, (The English, Arabic, and French versions are obtained by clicking on the appropriate maps in the blog's upper-right-hand corner.) It may take you several tries to get through -- it did me, and the message I got was that the server was "too busy," so apparently lots of people are flocking to tune in to Ahmadinejad's maiden blogging effort (do we beleve he really will write the blog himself?) It's clearly designed as a propaganda tool.

RELATED READING: The L.A. Times had a very interesting report on the trip to Los Angeles by Akbar Ganji (photo right), the famous dissident Iranian journalist only recently released from prison, who warned the audiences he spoke to that U.S. military intervention in Iran would only lead to more oppression by Tehran of its citizens. The article also talked with sceptics about Ganji from the "Irangeles" contingent (as the large community of exiled Iranians in L.A. is called), and a lot of those critics of Ganji seem to be from former Pahlevi circles. Read the entire L.A. Times article on Akbar Ganji by clicking here. ....Hoder, too, has a question-raising post on his blog today noting that Reza Pahlevi has endorsed Ganji's call for a global hunger strike in support of Iranian political prisoners, and said this and a number of other facts and people he cites supports "my hypothesis that the people who organized Ganji's hunger strike were the same ones who were behind the Reza Pahlavi and Mohsen Sazgara's Referendum movement. There was definitely something going here, beyond Ganji's naivity." You can read Hoder's comment, "Reza Pahlevi and Ganji's Hunger Strike," by clicking here.

NOT TO BE MISSED is my old friend Seymour Hersh's sharp-eyed and sharp- tongued report just posted on The New Yorker's website, "WATCHING LEBANON: Washington's Interests in Israel's War." The inimitable Sy (photo left), ahead of the pack as usual, reports the Iran connection: he says the Bush administration "was closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground...." You must make time to read Sy Hersh's latest New Yorker article by clicking here.....By the way, the French weekly Le Canard Enchaine reported last week that Washington is keeping a steady supply of bunker-busting bomgs and other key munitions flowing to Israel for its war in Lebanon through its base in Diego Garcia....