Hoder - the Ayatollahs’ friend in the west
by Jura Watchmaker, 4 September 2007
Further to my Comment is Free article about two Kurdish journalists sentenced to death in Iran, I see that the Toronto-based pro-regime blogger Hossein Derakhshan (Hoder) has resurfaced to have a pop at Haleh Esfandiari. I’m surprised it’s taken him this long.
Tuesday 4 September 2007 at 13:17
What Hoder is doing, I’m not sure. Originally he seemed to be against the censorship and actions of the Islamic Republic and was trying to draw international attention to what was going on there. He ran stop.censoring.us.
Now he seems to have changed his tune. stop.censoring.us is going Persian only and he’s writing pap like that at CiF.
Why has he changed? Maybe because he’s got family still in Iran. Maybe because he’s not “making enough money” outside of Iran and thinks that if he can get back into Iran he’ll make more there as the “most famous Persian blogger”?
Tuesday 4 September 2007 at 15:44
He’s an odd one. Where does his trip to Israel fit in with all of this?
Tuesday 4 September 2007 at 17:39
He says he opposed blog censorship in Iran because it made the regime look unnecessarily bad.
Wednesday 5 September 2007 at 11:07
Iranians I’ve spoken to think he’s an agent of the Islamic Republic: who was either masquerading as an anti-regime figure, or who was ‘turned’ by the IR after his arrest.
What I do remember is that at the time of his trip to Israel, there were comments from Iranian dissidents who were saying, in effect, “Careful with this one - he is not all he seems”.
Personally, I am agnostic. Much of what Hoder says chimes in with the sort of Zmag/SWP-ish analysis with which we’ve become familiar. As far as we know, they’re not in the pay of the IR. Therefore, Hoder may simply be a North American lefty.
He has, however, become considerably more strident of late, and I have to say, I really can’t tell the difference between the material he produces, and a standard pro-IR defence of the regime.
The only difference is that Hoder typically frames his arguments with a coda which says, in effect, “I’m not a supporter of the IR, and I’m a dissident - but even I believe that XYZ”.
Put it this way. If Hoder is, indeed, a propagandist for the IR, he’s a very clumsy one. I’d expect the country which invented chess to be a bit more subtle and smart…
Wednesday 5 September 2007 at 11:45
I go along with David T’s agnosticism, but Hoder does have a relatively high profile in the west, thanks in part to exposure in the pages of the Guardian and Washington Post.
My CiF article (also here) on Hoder and the two condemned Kurdish journalists Adnan Hassanopour and Hiwa Boutimar was prompted by a short blog on Caspar Henderson’s site.
In 7 June Henderson quoted without comment an extract from Hoder’s blog:
Henderson titled his blog “Has Hoder lost it?”. Quite.
On 1 August Henderson referred to the case of the journalists. He had asked Hoder for his take on the story, and was in return referred to the blog I quoted in my CiF piece in which he denounces Hassanpour and Boutimar as PJAK members.
I’m just about to post another piece on the situation in southern Kurdistan.