Entries Tagged 'name-calling' ↓

Don’t you hate it when David Brooks uses his New York Times perch to remind his readers that life is full of unexpected turns, expecially ones that reflect well on BushHitler?

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. … The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

Yep. (This also applies to Brooks, by the way, who referred to the Iraq war as “a disaster” many times during what he now refers to as “the dark days of 2006.”) He’s not humble enough to acknowledge his own previous cocksureness and foolishness. But he’s out there on the cutting edge of what should be opinion right now. We’ll see how it plays.

Brooks sets the stage:

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson [about orthodox thinking] during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

It’s unlikely that there will be many such souls, but count me among those who grudgingly (grudgingly because we are of a certain [anti-Vietnam War] age) admit that Bush’s stubbornness has, on balance, been a good thing for America in the immediate wake of 9/11. Many of America’s cocksure enemies have stood down in the wake of Bush’s cowboy-like cocksure aggressiveness. Bush himself has said he regrets the language he used; I didn’t hear him say that he regrets his “going on offense” against America’s enemies, as indeed he shouldn’t.

Something else has been gained in these long seven years. Brooks doesn’t mention it, but I will:L Islamism now has many respectable enemies—including several of Britain’s most famous public intellectuals and novelists.

The New York Times doesn’t quite approve of such heterodox thoughts as this one expressed by Ian McEwan, the author of Atonement:

“As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark skinned, he who criticizes it is racist.” He added: “This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on — we know it well.”

The Independent, a British paper, referred to McEwan’s words as

an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism

and pointed out that these words could,

in today’s febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a “hate crime”.

Despite adding to the “febrile” climate surrounding this issue, at least the Independent is honest enough to give a full airing to McEwan’s views, which I reprint here with some emphasis [e.a.]:

McEwan – author of On Chesil Beach and the acclaimed Atonement and Enduring Love – has spoken on the issue of Islamism before, telling The New York Times last December: “All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, ‘I find some ideas in Islam questionable’ without being called a racist.”

But his words in the Corriere interview are far stronger, although they do fall short of the invective deployed by Martin Amis. He has said “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”, and told The Independent’s columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Muslim, in an open letter: “Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.”

McEwan’s interviewer pointed out that there exist equally hard-line schools of thought within Christianity, for example in the United States. “I find them equally absurd,” McEwan replied. “I don’t like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don’t want to kill anyone in my city, that’s the difference.”

But McEwan’s specific irritation is reserved for those who find ideological grounds to condemn his and Amis’s views. “When you ask a novelist or a poet about his vision regarding an aspect of the world, you don’t get the response of a politician or a sociologist, but even if you don’t like what he says you have to accept it, you can’t react with defamation. Martin is not a racist, and neither am I.”

Thank you, Ian McEwan. And may others join you in perpetrating the “hate crime” of speaking out in favor of freedom of expression, even (perhaps especially) when your ideas are out of favor with “expert and elite opinion” [Brooks's phrase].

On some days, everything you want to blog about is in the New York Times—in the Styles section!

First up, my favorite story of the year so far, which I wrote about here and for which I have nothing to add, is covered again, here:

The French President’s Lover

Bertrand Guay/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

SWEETHEARTS Carla Bruni, the former model, and her new boyfriend, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

The article suggests that Sarkozy’s ex-wife and current amour are engaged in a catfight and handicaps the fight Upshot? Bruni has it all, she’ll make a better first lady than the ex, and people hate that (unless they’re in the government, and then they wish Sarkozy would get on with it and marry her already so that he can get back to being a credible head of state):

Still, it isn’t necessarily the couplings and uncouplings and recouplings (and cheesy photo opportunities) that appear to offend so many who have tuned into a story that is less soap opera than Feydeau farce. It is the unspoken sense that it is unseemly for those so materially blessed and genetically gifted to want more.

And it may also be the cheekbones. “People always secretly hate the rich and beautiful,” said Long Nguyen, the editor of Flaunt magazine, … “It’s not a matter of whether ex-model is a career path for a first lady. It’s that nobody can stand a person who has it all.”

Ms. Bruni is the daughter of classical musicians, and she speaks three languages; she is also a bestselling musician herself, as well as a former model:

Gerard Julien/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Bruni on the catwalk for Yves Saint Laurent in Paris in 1995.

Intellectual honesty compels me to point out that in the past, I have been grossed out by American politicians’ PDAs.

I don’t know why I’m more tolerant of the French president’s very public love affair. I won’t try to justify my deeply lowbrow interest in this story. It is news, however. I don’t remember anything like it in my lifetime (except, vaguely, Rudy and Judi’s love affair—and that went over like a lead balloon, including with me).

Here’s another fun story from the Times:

Has Gawker Jumped the Snark?

By ALLEN SALKIN

Gawker, the gossip Web site, seems to be in the midst of a particularly intense period of turmoil, which has led to a slide in its once-hypnotic influence on the news media world.

The setup:

“THE ideal Gawker item,” Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, wrote in an instant message last month to a prospective hire, “is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

Indeed, that’s the perfect gossip item. And gossip has traditionally been a weapon of the powerless against the powerful [which is one reason I do not criticize infotainment--i.e., institutionalized gossip--but rather accept it; in the media age, gossip may be even a more potent weapon than ever against the powerful] , as Gail Collins wrote in her entertaining and informative book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics [e.a.]:

For much of human history, [gossip] was one of the few weapons available to the powerless: servants who spread stories about their masters, peasants who irreverently speculated about the most private aspects of life in the manor. … In American history, gossip has sometimes been a reaction against heavily marketed politicians who voters might suspect were being thrust upon them against their will.

Back to Gawker. The Times describes a situation in which Gawker moved from criticizing the powerful to attacking the powerless:

Before the wave of staff departures at Gawker, New York magazine published an article in October ascribing the site’s popularity to the resentment of the city’s “creative underclass,” and asked whether pandering to the nasty impulses of those who covet an increasingly rare slot among the news media establishment troubled the souls of Gawker’s writers.

N+1, a culture journal, followed with a thoroughly researched essay noting how Gawker’s voice has changed with successive editors, descending from a homespun blog that smartly sniped about editors like Tina Brown and Anna Wintour, whose prominence arguably opened them to sarcastic comment, to its current state as a cruel behemoth, eviscerating low-level editors and people’s children.

Gawker didn’t “jump the shark.” It was eviscerated by New York magazine and then cut to pieces and stomped into the ground by N+1 (with which Gawker had had a long and not so illustrious history).

The downfall, from the N+1 piece [e.a.]:

Gawker had always sold itself as mean but it now became, actually, very mean. …

If they had only pursued Tara Reid, Fred Durst, and other amateur celebrity pornographers, Gawker simply would have become another version of its own, Denton-owned, Los Angeles spinoff, Defamer.com. Instead, Coen took it upon herself to defame all-but-anonymous people who, within the context of the New York media apparatus, might have seemed like the equivalent of ingénue actresses and other easy-target celebrities.

Taking the form but lacking the content of tabloid magazines and websites, Coen and a succession of guest and co-editors besieged essentially private people, who for the most part did not have the audience or influence of Gawker.

Yep. And now it’s over (though Gawker is still alive, no one reads it anymore: that was the point of the Times piece).

For those of you who missed it, the actual end of Gawker was fascinating. It was described “live,” so to speak by Gawker’s Emily Gould, in this post. Twenty years from now, Gawker will be a distant memory, known to only a handful of people. Its cultural moment is over.

Back from cultural limbo, however, are American heroes from the 1980s.

Tough Guys for Tough Times

By ALEX WILLIAMS

At a time when the country is faced with a new tangle of problems, the return of the ’80s action hero suggests that some Americans, particularly men, are looking to revel in the vestigial pleasures of older times and seemingly simpler ways.

Finally, the New York Times has noticed that our pop culture lags behind reality so badly that people have to turn to “icons” from the 1980s like Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone to serve as role models for 2007. And—surprise, surprise!—it works! Because there seems to be a familiar American archetype in demand among Americans: the hero [e.a.]:

This is a moment in American history bedeviled by a sinking economy, the possibility of environmental catastrophe and violent conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. So it’s not surprising to see men who were raised on cartoonish images of the fictional John Rambo taking out more Soviet soldiers in two hours than the Afghan mujahedeen did in a decade show an appetite for characters who tend to fix even big problems with room-clearing brawls, monosyllabic wisecracks and large-caliber firearms. …

Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California … said that these living G.I. Joes communicate a “not-so-deep code of American exceptionalism,” as well as the American instinct to cut through obfuscation with plain talk and “to not bother with politics, just go in with force and fix things.”

So get ready for red-blooded action stories (and conspiracy stories and spy thrillers, the paranoid counterpart of hero epics) to come roaring back … once Hollywood gets back to its senses and starts making stuff that people want to see again.

The article does note one point that needs elaborating … sometime:

Indeed, heroic caricatures seem comparatively less cartoonish at a time when nonfiction heroes like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds have been tarnished by accusations of fraud, said David Zinczenko, editor in chief of Men’s Health.

Are sports stars “heroes”? I don’t think so.

I think the current craving is for heroes, not for celebrities. More about this another time.

Trying to explain rather than excuse Bush’s decisions since 9/11 is pretty much a losing proposition in the blogosphere (which is an entertainment arena as much as it is an information medium–and thus all the infotaining drama).

Nevertheless, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers dared attempt it, and another one responded:

Your reader wrote: “What if 9/11 had been a nuclear attack?”

‘What if,’ indeed. On the first page of his excellent and disturbing book, “Nuclear Terrorism - The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe” - Graham Allison, a former deputy secretary of defense under Clinton (and no fan of the Bush administration), relays the following anecdote:

On October 11, 2001, a month to the day after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W Bush faced an even more terrifying prospect. At that morning’s Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was now on American soil, in New York City.

Think about it. A month after 9-11, you are president Bush.

You are still struggling to get to grips with the 9/11 attacks when you are told that the same people who have just destroyed twin towers have a nuclear weapon in New York city. What do you do? How do you defend the country?

A big scare like this is, to me, the only reasonable explanation of why Bush and his cadre of advisers have been so willing to push their response to the 9/11 attacks so far.

I agree that this is the only logical explanation for the administration’s actions (the well-advised and the ill-advised ones). And I try to be satisfied with the explanation rather than judge their actions.

After all, none of us are privy to the information they had and none of us are responsible the way they were. I cannot even judge them for overreacting. I can’t say how I—or anyone else—would have acted in their stead, with the benefit of their knowledge.

Sullivan is much harsher:

My reader suggested that this extraordinary shift in America’s constitutional balance - the creation of an extra-legal dictatorship within a putatively democratic society - was explicable only if you believe that the very existence of the U.S. is in peril. I believe Cheney believes that. In the hours after 9/11, you can understand why. The question then becomes: what evidence did they have that the danger was that grave?

He then goes on to suggest that the evidence the administration acted on was derived through torture—a “torture regime,” in fact—and therefore obviously unreliable. That’s not a crackpot theory; it’s certainly within the realm of the plausible. What I dislike about it is that it presumes that the evil warriors Bush and Cheney,  acting in bad faith, against the interests of Americans and America, didn’t care how far they went, even if they had to turn America into a dictatorship.

Sorry, but that is hysteria. Beyond that, it assumes that some Prince of Light—such as Obama, for example—can come and turn things right around and make everything all okay again. Which of course is beyond ridiculous.

The other day, I was watching a silly but diverting British series, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which puts a sensible woman who’s fed up with politicians’ incompetence into 10 Downing Street to succeed Tony Blair. (Yes. I did say it was silly, didn’t I?)

The screenwriter is not at all sympathetic to Blair or to the war in Iraq, but she is sensible. She shows, for example, just how many decisions, large and small, a political leader must make every day. It occurred to me that if only more people would watch this show, they would have a glimmer of understanding beyond their pet theories about BushHitler and the Vulcans.

But when people want to judge, to condemn, to castigate, and to punish, no amount of understanding will stop them. Their fury has a life of its own.

So it goes.

A gift especially for you, from the New York Times:

I wonder how much “they” paid for the ad, and who “they” are.

Shankar Vedantam, writing in the WaPo, has gone and taken all the fun out of the nasty partisanship out of in the blogosphere and beyond—by clarifying what exactly gives it that nasty edge. His piece is called “Disagree about Iraq? You’re Not Just Wrong — You’re Evil” [e.a.]

A wide body of psychological research shows that on any number of hot-button issues, people seem hard-wired to believe the worst about those who disagree with them. Most people can see the humor in such behavior when it doesn’t involve things they care about: If you don’t care about sports, for example, you roll your eyes when fans of one team question the principles and parentage of fans of a rival team.

I’ve gotta say that as amused as I am by the battling in the blogosphere, and as helpful I find it in working through my own passionate (and sometimes overheated) feelings about hot-button issues, I am sorta stunned by the meanness that goes on in every day life these days.

There is not a corner of my life that hasn’t been touched by the hysterical politics of the day

“We are really bad about putting ourselves in other people’s places and looking at the world the way they look at it,” said Glenn D. Reeder, a social psychologist at Illinois State University who recently conducted a study into how supporters and critics of the Iraq war have come to believe entirely different narratives about the war — and about each other. “We find it difficult to grant that other people come to their conclusions in good faith if they reach a conclusion that is different than ours,” he said.

That’s the creepy thing: that friends, family members, colleagues, business associates, and neighbors can turn one one another in an instant; that people can simply begin to think the worst of one another … over politics. There is no end to the troubles that begin when people use politics as a weapon against one another.

Can’t we all get along?

John Edwards must be one of those warmongering neocons that Matthew Yglesias and his crew are foaming at the mouth about:***

“Iran is serious about its threats,” former US Senator John Edwards told the Herzliya Conference at the Interdisciplinary Center on Monday.

“The challenges in your own backyard — represent an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel,” said the candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, referring mainly to the Iranian threat.

In his speech, Edwards criticized the United States’ previous indifference to the Iranian issue, saying they have not done enough to deal with the threat.

Hinting to possible military action, Edwards stressed that “in order to ensure Iran never gets nuclear weapons, all options must remain on table.”

Adding insult to injury, Edwards appears to be a Likudnik:

After opening his speech with great praise for former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,

and a tool of the Israel Lobby:

Edwards continued to express great appreciation for the Israeli people and the special bond between the two countries, saying it was “a bond that will never be broken.”

Wait! It gets worse!—those New York money people must have offered him an extra bonus:

 Until Israel has a real partner, according to Edwards, Israel has the right, and indeed the obligation to defend itself, and should be strengthened militarily, politically, and economically.

In a further display of support for Israel, Edwards went so far as to suggest that Israel should even be made a member of NATO, saying it was only natural that the organization would seen to include Israel next.

I guess the Breck Girl didn’t get the memo.

—————

*** You can also add Anne Appelbaum and 100 courageous Iranian expat artists and intellectuals to Yglesias’s List of Warmongers Who Must Be Smeared.

Appelbaum’s sin was applauding the stance these Iranians took in condemning the totalitarian regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran for inciting Jew-hatred as yet another way to cover its monstrous persecution of the long-suffering Iranian people.

Here is their statement:

ON THE HOLOCAUST CONFERENCE SPONSORED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF IRAN

To the Editors:

We the undersigned Iranians,

Notwithstanding our diverse views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict;

Considering that the Nazis’ coldly planned “Final Solution” and their ensuing campaign of genocide against Jews and other minorities during World War II constitute undeniable historical facts;

Deploring that the denial of these unspeakable crimes has become a propaganda tool that the Islamic Republic of Iran is using to further its own agendas;

Noting that the new brand of anti-Semitism prevalent in the Middle East today is rooted in European ideological doctrines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has no precedent in Iran’s history;

Emphasizing that this is not the first time that the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has resorted to the denial and distortion of historical facts;

Recalling that this government has refused to acknowledge, among other things, its mass execution of its own citizens in 1988, when thousands of political prisoners, previously sentenced to prison terms, were secretly executed because of their beliefs;

Strongly condemn the Holocaust Conference sponsored by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Tehran on December 11–12, 2006, and its attempt to falsify history;

Pay homage to the memory of the millions of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and express our empathy for the survivors of this immense tragedy as well as all other victims of crimes against humanity across the world.

Abadi, Delnaz (Filmmaker, USA)
Abghari, Shahla (Professor, Life University, USA)
Abghari, Siavash (Professor/Chair, Department of Business Administration, Morehouse College, USA)
Afary, Janet (Faculty Scholar/Associate Professor of History, Purdue University, USA)
Afkhami, Gholam Reza (Senior Scholar, Foundation for Iranian Studies, USA)
Afkhami, Mahnaz (Executive Director, Foundation for Iranian Studies/Women’s Rights Advocate, USA)
Afshar, Mahasti (Arts/Culture Executive, USA)
Afshari, Ali (Human Rights Advocate/Political Activist, USA)
Ahmadi, Ramin (Associate Professor, Yale School of Medicine/Founder, Griffin Center for Health and Human Rights, USA)
Akashe-Bohme, Farideh (Social Scientist/Writer, Germany)
Akbari, Hamid (Human Rights Advocate/Chair/Associate Professor, Department of Management and Marketing, Northeastern Illinois University, USA)
Akhavan, Payam (Jurist/Senior Fellow, Faculty of Law of McGill University, Canada)
Amin, Shadi (Journalist/Women’s Rights Activist, Germany)
Amini, Bahman (Publisher, France)
Amini, Mohammad (Writer/Political Activist, USA)
Amjadi, Kurosh (Human Rights Advocate)
Apick, Mary (Actress/Playwright/Producer/Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Ashouri, Daryoush (Writer/Translator, France)
Atri, Akbar (Student Rights and Political Activist, USA)
Bagher Zadeh, Hossein (Human Rights Advocate/Former Professor, Tehran University, Great Britain)
Bakhtiari, Abbas (Musician/Director, Pouya Iranian Cultural Center, France)
Baradaran, Monireh (Human Rights Advocate/Writer, Germany)
Behnoud, Massoud (Writer/Journalist, Great Britain)
Behroozi, Jaleh (Human Rights Advocate/Iranian Mothers’ Committee for Freedom, USA)
Beyzaie, Niloofar (Theater Director/Playwright, Germany)
Boroumand, Ali-Mohammad (Lawyer, France)
Boroumand, Ladan (Historian/Research Director, Boroumand Foundation, USA)
Boroumand, Roya (Historian/Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Chafiq, Chahla (Sociologist/Writer/ Women’s Rights Advocate, France)
Dadsetan, Javad (Filmmaker)
Daneshvar, Abbas (Chemist, Netherlands)
Daneshvar, Hassan (Mathematician, Netherlands)
Daneshvar, Reza (Writer, France)
Davari, Arta (Painter, Germany)
Djalili, Mohammad Reza (Professor, L’Institut Universitaire de Hautes Études Internationales, Switzerland)
Ebrahimi, Farah (USA)
Eskandani, Ahmad (Entrepreneur, France)
Fani Yazdi, Reza (Political Activist, USA)
Farahmand, Fariborz (Engineer, USA)
Farssai, Fahimeh (Writer, Germany)
Ghahari, Keivandokht (Historian/Journalist, Germany)
Ghassemi, Farhang (Professor in Strategic Management, France)
Hejazi, Ghodsi (Professor/Researcher, Frankfurt University, Germany)
Hekmat, Hormoz (Human Rights Advocate/Editor, Iran Nameh, USA)
Hojat, Ali (Entrepreneur/Human Rights Advocate, Great Britain)
Homayoun, Dariush (Writer, Switzerland)
Idjadi, Didier (Professor/Associate Mayor, France)
Jahangiri, Golroch (Women’s Rights Advocate, Germany)
Jahanshahi, Marjan (Professor, Institute of Neurology, University College London, Great Britain)
Karimi Hakkak (Director, Center for Persian Studies, University of Maryland, USA)
Kazemi, Monireh (Women’s Rights Advocate, Germany)
Khajeh Aldin, Minoo (Painter, Germany)
Khaksar, Nasim (Writer, Germany)
Khazenie, Nahid (Remote Sensing Scientist/Program Director, NASA, USA)
Khodaparast Santner, Zari (Landscape Architect, USA)
Khonsari, Mehrdad (Political Activist, Great Britain)
Khorsandi, Hadi (Poet/Writer, Great Britain)
Khounani, Azar (Educator/Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Mafan, Massoud (Publisher, Germany)
Malakooty, Sirus (Composer/Chairman, Artists Without Frontiers, Germany)
Manafzadeh, Alireza (Writer, France)
Mazahery, Ahmad (Engineer/Political Activist, USA)
Mazahery, Lily (Lawyer, President of the Legal Rights Institute/Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Memarsadeghi, Mariam (Freedom House, USA)
Mesdaghi, Iraj (Human Rights Advocate/Writer, Sweden)
Milani, Abbas (Director, Iranian Studies Program, Stanford University, USA)
Mohyeddin, Samira (Graduate Student, University of Toronto, Canada)
Moini, Mohammadreza (Journalist/ Human Rights Advocate, RSF, France)
Molavi, Afshin (Journalist, USA)
Monzavi, Faeze (Women’s Rights Advocate, Germany)
Moradi, Golmorad (Political Scientist/Translator, Germany)
Moradi, Homa (Women’s Rights Advocate, Germany)
Moshaver, Ziba (London Middle East Institute, SOAS, Research Fellow, Great Britain)
Moshkin-Ghalam, Shahrokh (Ballet Dancer/Actor, France)
Mourim, Khosro (Sociologist, France)
Mozaffari, Mehdi (Professor of Political Science, Denmark)
Naficy, Majid (Poet/Writer, USA)
Nafisi, Azar (Writer/Johns Hopkins University, USA)
Nassehi, Reza (Human Rights Advocate/Translator, France)
Pakzad, Jahan (Teacher/Researcher, France)
Parham, Bagher (Writer/Translator, France)
Parsipour, Shahrnush (Writer, USA)
Parvin, Mohammad (Human Rights Advocate/Founding Director of Mehr/Adjunct Professor, California State University, USA)
Pirnazar, Jaleh (Professor, Iranian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Pourabdollah, Farideh (Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Pourabdollah, Saeid (Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Rashid, Shahrouz (Poet/Writer, Germany)
Royaie, Yadollah (Poet, France)
Rusta, Mihan (Human Rights Advocate/Refugee Adviser, Germany)
Sadr, Hamid (Writer, Austria)
Sarchar, Houman (Independent Scholar, USA)
Sarshar, Homa (Journalist, USA)
Satrapi, Marjane (Writer, France)
Sayyad, Parviz (Actor/Playwright, USA)
Shahriari, Sheila (World Bank, USA)
Soltani, Parvaneh (Actor/Theater Director, Great Britain)
Tabari, Shahran (Journalist, Great Britain)
Taghvaie, Ahmad (Founding Member, Iranian Futurist Association, USA)
Toloui, Roya (Human Rights Advocate, USA)
Vaziri, Hellen (Germany)
Wahdat-Hagh, Wahied (Social Scientist, USA)
Zarkesh Yazdi, Fathieh (Human Rights and Refugee Rights Advocate, Great Britain)
Ziazie, Arsalan (Writer, Germany)