Saturday, December 6, 2008
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Norouz - New Day on UN Calendars
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To: United Nations
Excellency Ban Ki-moon
Secretary-General
United Nations
New York, New York
Your Excellency,
For several millenniums many nations have celebrated the first day of spring as their new year. Today, nearly 300 million people around the world celebrate the first day of spring as their new year, better known as Norouz (New Day). Nearly all of these celebrants live in UN member nations. Unfortunately, none of the UN calendars or affiliated agencies commemorate this important date as has been done for different celebrations of member nations.
We, the undersigned, request from your Excellency, bearer of the highest office of the United Nations, to kindly authorize the relevant agencies to correct this oversight for the upcoming calendars throughout the UN agencies.
Please accept our best wishes and thanks for your attention to this important request.
Persian Cultural Center, San Diego, California - USA
Sincerely,
----------------------
source :
http://www.petitiononline.com/Norouz/petition.html
Friday, November 28, 2008
The legacy of chemical warfare
This is an article from guardian from Tehran where the peace musuem is built to remind everyone the horrible legacy of the chemical warfare ... The whole idea behind this can be described in this pragraph : "We want to show the whole world that chemical weapons have done this to us, we want to show how painful the consequences are. We don't want revenge. We just want to show what happens so it won't happen again."
The original article :
Tehran might not be the most obvious place for a peace museum, but Iran's eight-year war with Iraq was one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts of the post-1945 era — so anything that deals honestly with its legacy has to be a positive thing.
Set in a carefully tended park in the centre of the capital, the new museum — inspired by existing ones in Hiroshima and Ypres — will also serve as a centre for surviving victims of the war, especially for the thousands of Iranians who were injured in chemical warfare attacks unleashed by Saddam Hussein's forces.
Mohammad Shagef-Nakhaei is one of them – a middle-aged man with a persistent hacking cough that is an awful legacy of the injuries he suffered during an Iranian offensive against the southern Iraqi port of Fao in 1985, when he was 22.
"Four days after we captured Fao we were back on the Iranian side of the Shatt al-Arab," he told me. "We had eaten breakfast and said our prayers when five or six Iraqi fighters hit our position with chemical bombs. I felt cold like when someone splashes water on you. Later I started vomiting and something green came out of my mouth. My throat was very dry and I couldn't breathe. I was blistered from head to toe."
Shagef-Nakhaei was evacuated from the front line and underwent emergency treatment in a private London hospital – he still has a yellowing newspaper clipping reporting his arrival — but has been suffering ever since and still spends long periods in hospital every year.
Hassan Hassani Saadi, also injured by Iraqi mustard gas, tells a similar story of vomiting, dizziness, days in a coma and being burned all over. Two decades on he has been left blind in one eye and has just 20% vision in the other. His lungs are permanently scarred and his cough is especially bad at night. He is 43 but looks 10 years older.
In a country whose religious culture and official propaganda glorify sacrifice and martyrdom, these men's stories convey the banal pity of war. The effect is more Wilfred Owen than rose-scented Shia Muslim paradise.
Their experiences were shared by 60,000 Iranians injured in chemical warfare attacks in what the Islamic Republic still calls the "imposed war" or the "sacred defence". It was the first time since the first world war that mustard gas was used and the first time ever that nerve agents such as Sarin and Tabun were employed. Iran complained bitterly that the raw materials were supplied to Iraq by western companies while the US and other governments "tilted" towards Saddam and looked the other way.
It wasn't the first time I had seen the terrible effects of these banned weapons. I visited Iran several times during the war; in February 1986 in a Tehran hospital, courtesy of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, I met Hamid Kurd Alipoor, then a 19-year-old conscript with the Revolutionary Guards. A few days earlier he had been sheltering in a sandbagged bunker when an Iraqi shell detonated nearby.
Hamid was swathed from neck to waist in yellow, disinfectant-soaked bandages. His eyelids, I reported, were "scorched and puffy, his swollen face grotesquely patterned with slices of bright new pink flesh striped over cheeks and forehead the colour of overdone toast." Like so many others he was diagnosed as likely to suffer permanent lung damage long after he had passed the immediate risk of infection and blood poisoning and his burns had healed.
By 1986 Iraq was using chemical weapons as an integral part of its battlefield strategy. Over time, Iranian forces were issued with gas masks and chemical warfare suits that were also distributed to visiting journalists, who were instructed how to inject themselves with an antidote in the event of a nerve gas attack. It was a sinister and frightening experience - even for those who knew they would be back in the safety and comfort of a Tehran hotel within a day or two.
So it is gratifying that the Tehran museum — dedicated last summer but yet to formally open — plans to focus on the enduring human consequences of that grim period. "The government calls the war the 'sacred defence'. We don't like that. We hate war and that's why we have established this museum," said Dr Shahriar Khateri, of the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support. "We have witnessed its devastation and we are still dealing with the consequences of something that ended 20 years ago. We need to teach the younger generation that war is not a computer game."
Khateri, from Khorramshahr, was just 15 when he volunteered to fight. "Later I saw pictures of the first world war and it was very similar to our experience: trenches, dead bodies and heavy artillery firing for hours," he recalled.
Earlier awareness, Khateri argues, could have saved lives. The most notorious use of chemicals was against the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, though an Iranian Kurdish town, Sardasht in West Azerbaijan province, was attacked by the Iraqis the year before. If there had been a stronger reaction then, he says, Halabja might have been spared its terrible fate. (Khateri, incidentally, is firmly opposed to Iran developing nuclear weapons. The government, defying UN demands that it cease enriching uranium, insists it wishes only to generate power for civilian purposes.)
Mohammad Reza Taghipur Mughaddam, the director of the museum, was injured by a conventional high-explosive shell which hit the ambulance he was in, causing the loss of both his legs above the knees. "People help me all the time because I am in a wheelchair," he said. "The problem is that if you've been injured in a chemical attack your injuries are not visible. People don't always ask me if I was wounded in the war but when they do they always thank me for helping defend their homes and families."
Koroush, my guide and interpreter in Tehran, who had dismissed my idea of an interview with disabled Iranian war veterans as an old story, did just that, visibly moved as he embraced and thanked these former soldiers as our meeting ended.
"We want to show the whole world that chemical weapons have done this to us," said Saadi. "We want to show how painful the consequences are. We don't want revenge. We just want to show what happens so it won't happen again."
Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/26/iran-iraq-war
28.11.2008 - 10:58 GMT:+1
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Angel of Death and Cruelty
Where I come from oldness has a meaning of holiness, where oldness brings respect. Then with my point of view, I call this guy Angel of Death and Cruelty, an angel which deserves to be traced, imprisoned and courted because of thousands of lives that were taken away under his orders.
Iranian Newspapers & News Agencies Exhibition
Saturday, November 15, 2008
welcome to Milano, your suitcase plz !!!
I got here on wednsday afternoon, bought a two ways ticket from a buss company called RIO shuttle bus and came to Milan. But when we got off the bus, we found out there are just two suitcases left out of our three !!! Well damn yeah, some nice thieves helped us carrying our suitcase back to their own place ! The more surprising thing was the driver acting very normal and saying it is not his buisiness that our suitcase was stolen !!! He said he has no responsibility (!!!), and even more surprising was the company infromation saying they got no insurance or anything over our suitcases and it is not their buisiness and I should just go to police !!! I got mad man and I yelled at the girl, the suitcase is gone with my dad's heart medicine, I am on the way there to kick your company's a***. Well very very hardly(lack of same language communication with Italians) we found police finally where one out of four policemen could speak a little bit English and guided us upstairs in the train station where we filled the forms to report the thivery while we were told that there is not much hope that they can find our stolen suitcase. Then after walking awhile under the rain we took a taxi to the hotel whose driver was a left wing fan who hated illegal immigrants like right wings and thought that all jews should be killed !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I replied "I do not thinks so" and then he came up with a lot of crazy reasons that he is right and then again I replied : "I really do not think so ..." and finally he gave up reasoning me into his idea and said : You think different, I think differnet, it is okay (Me, officially, in my mind : Thank god I shouldnt be killed right here at his car !!! ) ... I should mention that he kind of charged us 10 Euros extera, but we got to the hotel safely !!!
Well we got to the hotel finally at 23:00, where I found out the Wi-Fi at hotel doesnt work and I should come to the lobby and work with a very damn old PC and pay 1 Euro every half an hour (!!!), and the day after I found out I am not allowed to send my assignment from this computer to my teacher at Norway(No file copying is allowded!!!) !!! Then I started walking around to find a so called Internet Access Point(the term receptions used here) to send my assignment BUT there were some technical difficulties !!! The first place I found wanted a passport from me to let me use internet for 15 minutes(!!!) which I had mine at hotel ... The second one didnt talk to me at all and just showed me computer number 3 and when I took out my phone to copy the files from it to the PC, he acted the way I got that I am not allowed to do that and then he kindly kicked me out(Opened the door and guided me out of his shop without saying even one word) ... The third one told me in Italian I am not allowed to use my phone connected to their PC and finally one guy (Yes MAN, I love africans, they are all my friends from Obama to the guy who helped me down here) helped me out by letting me use his pc to do my stuffs ... He got a cute kid who tried to talk to me in Italain ;-)
That's it for now ... I'll add some stuffs later ... So tiered to keep writing ...
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Voting for CHANGES, After the show ...
Now it is time for Mr. Obama to keep his words. Although with the economic crisis and all the troubles around him, the road toward his changes looks very tough but lets hope he can make it and lets hope he will keep his word no matter what :-)
Mr. Obama, welcome to white house ...
But be aware that every step you take, WE ARE WATCHING YOU & hoping that the changes you promised can make world a better place ...
Shahab,
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Playing Along With The Damn Good Reputaion ...
A top European Union court has annulled an EU decision to freeze the funds of a prominent Iranian opposition group.
The People's Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI) was put on the EU's terror blacklist in 2002, which meant the EU could block the group's finances.
But the Luxembourg-based Court of First Instance ruled on Thursday that the EU's decision was wrong.
The verdict follows an appeal by the group after a British court had ruled in its favour last year.------------------------
Comment, "My Type" :
Well it won't surprise me that western world would get their hands on ANYTHING or ANYONE to stop Iran from getting an atomic power but "The People's Mujahideen Organisation" are not a really good choice to bet the EU's reputation on them.
I was born in Iran, I grew up in Iran, I like politic, I read about it and I am familiar with Iranian way of thinking. Iranians inside Iran HATE this group(outsiders don't like them much neitehre). They know these guys as tradors who joined SADDAM HUSSEIN in the middle of the war against their home country(Iran). No need to mention their history in killing Kurds in north Iraq with co-operation with Saddam's army.
The leadership of the group are mostly day dreaming about their power in their speeches and it sounds like they really think they are popular in Iran and people want them to march back in Iran and take over the government. Their official media, called "Simaye Azadi" channel is a big lieing broadcaster which is built just to give fate to those who still believe in them. Although I had heard alot about them but since I hadn't heard those lies directly from their official media, I wouldn't have hated them so much. But since then I really dont trust these shamless liers. They lie to you, infront of you, directly in your eyes, about YOU !
The question remains that IF this group has been a terrorist group and has killed innocent people, then why there is no court (out of Iran where they live) or any international organisation that can bring the leaders(that miss used the people under their orders to commit terrorist attacks) to justice ? Is there any different level of terrorism we are talking about ? Because as much as I know these guys were on the same list as the damn other bad guys are ...
Gotto think more about it before you do the thing ... Trust me ... It's EU's good reputation that is being played ...
Shahab,
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Still vote for CHANGES ...
You tell me, he can't do that. I tell you the smallest thing that can change WILL BE DONE BY his lovely dark color :-) It will change our point of view about the world. It will change the way that it's always been. The way that the most powerful man of today's world(President of U.S.A) is a conservative man from a rich farm in Texas or somewhere around there ... This time he is an imigrant from Africa.
People, open it up, at its worst case this is a big CHANGE ... No one if perfect but with all his lacks, he is the right choice. Not a new Bush, Not McCain ...
Stand for changes, vote for changes, vote for OBAMA ...
Hoping for a new better world, standing for Obama, for his CHANGES ...
Shahab,
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Iran won Ukraine ...
Iran is going to meet Italy in the next match while only victory can take Iran to the next round instead of Italy as the 2nd team, while Brazil enjoys standing on top.
Iran in the 2nd round ...
Iran joined the big boys
Actually Iran has been one of the ever lasting powers of Asian soccer from the beginning but has never been a world class power in the outdoor's soccer field and at least we(Iranian people) believe it is because of very bad administration both in Iranian football federation and Iranian professional league ...
But at futsal the sky is blue for Iranian futsal team. in Asia, the record is all gold exept of 2006 :
AFC Futsal Championship record
- 1999 -
Champions
- 2000 -
- 2001 -
- 2002 -
- 2003 -
- 2004 -
- 2005 -
- 2006 -
Third place
- 2007 -
- 2008 -
The FIFA reports follows as well :
The first phase of the FIFA Futsal World Cup Brazil 2008 came to a conclusion on Thursday with the final round of games in groups C and D. Reigning world champions Spain held their nerve to record a 3-0 defeat of Uruguay and confirm top spot in their section.
In the battle to see who would join them, Czech Republic fought till the very end against Iran but missed out on the win they needed to advance. The eager eastern Europeans came back twice, but the Asian champions stood firm to book their spot among the best eight teams in the world.
In Group C, meanwhile, Ukraine failed to impress against the already eliminated China PR but did just enough to claim a 4-2 victory and with it first place. Argentina qualified behind them after beating a gutsy Guatemala 2-1.
The big game
Czech Republic 2-3 Iran
Goals: Jan Janovsky 27, Martin Dlouhy 31 (Czech Republic); Ali Hassanzadeh 16, 39, Vahid Shamsaee 30 (Iran)
With both outfits nursing hopes of a place in the next round, the tension was palpable as the match kicked off. And although the Czechs needed the three points to go through, it was the Iranians who dominated proceedings, Tomas Neumann's men only reacting after they had fallen behind to Ali Hassanzadeh's first-half goal.
The pace quickened in the first five minutes of the second half, Jan Janovsky breathing new life into the Czech challenge with an equaliser before Iran skipper Vahid Shamsaee promptly restored his side's lead. Martin Dlouhy hit back a minute later to make it 2-2 and set up a thrilling finale. The men in red dispensed with their goalkeeper in a desperate bid to conjure up a winner, but saw their hopes extinguished when Hassanzadeh scored a second time to secure Iran's place in the next round for the first time since Hong Kong 1992.
The player
Vahid Shamsee (IRN)
The Iranian captain led by example in his team's crucial win over Czech Republic. As well as scoring the goal that put Iran ahead 2-1, he posed a consistent threat up front, pushing himself to the limit to keep the Asian side's Brazil 2008 challenge alive.
The stat
5 - The number of times Argentina have reached the second group phase, missing out only at Spain 1996. The South Americans' best finish was fourth place at Chinese Taipei 2004.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Milad Tower (Borje Milad)
