© the eyeranian

Sina needs our help, NOW!

It may be fair to say that if it wasn't for Sina Motallebi, the eyeranian would probably not have been born. More accurately, if it wasn't for Sina's arrest in 2003, I don't know if I would have committed myself to a regular and organized web log.

You may remember he was arrested in Iran, mainly for the content of his blog and this was a first even for that regime. I did not know Sina personally, but Hossein Derakhshan did. They were both amongst the crop of young journalists who had found an opening to get published in the barrage of new newspapers that came to be after the election of Khatami and had become friends. Hoder (as Hossein is often known as) and myself had exchanged more than a few e-mails by then and I had used his advise in starting an infrequent weblog.

Naturally, it was through Hoder then that I heard about the arrest. He was also asking people for help, trying to get the story publicized further. I wrote him and volunteered to help. Soon, we had thousands of signatures on a petition I prepared and our multiple press releases and contacts for interviews, got the attention of some major mainstream media outlets such as Newsweek and BBC.

That is when I felt a regular outlet needed to be available for spreading the latest on his condition and starting the eyeranian seemed like a natural course of action. At the beginning and up to his release later in 2003, Sina was a regular topic of this weblog. In fact, the name "Sina" came up a total of 98 times during the first two months of eyeranian's existence in April and May of 2003.

We managed to get even more publicity for him and whether true or not, Sina himself gives much of the credit for his eventual release to all the bloggers who united behind his cause. He went even further and gave myself way too much recognition in his first post-release article about his arrest, more than it was ever warranted, sought or deserved.

Now, I told you all of this to get to this point; Sina's father was arrested a few days ago, most likely because of the outspoken and critical nature of Sina's writings since he escaped Iran. Hoder sees this as part of a much larger movement to put more restrictions in place, particularly against websites and blogs. Sina has a picture of his dad (with his grandchild, Sina's son) on his blog, followed by a link to every post and article people have written about his dad's predicament.

I'm not sure what the answer is at this point and how we could help, but I am volunteering myself and ask the rest of you to come up with some suggestions or help out in some even small way to get more attention to this travesty. I don't think sitting back and choosing silence will help, so be creative as well as generous with your time. I'm all ears.

Posted by Pedram at September 16, 2004 11:59 PM