Kourosh Ziabari

Syria crisis: Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora (C) meets
with members of the Arab League delegation. (UPI)

After the Arab League hypocritically suspended the membership of Syria amid the mounting pressures of NATO and the United States, the resurgence of violence in Egypt and the increasing use of excessive force in Bahrain and Yemen and the unrelenting massacre of innocent civilians by the barbaric regime of Al Khalifa and Ali Abdullah Saleh once again attracted the attention of conscientious observers in the international community.

According to official figures released by the "Bahrain Center for Human Rights" website, so far 44 Bahraini citizens were killed at the hands of the mercenaries of Al Khalifa regime. The Bahraini martyrs include the 6-year-old Mohammed Farhan, 14-year-old Ali Jawad Alshaikh and 15-year-old Sayed Ahmad Saeed Shams. The Bahraini organization has reported that many of these martyrs were killed while in custody. The Center has also published documents indicating that more than 1,500 Bahrainis including about 100 women were incarcerated since the eruption of turmoil in the Persian Gulf country on February 14, 2011 and that more that 90 journalists face life threat.

It's also said that the Bahraini government has blocked the citizens' access to more than 1000 opposition websites which are mainly used to organize and plan protests and mass demonstrations.

The Bahraini regime commits all of these aggressive and brutal actions with the direct involvement of the Saudi Arabia and the implicit support and backing of NATO and the United States. The author of the "Hidden Harmonies China" blog in a March 14, 2011 post referred to the abuses of human rights in Bahrain with the flagrant, duplicitous support of the White House: "the Entry of Saudi security forces to crack down on the protesters with deadly force is a complication for U.S. policies, to say the least, since U.S. is reluctant to criticize its oil ally dictators in the region."

He also called Bahrain the "Las Vegas" of the Middle East, host to the U.S. 5th Fleet and a haunt for the rich Saudis who are forbidden by Islamic laws at home from indulging in alcohol and other immoral enjoyments, "but who often vacation in Bahrain for these reasons."

Bahraini citizens have uploaded several video files on the internet, showing the cruel and ruthless torturing and persecuting of the protesters by the Al Khalifa lackeys. These videos depict the Bahraini forces using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters and killing many of them straight away. Some of these videos also show the Saudi and Bahraini cars nonchalantly running over Bahraini children and women, killing them at once.

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Kourosh Ziabari

Israel has awkwardly and desperately renewed its outworn war threats against Iran in the recent weeks, indicating that it's getting prepared to launch a military strike on the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities.

Last week, the Zionist regime successfully test fired a missile which is said to have the capability of carrying a nuclear warhead and reach Iran, as well as Russia and China. On November 2, the TV stations around the world screened footages of a rocket-propulsion system being launched from somewhere around Israel coastal Palmachim military base. The missile's range is claimed to be 10,000 kilometers and therefore, Iran will be easily within the reach of it, in the case that a military attack on Iran is opted for.

However, now even the most optimistic advocates of war with Iran within the fractured cabinet of Benjamin Netanyahu know that "empty vessels make the most noise" and that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities will be practically the same as the evaporation of the Zionist entity. They are well aware of Iran's unequaled military might and the recent advancements and progresses in Iran's weaponry industry. Although the hawkish Israeli FM Avigdor Lieberman has boasted of "keeping all the options on the table" with regards to Iran's nuclear program, he dismissed the reports that the Israeli cabinet members have reached an agreement over launching an attack against Iran.

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Kourosh Ziabari

You might have frequently heard of the Western mainstream media's claims that Iran is pursuing a military nuclear program which is aimed at developing atomic weapons. Actually, spreading falsehood and untruth about the nature of Iran's peaceful nuclear program has been a constant, unchanging and recurring theme of the Western corporate media's coverage of Iran's events.

Over the past years, the world mainstream media, funded and fueled by certain Western governments to derail Iran's sublime position in the international community through their unyielding black propaganda have laboriously and persistently attempted to pretend that Iran's nuclear program poses a serious threat to the global peace and security and that Tehran is taking steps to create atomic bombs to drop on Israel and European countries.

Unfortunately, the people who believe such claims seem to be unaware of the fact that those who accuse Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons are themselves the largest possessors of the state-of-the-art nuclear weapons and other types of weapons of mass destruction.

It should not be neglected that Iran has always been at the forefront of combating the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and also a victim of such weapons during the 8-year imposed war with the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranians. It was the United States that equipped Saddam with such weapons to use against the Iranian people in an unequal and unjustifiable war in which the brutal Iraqi dictator was unconditionally supported by a strong coalition of the United States and its European allies.

Since the U.S.-manufactured controversy over Iran's nuclear program was ignited in the early 2000s, the White House and its cronies successfully distracted the international attention from the illegal, underground nuclear activities of Israeli regime and helped Tel Aviv to secretively further its nuclear program and build atomic weapons.

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Interview by Kourosh Ziabari

William Norman Grigg is an author and journalist of Mexican and Irish descent. He was born on February 4, 1963 in Idaho. He was a senior editor of "The New American" magazine and has authored several books from a Constitutionalist perspective. Grigg graduated from Utah State University in political science. He was a "Provo Daily Herald" columnist for a while and also covered the United Nations summits and conferences from 1994 to 2001 for the John Birch Society's official biweekly magazine.

Grigg is also a studio musician and served as lead guitarist in the Wisconsin band "Slick Willie and the Calzones" until his 2005 move to Idaho.
Grigg has interviewed prominent world leaders, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. His investigations of terrorism and international organized crime included interviews with high-ranking officials of the Chinese Communist Party, former operatives of the Soviet KGB, and - long before the group was thrust into the spotlight during the 2008 presidential election - leaders of the New Black Panther Party.

Will writes and publishes the Pro Libertate blog, and is a frequent contributor to LewRockwell.com, the most widely read freedom-oriented website in the world. He also produces the "Liberty Minute," a one-minute syndicated radio commentary archived at www.prolibertate.us.

Grigg has published several books of which we can name " The Gospel of Revolt: Feminism Vs. the Family" by Northwest Publishing Inc. and "Liberty In Eclipse: The Rise of the Homeland Security State" by Welch Foundation.

William Norman Grigg joined me in an exclusive interview to discuss with me the latest developments in the Middle East, the prospect of Egyptian revolution, the massacre of peace activists and pro-democracy demonstrators in Egypt and the blurred destiny of Libyan civil war.

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Interview by Kourosh Ziabari

Stuart Littlewood is a British writer and photographer. He is the co-author of the book "Radio Free Palestine" in which he has elaborately described the plight of the Palestinian nation under the Israeli occupation. Littlewood's articles on the cause of the Palestinian nation have been published on a variety of websites, newspapers and online magazines including Intifada Palestine, Veterans Today, Palestine Chronicle, Dissident Voice, Ramallah Online and Voltaire Net. In a 2009 interview with Media Review, Littlewood described his contributions to raising the public awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ignorance of the British people concerning the suffering of the Palestinian nation.

Stuart joined me in an in-depth interview to discuss the ongoing anguish of the people of Palestine, the situation of Gaza Strip and West Bank, the influence of Israeli lobby over the mass media in the West and the international isolation of Iran due to its unconditional support for the Palestinian people.

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Interview by Kourosh Ziabari

Born in 1945 in Philadelphia PA, Dr. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic work is focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He also teaches courses in the history of science and modern European intellectual history.
At Georgetown University he studied modern European intellectual history under the Palestinian ex-patriot Professor Hisham Sharabi. Sharabi and Davidson subsequently became close friends and one can date his interest in Palestinian, as well as Jewish and Zionist, issues from this time.

Dr. Davidson writes regularly on the Middle East affairs, Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. foreign policy. He has written several books of which "America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood" by the University Press of Florida is a prominent example.

Dr. Davidson joined me in an exclusive interview to discuss the latest developments in the Middle East, the collective uprising of the Arab world, Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions of 2011, the humanitarian crisis in Libya, the prospect of anti-government protests in Saudi Arabia and the fate of Israeli regime in the wake of growing international isolation.

What follows is the complete text of my interview with Dr. Lawrence Davidson.

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Interview by Kourosh Ziabari

Dr. Fredrick Töben is a unique man. You can find a certain tranquility and serenity in his words and actions which make him an unparalleled academician, author and political analyst. While talking to him, you can make sure that you enjoy a fruitful, comprehensive and informative conversation. He always speaks as if he is in a university classroom and wants to teach something to his students. This is the prominent aspect of his personality. He wants to teach and to learn, as well. He loves sharing new experiences with you, and this is another feature of his personality. He has scientifically denied Holocaust and paid the cost: five times in prison in five countries.

He was born on 2 June 1944, Jaderberg, north Germany, into a farming family, which immigrated to Australia in 1954. His father and mother farmed in Australia. His father died in 2003 and his mother passed away in 2008 while he was serving a three-month prison term for 'contempt of court'. His parents were married for 63 years.

Töben received his tertiary education in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Rhodesia-Zimbabwe and he taught secondary and tertiary level German, English, sociology and philosophy in all these countries and Nigeria, as well.

He had a major policy difference with the Victorian Education Department in Melbourne, Australia, which dismissed him from his teaching post on grounds if incompetence and disobedience, and for almost ten years he fought the case and had his dismissal declared invalid.

In 1994, Fredrick Töben founded the Adelaide Institute and became its director. The aim was to research matters relating to 'Holocaust-Shoah' and other related 'taboo topics' that mainstream research institutes did not dare investigate for fear of financial and social sanction. In 1998 Adelaide Institute held the first-ever Revisionist Symposium in Australia. In 1997 and 1999 he went on a world revisionist fact-finding tour that took him to Eastern Europe in particular to Auschwitz where allegedly millions of Jews were gassed. He found that the technicality of the gassing assertion could not be sustained.

Since 1999, Töben made visits to Iran on a regular basis to attend scientific congresses and news conferences on various social and political issues.

Fredrick Töben joined me in an exclusive interview and talked to me about his viewpoints regarding Iran, the Persian culture, the Islamic solidarity, the impacts of Iran's Islamic Revolution on the global order and the current position of Iran in the international community.

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Interview by Kourosh Ziabari

George Katsiaficas is a renowned university professor, sociologist, author and activist. He is a visiting American Professor of Humanities and Sociology at Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea where he teaches and does research on the 1980s and 1990s East Asian uprisings.

Katsiaficas has a Ph.D. of sociology from the University of California, San Diego. Since 1990, he has taught sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology's Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. During the period between 2006 and 2008, he was an Associate in Research at the Harvard University and Korea Institute.

He specializes in social movements, Asian politics, the U.S. foreign policy, comparative and historical studies and has written numerous books in these fields.

In 2003, he won the American Political Science Association's Special Award for Outstanding Service and in 2008, received the Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Fellowship.

Among his major books are "The Battle of Seattle" by the New York's Soft Skull Press, "Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party" by New York's Routledge Press and "South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising" by London's Routledge Press.

What follows is the complete text of interview with Dr. George Katsiaficas on the recent uprising in the Arab world, its impacts on the international developments and its implications for the United States and its European allies.

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Kourosh Ziabari
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari

Craig LaMay is an associate professor of journalism at the Northwestern University. He is a former editorial director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center and editor of Media Studies Journal; and a former newspaper reporter. LaMay's articles and commentaries have appeared on New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, Communication & the Law and a number of other media outlets.

LaMay has published several books on journalism and mass media of which we can name Journalism and the Problem of Privacy (2003), Commercial Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector, with Burton Weisbrod (1998) and Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television and the First Amendment with Newton Minow (1995).

Prof. LaMay joined me in an exclusive interview to discuss the constraints of journalism in the United States, freedom of speech in the EU, the performance of local magazines as opposed to the national news outlets and the gradual disappearance of traditional media with the emergence of new internet-based technologies. What follows is the complete text of my interview with Prof. Craig LaMay of the Northwestern University.

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Kourosh Ziabari

As the Western governments add fuel to the fire of Islamophobic sentiments in their societies with inflammatory and rabble-rousing actions and statements, the Western media mischievously try their best to portray a lopsided, biased and prejudiced image of Muslims in an attempt which should be interpreted as an incontestable crusade against more than 25% of the world population.

Although it is arguable that the 9/11 attacks played in the hands of the United States and its European cronies to spread an all-encompassing wave of Islamophobic sentiments in the world and introduce the Muslims as the number one threat to the global peace and security, one should bear in mind that Muslims have been conventionally considered as the villains of the fables of the Western governments for a long time already and despite their unquestionable and treasured services to the world, they never did receive a fair, justifiable and humane treatment by the superpowers, be it from the deceitful, fraudulent and warmongering Russia that massacred some 50,000 innocent Muslims in Chechnya, or from the arrogant, bullying United States that incarcerated scores of innocent Muslims in its illegal, underground detention centers in Guantanamo bay and Abu Ghraib following the 9/11 attacks.

The corporate mainstream media is the most effective spearhead of the Western governments in their crusade against the Muslims and the Islamic world. When it was needed to conceal the most conspicuous realities which would attest to the righteousness of the Muslims, the mainstream media did their best: Marwa El-Sherbini was flagrantly murdered in a courtroom in Germany, and the Western media outlets unanimously kept silent, turning a blind eye against one of the most heartrending instances of the violation of human rights before the eyes of a judge and his colleagues. When it was needed to sabotage a truer perception of the facts, Western media went into high gear: the Freedom Flotilla was brutally attacked by the commandos of Israel Defense Forces and 9 of its passengers were massacred viciously -but the media justified the massacre as an act of self defense. Nobody asked the Western media how it could justify the killing of defenseless civilians as an act of self defense when the civilians lacked even a single knife with which to defend themselves against the rifles of the Israeli commandos. When it was needed to suppress the stark realities Gaza, the mainstream media scored its best ever: 1,500 innocent people in Gaza were massacred in a few days (less than 3 weeks), and the Western media acted so indifferently, that one might have felt as if nothing had really taken place at all!

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