There’s a story in today’s New York Times about an Iranian-Canadian blogger named Hossein Derakhshan who was arrested in Iran on charges of spying. He wasn’t spying, actually, but in the bizarro world of Iran today what he was doing was clearly seen as troubling and potentially disloyal. He was blogging about Israel. 

An Israeli journalist, Abraham Rabinovich, who had met Derakshan in Jerusalem two years ago, described the blogger as an “Iranian patriot” who “offered the first views or ordinary life in Israel that Iranians had been able to see.” Which turned out to be a subversive act. 

It is hard to completely hate that which you begin to recognize. Derkashan told Rabinovich, “I want to humanize Israel for Iranians and tell them it’s not what the Islamic propaganda machine is saying, that Israelis are thirsty for Muslim blood. And I want to show Israel that the average Iranian isn’t even thinking about doing harm to Israel.” Clearly, this man was a threat to society. 

It reminded me of a conversation I had with the Arab journalist Adel Iskandar a few years ago, when I was working on a book about Al Jazeera. In the early days of the network, he said, tapes of the Qatar-based news network were pirated and sold at markets to Arabs who had never heard anyone criticize their leaders and governments before — and who had never seen an Israeli. 

“They were the first Arab network to invite Israeli officials to come on,” he told me. “I cannot tell you how horrifying that would be for an Arab audience in the late ’90s: to turn on the television and see an Israeli speaking. Israelis had never spoken! One, they don’t exist. Secondly, they don’t speak. They just kill. For them to be involved in a dialogue was really just mind-boggling to an Arab audience.”

The mind-boggling blog is the satellite-transmitted news network of today: impossible to stop unless you stomp on the blogger himself. Given Iran’s track record (they executed another Iranian on charges of spying for Israel yesterday) we should be concerned for the fate for Derakhshan. In this blogosphere of a billion voices we need be reminded of the price some pay for a freedom we take for granted, and use to write about our pets and favorite bands. As his arrest reminds us, there is nothing more threatening to institutionalized prejudice than the specter of ordinary people.

For more information regarding the fate of Derakhshan email freehossein@internetsansfrontieres.com