How Hoder Galvanized the Iranians of 'Tehranto'

THE MANY FACES OF THE BLOGFATHER How Hoder galvanized the Iranians of 'Tehranto' His divergent political views made him a star of the blogosphere. Now that Hossein Derakhshan is missing in Iran, Toronto bloggers are abuzz, Ivor Tossell reports IVOR TOSSELL Special to The Globe and Mail November 29, 2008 Before he disappeared, Hossein Derakhshan might have been Toronto's most famous blogger. For a time, he was held in such high regard that when renowned cartoonist Nikahang Kowsar, a fellow Iranian expatriate, drew a cartoon to honour him, he rendered the man who helped kick off Iran's blogging revolution as a marble statue. But Mr. Derakhshan's politics shifted, growing more sympathetic to Iran's regime. His friendships soured, and Mr. Kowsar's cartoons ceased to be so flattering. Now, Mr. Kowsar is worried for his former friend. A month after making a ballyhooed return to Iran, Mr. Derakhshan, 34, has vanished. State media has reported that he's under arrest, charged with spying for Israel. The Internet is up in arms; the blogosphere is abuzz with concern that one of its stars is in trouble. Human-rights organizations around the world are demanding his release. But in his adoptive home of Toronto, he's left a bitter divide in the Persian blogging community. "His enemies have come out stabbing left, right and centre," says Bahman Kalbasi, a journalist and long-time friend of Mr. Derakhshan's, as well as a former Persian blogger. Depending on who you ask, he's either an idealist and a straight-talker, or an enabler of a repressive regime and - as one acquaintance from his University of Toronto days put it - "a publicity-seeker par excellence." The debate is swirling across Persian-language blogs and English-language mailing lists. Some even ask if the arrest was a set-up. "Many people are in doubt," says Mr. Kowsar. "They wonder if this is a PR stunt." The blogger sometimes known as "Hoder" has certainly shown a puckish side in the past. In 2005, he used his blog to drop hints that he'd travelled to Tehran, commenting on the traffic and weather. He censored any contradictory reader comments, until eventually his Tehrani readers started e-mailing him, asking where he was. This lasted until he posted a photo of himself holding that day's copy of The New York Times ("Canadian papers are not worth the money," he noted) with the CN Tower in the background. He'd been here the entire time; the prank was a pointed commentary on the power of media censors. But Mr. Kalbasi - who spent 63 days in a Tehran prison as a reformist student - bristles at the suggestion that Mr. Derakhshan may be joking. The two were friends in Tehran before both moved to Toronto (Mr. Kalbasi moved on to Washington, D.C., last month, leaving the CBC to report for BBC America). He says that those who fall afoul of the well-funded opposition-in-exile groups quickly get labelled patsies for the regime. Meanwhile, friend and foe are campaigning for his release, and in Toronto, some of his enemies are still willing to give him his due. By all accounts, Mr. Derakhshan is an enigmatic figure. He was a young reformist journalist in Tehran before arriving in Toronto in 2000. He shot to prominence by publishing step-by-step instructions on how to use Blogger to publish Farsi blogs in the flowing Persian script. The Persian blogosphere subsequently ballooned to more than an estimated 60,000 blogs and Mr. Derakhshan rose to fame online, where he was sometimes called "The Blogfather." His blog, hoder.com, became an influential read. All the while, he was living the life of a gregarious Torontonian twentysomething, studying sociology at the U of T and becoming involved with the Iranian association there. He married (and later divorced) a Canadian, and became a Canadian citizen in his own right. "He thought [Toronto] was too provincial, but at the end of the day, this was where he became Canadian," says Mr. Kalbasi, with a laugh. "This is where he started writing a blog. It was very much a second home to him." Indeed, the Greater Toronto Area is host to a 57,000-strong Iranian community; some estimates peg the number even higher. The community has especially settled in North York and Richmond Hill - an area that, from time to time, gets dubbed "Tehranto." Iranian immigrants started arriving in Toronto after 1979, many fleeing the revolution that ushered in the theocratic Islamic Republic. But subsequent waves of immigrants arrived less for political reasons than for education and jobs, and many travel back and forth between Iran and Canada today. As a result, the anti-regime sentiment that once prevailed here has given way to a more discordant atmosphere. But Mr. Derakhshan's blogging message resonated as a way of uniting the diaspora, especially among the community's younger generation, and Toronto became the home to a thriving coterie of Persian-language bloggers, such as Nazli Kamvari, 29. "I could write in English," says Ms. Kamvari, a worried friend of Mr. Derakhshan's. "I feel there's a need to theorize and write in Persian." Born in the United States, but having spent about half her life in Iran before coming to Toronto, Ms. Kamvari writes about gender and sexuality in theoretical terms. Her blog is filtered in Iran, but she still reaches an audience in the low thousands, mostly in North America and Europe. Ms. Kamvari stuck by Mr. Derakhshan, even while others were alienated as he became increasingly strident against the Western establishment and its desire for "regime change" in Iran. In a 2006 interview with George Stroumboulopoulos on CBC's The Hour, Mr. Derakhshan announced his support of Iran's nuclear-weapons program. This October, shortly before he returned to Iran, a rare English note on his blog lauded the success of the Iranian government's policies. "Please get over Ahmadinejad's scruffy look, prayers, and plain language and see these achievements," he wrote. "We were saying, 'What's happening to him?' " says Mr. Kowsar, who came to Toronto in 2000 after years of government harassment and jail time, and now works as an online journalist in addition to cartooning. "I even had a fight on my blog with him. ...I didn't mention him in my blog for two years, until three days ago." Mr. Derakhshan finally left Toronto to study in London a year ago, before returning to Iran this fall to continue blogging there. Before his return to Tehran, his friends say he conceded that he could be arrested - especially having publicly visited Israel in 2006, a crime in Iran - but asked not to be turned into a human-rights cause that would further demonize Iran. "He didn't want this to be human-rights propaganda," says Ms. Kamvari. .

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