Dr. Nourizadeh

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

We continue the program with paying our respect and tribute to the memory of the veteran sports commentator Manook Khodabakhshian who sadly passed away over the weekend in Los Angeles.

We then talk to our colleague journalist and sports commentator Iraj Adibzadeh.

Manook was a great friend and fellow journalist who always used to ask me if I had any scoop in my news programs.

We began working together in Iran’s national radio station in the early 1970s.

At the time I was also the political editor of Ettelaat daily and in the evenings Manook an I used to practice our broadcasting skills until early hours of the following days.

Iraj Adibzadeh:

I was moved by your stories of the yesteryears. In fact you share a lot with the late Manook as he also had a very good and sharp memory and remembered those old and wonderful days very clearly.

He was a very decent and honest man and a great and trustworthy friend.

His deep knowledge of both English and Italian languages combined with his informed sport commentary made him a unique personality in the world sports journalism in Iran.

He was particularly popular among the Iranian youth as they looked upon him as both a sports commentator as well as a mentor to achieve high position in any field of social life that they were in.

May he rest in peace.

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

Imagine this was 60 or 70 years ago and one day you wake up and do not see the usual natural world of trees and creeks around you and instead ta sahara and scorching sun have replaced them.

This is Dubai of those days in which our special guest of tonight Mr Faghihi woke up to when he was a young man.

Now in his seventies he is the chairman of the association of foreign trades in Dubai and one of the most prominent businessmen of the Sheikhdom.

Anyone who needs help for a wide range of services, from having a wedding party to insuring their cars, calls at his office in Dubai.

Back in Iran he has built schools, university, old people homes, mosques and clinics for the people in his birthplace of the city of Lar.

And he has provided these excellent services regardless of if a Muslim, Christian, Jew or Zarostean Iranian benefits from them as he does not look at his fellow humans from a religious angle!

So, lets hear the story of his life from himself.

Mr Faghihi;

When I was only 16 years old I accompanied my late father to the Hajj pilgrimage through Dubai.

He went on to Mecca and I stayed over in Dubai. I had lost my mother when I was two years old and were not on good terms with my step mother. So I decided not to go back to Iran.

In Dubai I began working as a bookkeeper at a relative’s company and went back to Iran after six years to do my military service.

After completing my conscription in 1964, in partnership with my brother in law we opened the Halem Fujaira Company.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

In those days Dubai must have only been a long road that connected a few buildings only.

Mr Faghihi:

Dubai came to being in 1832 when two rival clans from Yemen migrated there and each established their own authority in opposing parts of it.

The first official ruler of Dubai was Sheikh AlMaktum who needed some protection from the Iranian people for his authority and 35 armed men from my birthplace had provided this for him.

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

We continue the program with talking to our special guest of every Thursday, Dr. Mohsen Sazegara, for his views about news of Iran and the Middle East.

I was listening to Trump’s speech when he said he has saved several trillion dollars for the US in trade deals and that at the same time the Iranian regime has lost an equivalent amount under the sanctions and squandering the Iranian people’s wealth.

He then spoke directly to the Iranians and saidtheir miseries can come to an end tomorrow and they deserve much better than the dire situation they are in.

Mohsen Sazegara:

We need to look at the issue of peaceful protest and transition of power in Iran once again. Time and again the new generation of Iran criticizes my generation and asks us why did we follow a revolutionary path and armed struggle against the Shah, which led to a revolution whose consequences have been disastrous for our country.

With hindsight, looking back at the 1960s if you wanted to be regarded as an intellectual or educated person or a writer andwere not a revolutionary no body would take you seriously.

This was the time of the Algerian civil war, the Vietnam war and the Latin American revolutions. Even Mohammad Reza Shah hadcalled his land and social reforms as White Revolution. Even our religious opposition groups had taken up Marxist ideology.

All in all around 700 people were killed in street clashes during the anti-Shah demonstrations, which were the result of soldiers’ lack of experience on how to handle street riots. But the current regime deceitfully claims that more than 60,000 people were martyred for the victory of the revolution.

And this is the same regime that has executed 5000 Iranians in a matter of few days alone.

So the experience of the last half a century tells us that civil protest has twice the chance of ousting dictators and establishing democracy than revolutionary approach, which involves bloodshed and armed conflicts.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

You mentioned the new and young generation of Iran and one of them recently asked me if we were to have a referendum in Iran today how many people would vote for the continuation of the present regime?

I gave him a modest figure but he said I was wrong, as the figure would be far less.

He also reminded me that our generation was only asking for the Shah to leave without thinking what happens after he is gone, but this generation would not repeat your mistake.

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

Ahmadinejad has given an interview and while I was reading it I thought to myself that if one did not know him well you would think he is a saint and a man who has would sacrifice his life in the path of his humanitarian beliefs, the way Zeid the saint did centuries ago.

Zeid was the son of Imam Sajad and wanted to take the revenge of his grandfather’s death but refused to damn the Sunni caliphs and respected them and this led to him being killed by his followers.

Ahmadinejad has said that if it were up to him he would not have signed the nuclear deal. We all know very well that during his eight years in office he and his men including Saeed Jalili were constantly haggling with the international community to reach an agreement over regime’s nuclear program to the point of begging them.

Had Khamenei permitted him, Ahmadinejad would have signed an agreement immediately.

Our guest Mr Alireza Sasanian is here tonight again and would tell us more about this now:

Alireza Sasanian:

If the current so-called fight against corruption in Iran was genuine, the first person to be arrested must have been Ahmadinejad himself.

He is a charlatan and a liar who while mayor of Tehran squandered 341 million dollars and falsely claimed it had gone into the municipality’s projects but in fact had been distributed among his cronies and later spent on his campaign in presidential elections.

The Tehran City Council never investigated this theft simply because they were all involved in this massive corruption.

The same corruption method was rampant in the national broadcasting organization both under Larijani and Zarghami who used to distribute gold coins among the staff to keep them silent about the theft of funds by the senior managers.

Now Rouhani has appointed Mr Monsan as the new minister of tourism and cultural heritage. He is a relative of Rouhani and used to be a senior member of staff during Ghalibaf’s tenure as the mayor of Tehran whose corruption is known to everybody.

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

Tonight we will look at the Rouhani’s latest comments in Majles about Iran’s socio-economic problems. His comments once again reveal the deceitful and ignorant nature of a regime that has nothing to offer to our people exept lies.

I am so sorry to see that he appears in front of a parliament whose members are supposed to be there to protect the rights of our nation but sadly they arenothing more than a bunch of carefully selected people by the disgraceful Guardian Council and except a handful of them the rest look at their jobs as a money making position.

Now and after six years of boasting about doing this and doing that for the Iranian people Rouhani has said very clearly that he is nobody and all the regime’s domestic and foreign policies are dictated by Khamenei!!

As such, after an initial caving in to pressure to say that he is happy to negotiate with the US officials, Rouhani has declared “we have no plan at all to enter any negotiations with the Americans”.

Sheer charlatanism! This is the same man who only a week ago when his foreign minister turned up in France and engaged in secret negotiations with the G7leaders had said “I am ready to go anywhere in the world to meet with anyone if it helps to solve the problems of our people”.

But apparently Khamenei has told him off and he has now retreated from his earlier comments. In any case, Trump did not pay much attention to Rouhani’s “readiness” as he knows that Rouhani is nothing more than the servant of Khamenei’s whims.

The damages that Khamenei’s despotism has done to our country are numerous. Out of the 150 top mathematicians who graduated from Sharif University in 2011 only one of them has remained in Iran and the rest have immigrated (or better said fled) and obtained top jobs in major Western universities and research institutes.

More than 6000 top Iranian engineers alone have immigrated to Canada since the revolution!

The latest news says an Iranian woman has set herself on fire outside a court in Tehran after being tried on charges of resisting arrest by morality police for removing her mandatory hijab in public.

A spokesperson for the judiciary has said the woman “had been engaged in a physical confrontation with security forces in February after resisting arrest on charges of bad-hejabi and insulting them”.

I tell Mr Khamenei that he is responsible for this horrific news!

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

We continue the program with watching two video clips about the widespread corruption in the Iranian regime’s judiciary.

We then listen to the comments of Iran’s national judo champion Saeed Molayie who reveals how the regime’s sport officials have ordered him to abandon his fight against the Israeli champion in the Yokyo tournament as a cheap political propaganda.

Molayie has now refused to go back to Iran and has stayed in Germany where his family lives.

Two weeks ago the senior and trusted journalist who had accompanied Javad Zarif in his trip to Europe fled the press team and has asked for political asylum in Sweden.

He had previously published a list of its ministers who have dual nationality. What kind of national ministers they are when half of their interests lie with a foreign country?

During the time of the Shah any senior government official of foreign ministry found married to a foreign national would be jailed! But now under this regime these dual nationals have two wives!!

Israeli army and the Lebanese Hezbollah have exchanged artillery fires at their border areas.

Benjamin Natanyahu has claimed that Israel will continue to annex all those Palestinian lands that historically belong to then, as if he owns them!!

One needs remind him that his war with the Hezbollah of Lebanon does not give him any justification to confiscate more Palestinian lands.

On the other hand, we have the Jewish nation that the Nazis and Hitler murdered 6 million of them in the most horrific crimes against humanity.

Even today Jews in Iraq and Iran are subjected to so many restrictions and repression.

They are a nation with a country and have the right to exist and live in peace alongside the Palestinians in their own independent country.

That is to say if the likes of the Iranian regime and its proxies allow this objective to be realised.

In Paris through Macron, Zarif had requested from the Trump government to allow Iran sell 700-800,000 barrels of oil per day.

There was also the talk of Rouhani meeting with Trump at the UN but Khamenei has now interfered and sabotage all the behind the scene agreements between Zarif and Macron!

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

We continue the program with talking to our special guest Mr Alireza Sasanian.
But before that, I need to tell you to be careful about what you say on this program because some people have accused us that you are an agent of the Iranian regime!!

Alireza Sasanian:

We need to be a human before we believe in any religion. I do believe in the existence of heaven and hell.

I had told you before that in Iran’s national broadcasting organisation, IRIB, many people have more than one name and family name.

These are pseudonyms but I never used it to extract money from any other source of employment.

The fact is that within every institute or organ of the regime you would find honest and patriotic people working alongside corrupt people and traitors. This includes the IRIB, the Revolutionary Guards, the security forces and the ministry of intelligence.

Dr Alireza Nourizadeh:

How would you judge the previous heads of the IRIB, people like Haj Ezzat or Asgari?

Alireza Sasanian;

The truth is that the best general manager that the organisation had was Mr Sarfaraz.

However, if it was up to me, I would rename the IRIB as the “retired people’s home for terrorists”!

When Sarfaraz was appointed, he fired 800 of these types of people who were on the payroll.

When Dr Najafi became the Mayor of Tehran he too focused of purging those corrupt cronies of his predecessor Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf.

Some of my friends warned him not to do so as Ghalibaf will come after him and we have seen how this happened. He has had to confess to the murder of his second wife which has all been a staged killing to implicate him in it.

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

We continue the program with talking to our special guest of every Thursday, Dr. Mohsen Sazegara, for his views about news of Iran and the Middle East.

Last week we had the annual summit of the heads of states from the G7 countries and Zarif suddenly turned up in France and Macron said there is a possibility of Trump meeting with Rouhani.

But both sides put forward some conditions for the meeting to take place and later backtracked from the idea as a whole. What is your take on this? Was it just mediation by Macron or the whole thing was a misunderstanding?

Mohsen Sazegara:

I followed the news in Washington and Tehran and asked a few of my close friends who knew something about this.

It is Iran that is pressing France for the mediation and in his meeting with Macron Zarif had requested that Iran be allowed to have the exemption from the oil sanctions to sell 700,000 barrel of oil per day and at the same time as a gesture of goodwill France offers a 1.5 billion Euro credit to Iran as a back up for the INSTEXT project.

In return Iran would agree to stop any further retreats from the nuclear deal.

Macron had discussed these arrangements with Trump privately and he had agreed to them. In Tehran Rouhani had said that he is willing to meet anyone if it helps the national interests of the Iranians. Surely he had been in touch with Zarif all along.

Some people think that Khamenei opposes Rouhani on this matter but that is not true. He is just a timid dictator who sits back and waits to see if the policy fails he can then say that it was not his idea.

However Trump had disagreed with lifting of the oil sanctions and made it conditional to regime changing some of its policies before hand. As such Tehran had become angry and soon Rouhani reacted by saying he is not prepared to take part in a photo opportunity with Trump to boost his position in US politics.

Then Pompeo and Bolton repeated Trump’s position and Pompeo once again said Iran could only come to a negotiating table after accepting and implementing his 12 conditions. So at the end, it was much ado about nothing!

The Iranian regime believes US is after the same policy for it that it has towards North Korea and Trump is only trying to have a winning card for his 2020 re-election by forcing Tehran to come to a negotiating table.

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

Tonight our special guest Dr Payam Fazel who also serves with the Doctors Without Borders will talk to us about the story of the turbulent life of his family.

Dr Fazel has previously appeared on our program on many occasions and is a very active member of the medical organization thattakes him to countries as distant as in African and North Korea. We want tofind out why he has so passionately dedicated his life to helping others.

Dr Fazel’s late mother, Shahla Harriri, was an educated woman who loved her children so much and worked with her husband who was a doctor. Then the revolution arrived in Iran and she became associatedwith a political opposition group and was later arrested and despite repenting she was executed.

Dr Payam Fazel:

I can say the revolution cut through the life of our family. Some years before it happened my father had become interested in Dr Ali Shariati’s books and ideas. He came from a religious family and I remember together with my mother they used to read the books at our bedside and thismade us all a very religious family.

Ali Shariati presented a different image of Islam, which was more of its Alawi sect. People who shared a cell with him in prison were saying that he did not even do prayers and instead always did meditation.

Unlike Shariati’s intellectual ideas, Khomeini was a true strategist despite his langue of the peasants. Behind the scene he controlled everything to make sure his revolution would succeed. He never talked about women’s rights and even promised that his regime would be more democratic than that of France. He always kept his image of a spiritual leader.

My mother became a follower of the Mujaheddin Khalq organization and on one occasion the pressure groups broke her nose during a protest demonstration and she appeared with bloody face next to Massoud Rajavi on the front page of the Mujaheddin’s newspaper.

My father on the other hand kept his life style of drinking his whiskey and began a relationship with his secretary, which truly broke my mother’s heart. He even distanced himself from my mother’s political activities and wrote a letter to the regime and denounced her.

We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.

Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:

Tonight we speak with our special guest Dr. Hossein Lajevardi by asking him about his views about the latest news of our country in view of French president Macron’s behind the scene efforts to mediate between Tehran and Washington, while each party has put forward some pre-conditions before they could start talking to one another.

Dr. Hossein Lajevardi:

I have already discussed this matter on a number of occasions. My view is that the entire Iranian regime has only one aim and that is to stay in power at any cost. The talk of so-celled reformists versus conservatives is baseless.

However, that we do have two factions within the systems is true but each one of them wants to be in power but neither of them wants this in the interest of the Iranian people.

One faction is Khamenei’s that has the backing of the Revolutionary Guards and their policy to remain in power is through war, repression and violence andbloody purges of all voices of dissent.

I think once this regime has disappeared we will find out about those of its many victims that we have not even heard of them.

The other faction is formed of Rouhani, Khatami and Moussavi. I believe Moussavi is the most decent of them as at one point he separated his life and politics from the rest of the followers of this faction.

Rouhani on the other hand is the most deceitful of them.

As for the international support behind this regime, both the Western governments and the Russians are behind it simply because the regime looks after the interests of both to stay in power.

This includes Trump’s government, which keeps saying that he is not after the ousting of the regime in Iran.

All he has said about Iran since becoming the US president has meant that before the revolution Iran belonged to America and he wants it back!

Further more, it is in the interest of Trump to keep the Iranian regime in power because if a popular and democratic government comes to power in Iran he, and Mr Putin too, will not be able to sell billions of dollars of arms to the region.

We also have this problem of Iranian people suffering from the disease of not trusting any opposition groups.

Like Prince Reza Pahlavi, they keep changing their slogans and positions and this has caused confusion among our people. One day these opposition groups must sit down and decide who they want to lead them and then inform our people accordingly.