Your Eyes Say That You Have Cried

With her small frame she would sit in the first row of class, squint her eyes, and listen. She never raised her voice, even at the end of the class when she would come to my office to ask something. One time, however, she did not learn a particular lesson, meaning she could not accept it, could not believe it. When I was saying that a reporter has to be objective, Fereshteh stood up and asked whether she still had to be objective in an interview with Saeed Criminal. I said, “Yes.” With a pitch louder than usual she asked, “How can I be objective?”

Saeed Criminal was Saeed Hanai, the same guy who had strangled 16 women in northern Iran. He became a darling of fundamentalists because he claimed to have killed the women in order to purify the earth. Saeed Criminal was a monster. And Fereshteh means angel in Persian.

I was sure she did not accept the notion that a reporter has to be detached and objective. She did not accept it even when I reasoned that only with detachment would her work be effective; only when it was not in opposition to someone or to a situation right from the beginning; only when she can lay out or question the situation effectively. Only then will the reader take a side in the end. “It will turn out the way you want it to,” I said.

Even to influence, one has to be objective. A report cannot take a side and have a direction …

Even when I said these things.

In the next class, Roya was the same, as she stood up and renounced the idea. She asked, “Are you objective?,” and she firmly questioned how anyone can be objective.

In those years, Banafsheh was a young girl in that class. When I asked the class to write a report of their choosing, she described a man who had nice facial features, wrote well, and spoke romantically, but whose heart was not tender, maybe made out of iron. Banafsheh was describing me. She had not accepted that one could be objective, either, and she had voiced her dissent in that way.

Objectivity in a society in which violence against women has become institutionalized is a difficult task, and in vain I wanted young women to discover this—the very ones who can better feel pain. Why was I adamant to dictate callously and test them on classic journalism?

The day they arrested Fereshteh, I could not believe they would take that delicate girl to prison. But they did, and the newspaper picture showed her walking toward prison with a smile, staring straight at the camera—into my eyes. It was as if she was saying, “See professor, it’s not possible to be objective.”

The day they were trying Banafsheh, I went and sat in the back of the courtroom. I hid myself pointlessly so she would not be embarrassed. I was mistaken; she was not ashamed to be standing on the defendant’s stand. She stood tall and proud and said, “I wrote it. I gave my signature for women’s freedom, in order to prevent oppression in a misogynist society and legal persecution of women.”

She did not even ask for mercy. The judge, prosecutor, guard and court were all men; even Banafsheh’s lawyer was a man. Except for a few members of her family and a couple in the audience, there were no women in the room. Still, it seemed to me, even the lifeless statue of justice with its empty scale was crying—the consequence of the words of a romantic young girl.

Our daughters, our students, young women reporters, in a traditional society like Iran, take photographs, conduct interviews, and write reports. Some like Asieh exhaust their own health in their effort to help young girls facing execution; some like Massih become wanderers. All because they say something their patriarchal society deems bigger than their mouth. They say you talk too much. A woman should be modest and chaste, raise kids, cook and clean the house for her man returning from work, tired and expectant.

Young women are doing in one generation something that in other societies it has taken many generations to accomplish. So what if they cannot be objective about Saeed Criminal who murdered all of those women and the serial killers who murdered 10 intellectuals and dissidents.

Today’s generation of Iranian women reporters are doing big things. Their mark will be left on history. Let the professor not accept their papers. Let the heartless professor tell them that in writing a report they have to be objective. Objectivity only had meaning when Fereshteh smiled at her guard while being taken to prison, teaching him that he was not her enemy and, if she had any enmity, it was with the tradition of misogyny.

She had learned this lesson from life.

for: neiman report

Toward the no Future

For those who have followed the U.S.-Iran chronicles in the past thirty years, Obama's message and the Islamic Republic Supreme Leader's response to it seemed to carry kinder tones, away from their usual harshness. However, I believe that they may not amount to anything.

Currently, even if some inside Iran seriously wanted to resolve the U.S.-Iran standoff, it would not be smart to bet on the immediate thawing of the frozen relations. However, the point that is of importance in this midst relates to the Iranian people and their future.

In foreign policy, the Islamic Republic now is in possession of some capital. What is meant is the list that the Americans would probably put on the table for discussion if and when the negotiations begin. This capital includes the Hamas, Hezbollah, the situation in Iraq and peace in Afghanistan. Perhaps in the future Iran's closeness with Latin America's defiant regimes can be added to this list.

One of the Islamic Republic's last losses in its conflict with the West is the fact that America finally got serious and decided to enter into open talks with the Islamic Republic Supreme Leader. For a regime that claims to be popular, it is not an achievement that thirty years after its founding, others have realized that they must resolve their differences with the person in charge for life - that the elected institutions have no power.

For Ayatollah Khomeini, from that day when the monarchy crumbled with the announcement by the royal army commanders, it was not only probable but perhaps inevitable - because of the society's authoritarian culture - to occupy the fallen Shah's place. But the Islamic Republic's founder wanted the Shia regime to be a model, built on the people's votes. He wanted to make the new regime permanent and knew that he should not fall for the prescriptions of those who are always ready to turn power into absolute power and pit any regime against its own people. Now, is it cause for celebration now that, thirty years after joining the ranks of the republic's in the world, the White House has finally realized where the real power resides in Iran?

I guess that with Obama's new approach, the U.S.-Iran feud has fallen on the tracks of peace. That is cause for joy. But what now? Aren't elections and voting meaningless now that the Islamic Republic foreign policy has been insulated from the current president's unwise remarks? Have we not moved a step closer toward the rule of absolute power, which somebody pointed out of being of no future twenty years ago?

Iranian Press and Censorship

Thirty years ago, when Iran's last Shah hosted the-then British Prime Minister Callahan at the ‎Sadabad Palace, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's current president, was fifteen- or sixteen-years-‎old.

Today, the world recognizes Ahmadinejad better than the former Shah and newspaper write ‎about him more; his picture is in more places than the Shah's, and he has been to the United ‎Nations and spoken there more times than the Shah. The Shah, however, was worried about ‎Ahmadinejad, because at his meeting with Callahan he said, "My thoughts point to thirty years ‎from now." ‎

At that time, neither the Shah nor anyone else could imagine that in thirty years Iran would be ‎consumed in an election that would send Ahmadinejad to the Sadabad Palace as President. ‎Thirty years ago, the Iranian people, a majority of their thirty-and some odd million people, ‎carried out a revolution that was predicted nowhere in the world and not preceded by any sign or ‎alarm.‎

When the revolution took place, a while had passed since anyone was looking for an important ‎headline in newspapers. Newspaper pages were similar and those days' colorful magazines ‎summarized society's worries, be they traffic in Tehran, difficulty of obtaining a construction ‎permit or lost cows on provincial highways, and so on. The country's mighty censorship ‎apparatus had not been able to find much to censor for some time. ‎

In the second half of the seventies, the Shah and his government insisted that the youth become ‎more politicized, but they weren't interested. The regime was worried that the indifference of the ‎youth was harmful for national security, but at the same time the Savak [Shah's infamous ‎intelligence organization] would throw young people in jail for possessing a banned book. Still, ‎the Shah, his ministers and general still complained that the youth cared too much about jeans ‎and looking like Elvis Presley and Allen Delon. They asked, why isn't there any activism? Why ‎doesn't anyone care about issues? Why is the city dead? They worried so much that they finally ‎decided to establish a full political party for the youth to channel their political activism- though ‎to no avail. ‎

Then news came that students were preparing themselves in dormitories for armed struggle ‎against the regime. Suddenly it was revealed that several youngsters had gone to Iran's northern ‎mountains to emulate Fidel Castro's armed resistance. The royal army mobilized its tanks and ‎helicopters to suppress the uprising. ‎

For the regime, even the handful of youngsters was surprising. The guerillas were killed. The ‎Savak was happy and proud, but in March 1975 the Shah confided in his chief of staff, Asadollah ‎Alam, "It is surprising that out of one thousand students at the Tehran University yesterday, six ‎hundred paid homage to the killed guerillas." Acknowledging the Shah's concern, Alam ‎responded, "This is the result of controlling thoughts." Alam adds in his memoir, "He [the Shah] ‎asked why can't we do that ourselves [police thoughts]?"‎

Neither could journalists control thoughts for the regime, nor could writers paid by the palace or ‎other institutions. And so, the revolution began. ‎

When the revolution heated up, no one worried about people's indifference anymore. Suddenly ‎everyone was politicized. The newspapers were politicized. When the government wanted to ‎pressure them, they staged a powerful strike that ended only with the full lifting of censorship. ‎And when they ended their strike, they all published on their first page the image of their ‎country's next leader, whose image no one had seen in newspapers for a quarter of a century. ‎From then on, all newspapers began criticizing the regime. ‎

The situation continued until the revolution's victory. Immediately afterward the American ‎embassy was invaded. Before long, war arrived too and Saddam's missiles began an ominous ‎dance in city skies. ‎

Everyone had forgotten that six years before, in the very same Iran, the Shah was worried about ‎thirty years after. People were consumed in the struggle to prepare essential goods in wartime ‎and talked politics while waiting in line to purchase them. ‎

Gradually, officials entertained the thought of preventing society's further politicization. ‎Women's magazines, cooking and sewing journals flourished. Though wartime and post-war ‎reflections politicized journalists and newspapers, it didn't liberate them. Censorship grew, and ‎so journalists were left in the same predicament they were in before the revolution, and to change ‎which they had revolted. The situation continued until the 1997 presidential election and the ‎coming to power of Khatami, which ushered an era of unprecedented journalistic freedom.‎

The conservatives renewed their war on the media. More than one hundred newspapers were ‎shut down and two hundred journalists were sent to prison. Silencing the media, however, is not ‎possible after a revolution whose main goal was liberty.‎

There was a time when the government could control the media as it wished, but that time has ‎passed. It may be possible to control journalists for a short time, but to silence them forever- that ‎is an impossible wish.‎

What He Will Bring from America

Last Friday Iran’s leader made a fiery speech at Tehran’s weekly prayer gathering in ‎which he once again defiantly snubbed the power of the regime at its opponents. Coming ‎on the eve of President Ahmadinejad’s trip to New York to attend the annual General ‎Assembly meeting, the snub sends a special message.

Some opponents of the regime will ‎simplistically compare the words of the leader that, “sympathy for the people of Israel is ‎not the view of the government” with the remarks that Ahmadinejad made at a press ‎interview in which he said, “Mashai’s message is my message and that of the ‎government” (Mashai is Ahmadinejad’s vice-president who had a few months ago ‎publicly stunned the hardliners by talking positively about friendship with Israeli people), ‎and conclude that these two politicians have very opposing views. The reality however is ‎something else.‎

The controversy over Mashai’s remarks and the finality of the storm it caused is ‎indicative of an unfolding political plan. The implementation of similar plans by earlier ‎administrations had failed because the leader, and right-wing groups in Iran, had opposed ‎them. Today, however, the leader does not even attempt to hide his support for the ‎current administration and its allies, creating an opportunity to go ahead with ‎implementing plans that had proved impossible in the past.‎

Except for Ahmadinejad’s first trip to the UN which was to send a religious message ‎when he claimed in his speech at the General Assembly that a halo of light surrounded ‎his body as he stood at the podium, his trips to the US have been aimed at opening a ‎channel to the White House.

And despite the humiliating gestures in the way the ‎Americans issued entry visas to their country and tens of other more subtle barriers they ‎created – whose reasons will be revealed in the future - Ahmadinejad has continued his ‎knocks at the door by presenting different models and formulas to break the impasse, ‎while George Bush’s administration has till now rejected each and every one of them. ‎But the Iranians have not been dissuaded and have now relegated the task of building the ‎ground for Iran-US relations to Mowlana and Amir Ahmadi.‎

It appears that in the latest scenario for Ahmadinejad to get close to the White House he ‎must first retract his comments about Israel and the Holocaust, as a way to win the ‎American heart. I think a roadmap has been prepared in this regard which would begin ‎with Rahim Mashai publicly declaring friendship with the people of Israel. When he ‎announced, “I will repeat this a thousand more times that we love the people of Israel and ‎I am not afraid of anybody for saying this,” however, another hullabaloo erupted.

Clerics, ‎theological centers, Friday prayer imams, 200 Majlis representatives, members of the ‎Experts Assembly on Leadership, Majlis clerics etc, all protested the message to the point ‎that even a resolution to subpoena the president to the Majlis was signed by eighty ‎conservative MPs.‎

The president however not only ignored the protests, but responded with these words: ‎‎“Clerics are respectable but we have to do what we have to do. You make your ‎recommendations, but (bear in mind that) we cannot implement every recommendation ‎that you make. The responsibility of running the country rests with us, and that has its ‎own rules.” Even the former king of Iran, the Shah, could not utter such words in public. ‎And with these words, the president clarified the issues, and subsequently stressed that, ‎‎“Mashai’s words are my words and those of the government.”‎

The storm continued and required a larger intervention. This is when the leader of the ‎Islamic regime stepped in to help the president, and through them stopped the growing ‎protests against the fiery chief executive. At last week’s Friday prayers, he said that while ‎talking about friendship with Israeli people was not right, there should be no attacks on ‎the government because of Mashai’s words! In short: Stop the uproar and leave the ‎government alone. End of the matter!‎

This message was immediately heard by Mashai who responded that he is a dedicated ‎follower of the leader. Ali Motahari, an MP from Tehran who had initiated the process to ‎subpoena the president to the Majlis, announced that they were removing the resolution ‎and others too said that with the words of the leader, the issue had ended.‎

So with these words and maneuverings, the basis for Iran-US talks is now laid and we ‎must wait to see what the president will bring from Washington. The outcome may result ‎in a product that will require more propaganda (similar to the claims of seeing a “halo of ‎light” or the “victory” at Columbia University) or a better product, which may come ‎about because the president’s new advisors (Hushang Amir Ahmadi and Hamid ‎Mowlana) being Americans with a better understanding of that society and its political ‎workings, may perform better than his previous advisors.‎

Recent events in Iran clearly demonstrate that under Ahmadinejad’s administration, ‎anything that is willed can be implemented, and, because of the total support of the ‎leader, Iranian politicians and officials don’t have much to worry about. This is so ‎because inside the country, everybody has accepted the regime. Stay tuned.‎

A Necessary Correction

The explanation or correction offered by the spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry that ‎the Iranian government has taken an independent posture regarding the recent events in ‎the Caucuses (i.e. Georgia), and the denials of Iranian authorities that the country has ‎sided with Russia in its dispute with Georgia, contains both good and bad news.‎

The good news is that the spokesperson understands the importance of acting quickly to ‎correct an impression before it is too late. Otherwise it would not be clear what would the ‎confrontation between the Iranian cat and the Russian bear would lead to. Just as it is not ‎clear that if the Iranian government had taken a few more steps, what other unwanted ‎requests it would have to heed to, taking the country into some further unknown ‎direction.‎

But the bad news is that reason for the explanation and correction that was provided was ‎not what it should have been. ‎

The explanation of the spokesperson was so choreographed as if the world press or ‎analysts opposing the government had said something that had not been calculated and ‎thought through which now needed an explanation or a correction. This as we know was ‎not the case. When one looks at last week’s major headlines of government and pro-‎government newspapers such as Kayhan, and more importantly when one listens to the ‎remarks that the president himself made on Monday and others made during his presence ‎at the Shanghai gathering, it becomes clear that the domestic and international ‎commentators had actually been right.‎

The cartoon that the Daily Telegraph, a British right-wing newspaper, published showing ‎a bear whose one claw was holding oil pipelines – showing Russia’s hold on portions of ‎the international gas and oil connections around the world – while the other was giving ‎Iran a gift, which was nothing but Russian missiles, was exactly what the headline of the ‎Iranian right-wing newspaper Resalat had for its readers: “Iran Acquires Most Advanced ‎Missiles”, or Kayhan’s headline on Sunday [even though it is a quote from Western ‎sources] which claimed that the Georgian crises had removed the possibility of a George ‎Bush military attack against Iran. So commentators and analysts who had said that Iran ‎was probably supportive of the Russian position were not off the mark.‎

Even if these and all other similar announcements made by Iran’s state-run national radio ‎and television network last week are attributed to the media, one cannot ignore the ‎remarks and the joyous laughter that Iran’s president demonstrated in Dushanbe, the ‎capital of Tajikistan, when he talked of moves by Georgia’s uncalculated state authorities ‎and attributed the crises in the Caucuses to foreign powers saying, “We have reports that ‎the Zionists were very active in this issue.”‎

President Ahmadinejad’s remarks amid the condemnation of Russia’s military attack by ‎almost all of Russia’s neighbors or at the least condemnation of the military attack by a ‎powerful neighbor meant nothing but a show of support for the Kremlin. But it was now ‎the job of the spokesperson of Iran’s foreign ministry to change the president’s words ‎from “intervention of powers outside the region” and “foreign and non-regional ‎intervention in the Georgian crises” to saying that “this crises was not in the interest of ‎peace or stability for the region”, without naming the source of the intervention.‎

It is already late for the Islamic republic of Iran, after its thirty plus years of existence, ‎and with the forced retirement of its diplomats, not to know that one cannot be successful ‎at the international stage by making categorical statements or displaying uncalled for ‎laughter.‎

What the president said at the Dushanbe meeting about the Caucasian crises, and the ‎following correction or explanations that were offered, not only harmed Iran in a normal ‎way, but they also damaged the country’s dignity and standing. The mere presence of ‎Iran’s president at a meeting whose members are not too keen on accepting Iran as one of ‎them, and clinging on to Putin and others are not things that bring respect for the country.‎

These childish initiatives, such as gathering three participating members who spoke Farsi ‎and then portraying this as a major event in the Iranian press, are not only valueless, but ‎also show our thirst for newspaper headlines, while instructing them how to deal with us.‎

In all honesty, what is the importance of being in the same room with Hamid Karzai - ‎while everyone knows how he came to power in Afghanistan - and president ‎Ahmadinejad’s counterpart in Tajikistan who loudly proclaims two points every time he ‎comes across an Iranian, that first of all they do not need any clerics in their country, and ‎secondly that they drink vodka there, and plenty of it, except to feed the Iranian state run ‎news agencies?‎

No New Cold War on its Way

With Russian army’s invasion of Georgia, has the post-Cold War period ended: has a ‎new Cold War begun? This is the question that was repeated asked in the international ‎media and state officials were subjected to responding to it. The specter of a new Cold ‎War and the possibility of returning to a period that had apparently ended about 20 years ‎ago is opening a new chapter in the minds of the generation that witnessed the Cold War.‎

The key issue of articles published in prominent media on this subject is a warning to the ‎West that in a uni-polar world it may again look for another rival and create another ‎period of anxiety over a possible nuclear war. This is the West’s horror. But the Cold ‎War is not just a political and historical concept. For my generation – that came after ‎World War II and during the Cold war – the reference to another Cold War invokes a ‎different set of memories. It speaks of a world which like the original black and white ‎films, every person belonged to one of the camps of good or evil. It was as if life had not ‎yet become multi-colored, and it was not full of shades like it is today. At least this is ‎how it is viewed in the Third World.‎

It was the end of the Cold War that catapulted dissidents ranging from Lech Walesa to ‎Nelson Mandela to the presidential palace. During the Cold war this could have only ‎been accomplished through a coup d’etat or the rolling of the tanks. It was this new ‎atmosphere that enabled Giddens, the most prominent sociologist of this generation, to ‎shake the House of Lords, unlike philosopher Bertrand Russell, None of this could have ‎happened without the coloring of the world after the Cold War, the end of idealism and ‎the end of the war between the devil and the angel.‎

Thinker Arthur Koestler has an episode in his book Sleepwalkers which is quoted by ‎Andre Fontaine, a French writer and intellectual in a chapter of his book that deals with ‎nuclear games during the Cold War. In it he says, “No other period, no matter how ‎decaying and decadent, had as many tools to completely annihilate mankind or to ‎manipulate nature as we do today. The peculiarity of our period is that the rapid and ‎unprecedented growth of material power has joined hands with the unparalleled ‎intellectual revolution” [loose translation into English].‎

This unmatched intellectual revolution is the reason why the 60-years generation view the ‎world as empty and absurd, when compared to the beginnings of the 20th century. This is ‎why idealist long for the days of the Cold War. This is why with all its blood, drugs, ‎revolutions, coups that the Cold War (and its ideals of the sixties) still are the dreams of ‎the older generation. ‎

At no other time has man pursued peace, human rights, women’s rights, battled the ‎population explosion, and consumerism, nature and the fights against the environment, ‎the struggle against the proliferation of the atom, the struggle against poverty and hunger ‎more vigorously than during the sixties. These events existed during the Cold War years ‎along with the political struggle between the camps, and Iran too the joy of the Third ‎World over the possible return of the Cold war is perhaps because they have seen that the ‎constitution and rules of the savage world in which when the vultures, the bears and ‎crocodiles get into a fight, the deer get a chance to breathe a fresh air and experience ‎some peace.‎

But it is still too soon for idealists to be singing the song of victory and return for the ‎Cold War because, as Lenin once said, history does not repeat itself, and if it does then it ‎is merely a comedy. Because of today’s mass communication and telecommunication ‎means and the rapid exchange of information through means that are available to ‎everybody, events similar to those during the Cold War will not be similar in their ‎workings. As one can see, despite the images that Western caricatures draw of Putin and ‎present him as a demagogue and wicket, he is far from a Stalin or even a Brezhnev. ‎

Fidel Castro, one of the old guard from the days of the Cold War, knows this too well that ‎the old days are gone forever and will not return. In one of his letters to Khrushchev, ‎Castro wrote that he understood the period to be one in which the weak were fried so that ‎they could be easily swallowed.‎

One of the reasons why the Cold War days will not return is that when the famous in the ‎realm of politics rose to power, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Adenauer, de ‎Gaulle, Marshal Petain, Chamberlain, Nehru, Nkrumah, Titov, Brant, Palme, etc, have ‎made or written remarks and observations that have become parts of the human ‎civilization today. Even if the midgets of the gray era bring back the ambiance of the ‎Cold War, things will still not be the same and they will have a different meaning and ‎interpretation.

This is Citizen Journalism

What happened a few days ago in Zanjan should wake us all up. This ‎is not the first time that a public official violates a young woman, nor is this confined to ‎Iran, or limited to a deputy university chancellor or a police superintendent who ‎presented themselves as pious and law-abiding citizens in public while privately ‎engaging in heinous acts. If such behavior began with the poet Hafez, then it has a history ‎of at least six hundred years.‎

The use of publicly unaccepted behavior to expose those in power is not a new even in ‎politics. What is relatively new is that someone filmed an event using a mobile phone and ‎another person posted it on You Tube, making it instantly available around the world. ‎Forty thousand people are recorded to have accessed the site in four hours. What all this ‎means is that a crime committed by a deputy university chancellor appointed by ‎Ahmadinejad’s minister of science, Mr. Zahedi, became a worldwide event in an instant. ‎If someone asked why is Mr. Zahedi or Mr. Ahmadinejad dragged into this, this is my ‎response: It is because these individuals claim to be the pious, of having a pious ‎administration and boast spending money on the missing twelfth Shiite saint, while at the ‎same time belittling and negating the world for being “corrupt”. It is because these people ‎have put themselves at the center of the world and who ever toes their line will be ‎protected by them as if their credentials have been approved by the missing Shiite imam. ‎If someone falls out, then he is announced to be the enemy of the very same saint.‎

Every society wakes up to a tune. Some to the tune of church bells, while others to the ‎calls of the Moazen. Still others wake up to a gentle breeze.‎

But we Iranians, who seem to disregard our ancient history whose grandeur is completely ‎lacking today and whose triumphs have not passed on to our generation, have only a tiny ‎interest in this fatherland and do not care about its past which is occasionally aired to fool ‎the masses. But we cannot continue to pretend to be living in the Stone Age. A mobile ‎phone is not just something that you take out of its box and plug it in and call our home. ‎A mobile phone means a documentary, photos, transmission, dissemination, connection ‎to the rest of the world, etc. And all of this without recourse. If you wish, you can ‎continue to practice your ancient habits and deny modern tools and needs, to issue orders ‎to find “the trouble source”, order to shut down websites, issue fatwas to kill, etc. But ‎these will not resolve your problems or solve things. Yes, issues can be resolved, but not ‎this way.‎

The film on You Tube shows how a university authority who ordered students around at ‎one time, was suddenly trapped and then fell to the mercy of the very same students he ‎was bullying. All of this because of a single mobile phone.‎

Look at the impact of the Internet since it became a national and public tool of the Iranian ‎people since eight years ago. Look at the impact it has had on our social life. One of its ‎changes is that until a few years ago people in power regularly smeared and defamed ‎their opponents using any language they wished. Today, the same, people are scared. ‎Unless of course they are like Keyhan newspaper (state appointed daily) and its followers ‎who have given up on the future.‎

If one counted the number of individuals who in recent years made slanderous ‎accusations in their speeches, interviews, and public talks against others, they are ‎countless. Nobody has bothered to count them. Nobody plans to. But all you have to do is ‎look at the number of cautions that have been recently issued about being slanderous and ‎defamatory with the aim of protecting people’s image and respect, and you will see the ‎power of the mobile phone.‎