Hossein Derakhshan

Hossein Derakhshan (born January 7, 1975), also known as Hoder, is an Iranian-Canadian blogger, journalist, and researcher who was imprisoned in Tehran from November 2008 to November 2014.

He is credited with starting the blogging revolution in Iran and is called the father of Persian blogging by many journalists.

He also helped to promote podcasting in Iran.

Derakhshan started out as a journalist writing about Internet and digital culture for reformist newspaper, Asr-e Azadegan in 1999.

Later, when this paper was closed down by the judiciary system, he moved to another newspaper, Hayat-e No.

His column there was called Panjere-i roo be hayaat (A Window to the Life, a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window), and later expanded to a weekly page on digital culture, Internet and computer games.

In December 2000, Derakhshan moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

On September 25, 2001, he started his weblog in the Persian language.

It was titled Sardabir: khodam, or "Editor: Myself".

He later moved his manually maintained weblog to Blogger.com, which was not supporting Unicode at the time.

He also prepared a step-by-step guide in Persian on how other Persian writers can start their weblogs using Blogger.com and the Unicode standard.

In December 2003, he founded Stop censoring us, a blog to watch the situation of internet censorship in Iran.

He appeared a few times on a VOA Persian TV show to talk about Internet censorship and methods to get around filters.

Derakhshan's weblog, like some other political Persian blogs and websites, has been blocked (or filtered) by the government in Iran, since 2004.

Derakhshan spoke at the Wikimania 2005 conference in Frankfurt, Germany regarding the complementary use of wikis and blogs to aid political reform and the growth of democracy in Iran and other countries.

On leaving Iran, he was briefly detained and summoned to the Ministry of Intelligence.

A few days later he was interrogated by an intelligence official over the content of his blog and was forced to sign an apology before being allowed to leave Iran.

But after leaving Iran, he published a report on what happened on his website.

Derakhshan visited Israel as a Canadian citizen in early 2006 and early 2007.

Before his first visit, he stated that he went to Israel as a personal attempt to start a dialogue between Iranian and Israeli people.

This might mean that I won't be able to go back to Iran for a long time, since Iran doesn't recognize Israel, has no diplomatic relations with it, and apparently considers traveling there illegal.

Too bad, but I don't care.

Fortunately, I'm a citizen of Canada and I have the right to visit any country I want.

I'm going to Israel as a citizen journalist and a peace activist.

As a citizen journalist, I'm going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there.

The Islamic Republic has long portrayed Israel as an evil state, with a consensual political agenda of killing every single man and woman who prays to Allah, including Iranians.

I'm going to challenge that image.

As a peace activist, I'm going to show the Israelis that the vast majority of Iranians do not identify with Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, despite what it looks like from the outside.

I'm going to tell them how any kind of violent action against Iran would only harm the young people who are gradually reforming the system and how the radicals would benefit from such situation.

His second visit was to participate in a conference at The Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy at Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva.

In August 2006, he published an article in the Columns & Blogs section of The Washington Post in which he supported Iran pursuing nuclear weapons as a deterrent to possible invasion by global powers, after normalising relations with the U.S. and Israel: However, later after his prison sentence he supported Iran's nuclear deal with the six world powers.

The annual international conference in 2007 was titled 'Reform, Resistance, and Conflicts in the Middle East." Hossein participated in panel titled 'Weblogging as a Space of Resistance', where he spoke about Iranian weblogs in a presentation titled as 'Internet in Iran: Are Weblogs and other forms of new media helping democracy in Iran?'.

His visits were widely covered by the local and international media, including Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, Ynet News, Ha'ir, Time Out Tel Aviv, Israeli Radio and its Persian service, Israel's English TV news, New York Times, BBC, etc.:

Derakhshan was arrested on November 1, 2008 and sentenced to 19½ years in prison on September 28, 2010.

He holds a master's degree (MA) in Film and Media Studies from SOAS, University of London, 2008.

His sentence was reduced to 17 years in October 2013.

He was pardoned by Iran's supreme leader and on November 19, 2014 was released from Evin prison.

Derakhshan started his education in Nikan High School in Tehran.

He has a bachelor's degree in sociology from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran.

He spent time studying sociology at the University of Toronto.