Inilah Islam...
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Son: Iranian dad arrested for my Facebook posts - CNN.com
By Ashley Fantz , CNN
July 12, 2012 -- Updated 1936 GMT (0336 HKT)
CNN.com
Abbas Khameneh lives in Iran while his son, Yashar Khameneh, lives in Holland.
Abbas Khameneh lives in Iran while his son, Yashar Khameneh, lives in Holland.
(CNN) -- How many young people have gotten in trouble for something they've
posted on Facebook? Maybe a party picture or an offensive comment compromised
their chances at a job.
But a 25-year-old Iranian says his Facebook activity has led to his father's
detention in a notorious prison in Tehran. And now he's struggling to find a
way to free him.
"I want my family to forgive me," Yashar Khameneh said. "But I believe what I
believe in."
A year ago, while studying at a college in Holland, Khameneh joined a Facebook
page that made fun of a top Shiite Muslim imam, Ali al-Naqi al-Hadi. Naqi is
one of 12 imams considered successors to the Prophet Mohammed. Called
"Infallibles," the imams are protected by law in Iran from ridicule or even
frivolous comments. One can be arrested for insulting them.
The Facebook page, dubbed the "Campaign to Remind Shias about Imam Naqi,"
features a robed man, presumably Naqi, with a face like Charles Manson's,
flanked by a camel wearing sunglasses and the donkey from "Shrek." It also
shows a picture of a Shiite tomb that has been pooped on by a flock of pigeons.
With more than 21,000 likes, the page explains, "Our goal is to use satire to
take out the superstition from religion."
"We believe that everything and everybody could be the subject of a joke,"
Khameneh said. "Nothing and nobody is too holy to be funny. At the beginning it
was not that serious because it was a joke."
Khameneh didn't know who the manager of the site was. They both used nicknames,
as did many people who posted, Khameneh said. In the early days, though,
Khameneh posted links to his personal Facebook page, which had his real name.
"I feel like that is how the authorities knew to come after me," Khameneh said.
During that time, Khameneh said, he wasn't thinking too much about someone in
the Iranian government seeing the page. It seemed unlikely: one page out of so
many on Facebook. The thought did cross his mind a couple times that if it did
become popular, it would probably upset some people back in Iran, where his
father, mother and sister lived.
But he kept posting on the page out of principle, he said.
"From the beginning, I knew that it could be dangerous, but the thing is this:
Taboos should be broken," he said. "I knew that it could be sensitive (for)
Muslims and Iranians worldwide, but here in Europe, jokes are made -- jokes of
Jewish stories or Christian -- and nobody is threatened or killed. This is how
it should be."
A page's overnight fame
Khameneh took comfort, he said, that the page had a small number of followers.
That changed this spring. Traffic skyrocketed in mid-May, when an Iranian
rapper living in Germany made international headlines, Khameneh said.
Iran's religious authority had placed a fatwa on the rapper's head for making a
song that mocked the same imam. The song had gone viral.
All of a sudden, people around the world were Googling the rapper and the imam.
"That was a boon for the (page)," Khameneh said. "It became famous."
On May 23, Khameneh got a call from his father, Abbas Khameneh, in Iran.
Yashar Khameneh\'s father, Abbas, seen in June 2010, has been detained in Iran
since May, his son says.
Yashar Khameneh's father, Abbas, seen in June 2010, has been detained in Iran
since May, his son says.
"He said, 'some people from the intelligence service had come (to our house),
and they want you to cooperate,' " Khameneh recalled. "My father said, 'they
want your passwords to your Facebook, web blog and e-mail.' "
The young man was frightened and felt trapped. First, he didn't manage the page
and therefore couldn't take it down. He assumed that the Iranian authorities
just didn't understand that.
"They came after me maybe because from the beginning, I was very active on the
page, and you could tell that I had a close relationship -- commenting back and
forth -- with the manager," he said.
He fired off a Facebook message to the manager of the site, explaining the
situation and asking that the page be taken down.
The manager wrote back, refusing to deactivate the page.
It's unclear exactly why the manager chose to keep the site up. But Khameneh
thinks there are two reasons, both of them legitimate. Allowing Iran to succeed
in taking the page down would be to defeat the very reason it was created: to
challenge authority and create a greater sense of free expression.
And it's possible that the manager suspected that Khameneh's e-mail was a fake
and that the sender was actually someone with the Iranian authority trying to
trick the manager into taking the page down, Khameneh said.
"At first, I was angry, but I was also emotional" at the news that the page
would stay up, Khameneh said. But "I understand that taking the page down,
really, wasn't going to help my father."
Password protection
Khameneh considered whether he should give up the passwords to the accounts he
did control: his personal Facebook account and his e-mail. But he decided that
wouldn't be wise. The Iranians could go through those accounts and find the
names of his friends and other information, he feared.
Khameneh seemed to be in an unwinnable situation.
So he took the only action he could and deleted his e-mail and personal
Facebook account.
The page mocking the imam remained up.
The day after his father called, Khameneh says, he got a call from his sister
and mother in Iran. They were hysterical.
They said Iranian authorities had arrested his father and taken him to Evin
prison in Tehran, a lockup notorious for torturing inmates.
Khameneh's sister begged him to give up his passwords. She pleaded for him to
dismantle the Facebook page about the imam.
He struggled to explain to her that he didn't control the page and that he had
closed all the accounts that he could. He told her he had no options.
"She told me, 'As long as that Facebook page is open, your father will be in
the same situation.'
"After a few days. I received another call, this time from my mother. She was
crying. She told me, 'OK, you see they want to execute your father? Why don't
you close that Facebook page?'
"At the same time, I can do nothing," Khameneh said.
Weeks slipped by as Khameneh worried about what to do.
By June, he decided to publish online an open letter, describing his father's
arrest and explaining that he didn't know who operated the Facebook page.
Staffers with the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a
nongovernmental organization based in the United States, saw that letter and
called Khameneh to interview him, Executive Director Hadi Ghaemi said.
Yashar Khameneh and his father in Holland in August.
Yashar Khameneh and his father in Holland in August.
Ghaemi said he feels confident the young man's story is true.
"It would be too dangerous for Khameneh's family in Iran for him to make up
something like this," Ghaemi said. "The burden of proof is (on) the Iranian
government, and they haven't issued a statement or denied the story. It also
fits a broader trend of Iranian intelligence targeting Iranian activists abroad
and their family members."
He pointed to the Iranian rapper as an example and reported intimidation of
Iran-based relatives of journalists who work for Radio Farda, the
Persian-language service of Radio Free Europe.
"Employees of Radio Farda believe that their journalism, which attracts over 10
million page views monthly on Radio Farda's website, is the motive behind at
least 20 incidents this year involving the interrogation and intimidation of
their family members in Iran by officials of the country's Intelligence
Ministry," according to a news release on the news outlet's site.
At a loss
Inside Iran, too, there's been an uptick in arrests of bloggers and journalists.
According to the official news site of the Iranian government, the minister of
culture ordered that "current conditions require more unity (of views) in the
media."
Mohammad Hosseini stated, "There will soon be a conference" with "members of
the media and officials of the economy sector" to "enhance their awareness
regarding the current conditions of the country," so "they can work while
considering the country's national interests and to prevent individuals using
their personal opinions which, sometimes inadvertently, leads to disturbing the
(society's) atmosphere."
The minister said he was issuing a final warning to anyone who moved against
"national interests."
Attempts to find any reporting of Abbas Khameneh's arrest in state-run media
were unsuccessful, as were efforts to reach top officials with the country
judiciary or foreign ministry to confirm that the arrest took place.
In Holland in late June, Yashar Khameneh was getting very worried about his
father.
"I thought I should tell the public," he said.
Khameneh began speaking to the media.
This week, Khameneh said, he was at a loss.
"I don't know what else to do," he said. "I don't know. I don't know.
"I can just hope."
CNN's Banafsheh Keynoush and Jennifer Deaton contributed to this report.
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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