HODER AND WAEL GHONIM
I met Hossein Derakhshan, better known by his blogname “Hoder,” at a bloggers’ convention in Nashville, Tennessee. We sat around a lunch table with other attendees and ate enormous barbecue sandwiches. Hoder was 30 but looked even more youthful than that, an amiable young man with sparkling dark eyes and a ready smile.
The media always referred to him as the Iranian “blogfather,” so it’s natural that we talked about the internet, and blogging, and Iran. I asked whether the blog he wrote in both Farsi and English, Editor: Myself, was blocked by the Iranian government. He assured me with a grin that he had ways to get his message into the mother country.
Hoder was technically savvy: that was his claim to fame. But, for an Iranian and a supposed dissident, I found him surprisingly naïve in political matters. He felt great anger toward the United States and the Bush administration. Part of that was personal: he had become a Canadian citizen, and getting across the border when your name was “Hossein Derakhshan” and you fit the wrong profile for age and sex was, at the time, a humiliating process. But he was full of strange ideas about neocons conspiring with other Iranian exiles whom he didn’t like.
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