Hoder gets booted from his weblog domain

by Vivian Salama

On the temporary homepage for his highly read blog, journalist and blogger Hossein Derakhshan has posted a plea. 

“Last Friday, I was kicked out of my hosting company,” the entry dated August 13th begins.His site, one of the most highly read Persian weblogs, was  booted from his home domain (hoder.com), forcing Derakhshan to move years of entries onto a temporary server.              

                                                                        

            The incident began when lawyers of Washington Institute for the Near East Policy fellow Mehdi Khalaji claimed Derakhshan had mistranslated an article written by Khalaji about the Iranian election campaign. According to Derakhshan, Khalaji’s lawyers sent a notice to Hoder’s hosting company plus his domain registrar “Go Daddy” asking them to remove all defamatory material about Khalaji, publish and apology and pay $10,000 in damages.

            According to a legal document provided by Derakhshan from the Toronto-based law firm of Cassels Brock, he is accused of numerous charges, including: “falsely stating that [Khalaji] is a traitor to the government and people of Iran”; stating that Khalaji “is a dupe or a puppet of the U.S. government,” saying Khalaji “counseled the Vice President of the United States of America to bomb thousands of men, women and children,” and that Khalaji “counsels enemies of Iran and of humanity.”  Derakhshan denies the charges and calls actions by his hosting company a blow to free speech.

On his temporary site, he writes: “It’s all quite ironic that the way I am treated in the United States (being kicked out of my servers) is worse than that in the Islamic Republic of Iran (filtering my blog and forcing me to sign an apology when I was last in Tehran).  Ever more ironic is that a blog I was editing to cover internet censorship in Iran has also been shut down.”

            Hossein is no stranger to such obstacles.  While leaving Tehran in Spring 2006, authorities detained the now 32-year old activist to question him about numerous posts on his popular site.  Authorities forced him to sign an apology for his blogging activities before permitting him to leave the country, according to his blog. He continues to blog defiantly at risk of never being allowed back into his homeland.

 

Hossein has provided the following documents in support of his claims:

1) The initial legal notice from Khalaji’s lawyer:
http://hoder.com/weblog/images/khalajithreat.pdf

2) Email exchange with the hosting company led to termination of his accounts:
http://hodertemp.blogspot.com/2007/08/accounts-and-billing-hosting-matters.html

3) His trouble with Islamic Republic of Iran’s authorities:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2006/03/70522