Revolutionary word beamed into Iran from Los Angeles
Iranmania ^ | 6/19/03 | Iranmania
Posted on 06/19/2003 7:57 PM PDT by freedom44
Half a world from the protests rocking the Iranian regime, a new weapon is being aimed at the ruling ayatollahs from a warehouse in a run-down part of Hollywood.
As Teheran was gripped by an eighth straight night of tense anti-government protests and clashes late Wednesday, a team of Persian exiles toiled in a Los Angeles television studio to encourage revolution against Iran's leaders.
"I want to change things from the inside now (to avoid) Iran being attacked by another country," said former rock star Zia Atabay, who runs Iranian National Television (NITV), a California-based satellite broadcaster.
Since the protests first erupted at Teheran University and spread to other cities, NITV has devoted most of its 24-hour Farsi-language programming to beaming news and political talk shows into Iran's heartland.
Atabay, who has about 33 staff, said protesters were using NITV to help coordinate their efforts by exchanging information on his live phone-in shows that offer an alternative to Iran's strictly-controlled state media.
The station's 16 telephone lines are jammed with up to 60 calls an hour from viewers, mostly in Iran.
Atabay -- who launched NITV as a youth entertainment channel for the Farsi-speaking diaspora after a making a fortune from a plastic surgery business that still finances the operation -- is blunt about his views.
"I tell (the Iranian people) that the regime is over," he said, predicting that with international support for the demonstrators and a western economic blockade, the government could fall within months.
"I tell them that ... if they are sending people to beat you or kill you it's only because they are afraid," he said of the attacks on anti-government protesters by puritanical vigilantes and the arrests of hundreds of demonstrators.
Broadcasting from a former porn studio that now boasts simple hand-painted backdrops and three flimsy-looking sets, NITV has picked up a major following in Iran since it launched in March 2000.
According to Atabay, 61, who fled his homeland after the Shah of Iran was deposed in 1979, NITV reaches millions of Iranians who flout a ban on satellite dishes, although accurate viewership figures are not available.
"Maybe its 20 million, maybe its just one person, but I know that when I say something, there is an immediate effect in Iran," he said citing his call for protesters to spread their efforts from the capital to other cities.
And his programming, coupled with the US government's encouragement of the protests, apparently has Iran's leaders worried, prompting fresh attempts to jam NITV and other unauthorized broadcasters.
"They (Iran's government) think that everything happening there is my fault and that the protesters are just sissies who want to dance," Atabay said referring to the clerics' bans on dancing and pop music.
"They just need freedom, they need to have some fun," said the man who was once known as Iran's Tom Jones.
There are about 600,000 Iranian exiles in Los Angeles, who call the city "Teher-Angeles". NITV is one of about nine stations that beam into into Iran from the city and one of the most stridently anti-regime.
"But we are the most powerful because we bring Iranians truthful news they can trust," said television anchor Noureddine Sabetimani, 61, who is known as Iran's "Peter Jennings."
"People know they can trust me," said Sabetimani, who became Iran's first ever television newscaster in 1965 and fled the country with thousands of countrymen after the shah was toppled.
Now battling to find about 250,000 dollars in monthly costs, NITV started out as an entertainment channel until Teheran began jamming it and eventually forced it off a French satellite.
Furious, Atabay shifted to an intensely political tone, even allowing an actor to do a comic impersonation of Iran's hardline clerics in a recurring skit featuring a rather un-pious character dubbed Mullah Hajji.
"They really loved that," he said dryly of Tehran's furious reaction to the act which earned Atabay death threats. The skit is now off the air.
But while NITV peddles a political line that must delight the administration of President George W. Bush, Atabay insists he receives no funding from the US authorities.
"Sometimes I get a nice letter from the State Department saying, 'You are helping freedom', but that comes cheap -- it only costs them 35 cents," he quipped.
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