Now, We know who Shirzad Bozorgmehr is.....
Then what? Start sending e-mail to CNN Offices?
I think, we should find his contacts in Tehran as well, then we can talk to him directly.
We better hear both sides first till Dr. Nourizadeh give us some new info.
Any Comment?
'Bored' youths signal a discreet social revolution
By Rafael Behr
Published: July 26 2003 5:00 | Last Updated: July 26 2003 5:00
Helicopters buzz over Tehran's residential areas looking for the illegal satellite dishes that many Iranians, sceptical of state-controlled media, stow on balconies, behind flowerpots and between washing lines.
Enforcement of the widely defied ban was stepped up following mainly student-led demonstrations that were reported in dissident newscasts, beamed into Iran by diaspora communities abroad. Although the protests petered out, the broadcasts were seized on by hardliners in the government as evidence that the domestic reform movement was playing into the hands of Washington hawks seeking regime change in Tehran.
But this has little resonance for those most attracted to foreign media - the young and bored. More than half of Iran's population is under 25 years old. Unemployment is 15 per cent and young Iranians bemoan their lack of prospects.
This generation has grown up knowing only the draconian social restrictions of post-revolutionary Iran. Curiosity about all things taboo is in evidence in every internet cafe where teenagers scour the web for material that, while often politically anodyne, is also usually licentious. Pornography and pop music downloads clutter the hard-drives of public computers. Instant messaging services are especially popular.
This leaves young Iranians free to cultivate tastes and relationships that are incompatible with revolutionary ideology and hidden from conservative clerics, traditionally minded parents and police helicopters. The result is a discreet social revolution. "We are already Americanised in our outlook," says one 16-year-old. "We also want regime change."
Changing attitudes are most apparent in Tehran. The city's northern suburbs have cruising grounds where young men and women exchange telephone numbers through car windows as they pass in gridlocked traffic, risking lashes or imprisonment for illicit sexual liaisons.
Drugs and alcohol, long available on the black market, are being used more widely and more openly. Inebriated youths are sometimes seen teetering through Tehran streets, a sight that would have been unthinkable five years ago.
The erosion of traditional values has far outpaced the rise of the political reformers, led by President Mohammed Khatami, whose election in 1997 and renewed mandate in 2001 first raised expectations of social transformation. The reformers are stuck fighting a rearguard action against the conservative clerical establishment, forcing a split in their support between those who want to pursue change through the existing institutions and those who want to abandon the political process altogether. But so far the growing contempt for the Islamic state's social controls has not tipped over into a mass mobilisation demanding political freedoms.
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