Free Republic

Akbar Ganji, Iran's most outstanding dissident, is in renewed danger. LAST March, during the Persian New Year holiday, Akbar Ganji, Iran's best-known political prisoner, was cracking jokes into his mobile phone at the edge of the Iranian desert. Chubby from festive dishes of polov (rice, often with lamb) and delighted to be surrounded by his family, he showered this correspondent's two-year-old son with kisses before speeding off to keep an appointment with a dissident ayatollah and return to Tehran's Evin prison by the end of his holiday probation. Nine months on, he is a sick man, severely weakened by the...

It all started as a rather pleasant, if not exciting evening. We had heard a speech from British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw once again trying to "explain" the evil of Islamofascim in pseudo-theological, rather than political, terms. But that had been compensated for with a poem from the great mystic poet Roumi recited by Iranian journalist Nazanin Ansari. Apart from the usual contingent of "the great and the good" most of the 800 or so people present were media people and their friends, come to cheer or boo as the Foreign Press Association in London distributed its annual prizes. The...