Now here’s a story that looks decidedly murky. The Jerusalem Post reports that Hossein Derakhshan, a leading Iranian blogger, has been arrested in Tehran on charges of spying for Israel.

The Post report was based, in turn, upon an item from Iran’s Jahan News, picked up by Israel-based Middle East analyst Meir Javedanfar. Javedanfar writes:

“Jahan news talks about Hossein’s participation in a number of conferences in Israel. It says that Haaretz news paper described him as a friend of Israel. It then quotes Jerusalem Post and Haaretz as saying that Hossein had described Israel as a model of democracy, and that the Israeli and Turkish system of governance, and participation of religion in government was a good model for Iran.

It then goes on to say that Hossein had a picture in Jerusalem post under which he said ‘I want to humanise Israel for Iranians and to tell them that Israel is not thirsty for blood of Muslims, as propaganda from the Islamic Republic says.’”

Derakhshan, who appears to have lived in both Canada and the UK prior to his recent return to Iran, visited Israel twice in 2006 and 2007. On each occasion, he was interviewed by the Jerusalem Post. In 2006, he sounded friendly and upbeat, talking animatedly about the Canadian-Israeli friend who enabled his trip and advocating relations between Israel and Iran. The warmth was still there in 2007, along with some barbed criticisms of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but he was also more careful to sound like a patriot, accusing the western media of deliberately misrepresenting Iran and announcing that he would fight for his country in the event of war with the US.

And it seems that he has been following that train of thought ever since. Meir Javedanfar notes that after his second trip to Israel, Derakhshan “started becoming vehemently anti-Israel in his blog. He also became a strong supporter of President Ahmadinejad and condemned Akbar Ganji (a leading pro-democracy journalist) and Ramin Jahanbegloo (a prominent academic arrested in 2006) for being ‘pro regime change.’”

Derakhshan’s recent output is certainly in this vein. Interviewed by the English-language, Holocaust denial outfit Press TV after Ahmadinejad’s visit to the UN in New York in September, he declared that “the Israel lobby is panicking” because Iran had managed to convince world opinion that “Iran is not making weapons, Iran is not threatening any country, even Israel.” When Ahmadinejad talked about Israel’s disappearance, he continued, this was a “prediction, not a prescription, that Israel will collapse.”

Blogging at the Washington Post’s PostGlobal site, Derakhshan denounced Zainab al-Suwaij of the American Islamic Congress as a puppet of the US government. Her participation in an Amnesty International event supporting yet another group of scholars and activists imprisoned in Iran led him to “wonder how Zainab Al-Suwaij has ended up being endorsed by Amnesty International, with its impressive history to oppose the US invasion of Iraq and its condemnation of the occupation. Call me a cynic or a paranoid agent of the Islamic Republic, but I can’t just see all these connections and endorsements as an accident. There is something fishy here, don’t you think?”

And on his own blog - which hasn’t been updated for six weeks - Derakhshan hailed Ahmadinejad’s “brilliant strategy of dismissing Israel and smiling to the U.S…Please get over Ahmadinejad’s scruffy look, prayers, and plain language and see these achievements.” What makes these views particularly interesting is that they ascribe Ahmadinejad a degree of power which, as Derakhshan correctly noted in his 2007 Jerusalem Post interview, he doesn’t really have. “He has no control over the army, no control over the state media,” Derakhshan said then. “And it is (Supreme Leader Ali) Khamenei who chooses the three key ministers - foreign, intelligence and oil.”

So the fact that Derakhshan’s arrest has now been reported suggests that, in his own phrase, “there is something fishy here.” Meir Javedanfar thinks that he is the victim of a power struggle inside Iran. Maybe the mullahs just didn’t like the fact that he clearly enjoyed himself at Amsterdam’s Paradiso Club. Or perhaps it was the inconsistencies he uttered in public which landed him in trouble - in democracies, frequently changing your mind makes you a figure of fun at worst, but in repressive regimes like Iran, doing that can get you tortured or killed.

And that is the reason we should all be concerned for Hossein Derakhshan. Anyone who cares about freedom of speech should be urgently contacting Iranian diplomatic representatives, making sure they know the report of Derakhshan’s arrest is out, and demanding that he be treated decently and humanely. As to the espionage charges, the Iranians have a habit of throwing these around - one of the few things the regime does liberally. We should assume Derakhshan’s innocence and insist upon his release.

Update: There are opinions galore in the comments here. Some commenters are even suggesting that Derakhshan’s arrest could be a weird publicity stunt. Let’s hope, tasteless and stupid as such a stunt would be, that is the case - there are enough people who have been inside Iran’s prisons to know how brutal and
ghastly they are.