Stiffing the Revolutionaries

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images Obama may be cutting off money for groups that promote democracy for Iran, but Reza Aslan says he and most other young Iranians struggling for change there are glad the U.S. is keeping its measly $85 million.

In 2006, after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Congress to transfer $85 million into the Iran Democracy Fund to, as she put it, “promote political change inside Iran” (translation: bring down the Iranian regime), I made a visit to the plush offices of National Iranian Television (NITV) in Los Angeles to find out how some of the tens of millions of dollars the U.S. had been giving to various Iranian dissident and human-rights groups was being spent.

NITV is one of a dozen Persian satellite stations that broadcast from poorly lit and garishly furnished studios in Westwood and Beverly Hills—a region California’s huge Iranian Diaspora refers to as “Tehrangeles”—into millions of households across Iran. Such stations have already received millions of dollars in American taxpayers' money and would stand to benefit even more from the media propaganda campaign that was being developed by the Bush administration.

Inside the studios of NITV, I met with the station’s founder, Zia Atabay, an Iranian-American businessman and former pop star in pre-revolutionary Iran. With his broad, regal forehead, penetrating eyes, and startlingly black toupee, Atabay is an intimidating figure. He told me he had initially begun NITV as a business venture, but quickly recognized that he had a powerful stage on which to incite revolution and regime change in Iran.

“I want to show [Iranians] that their country is a prison,” he told me in his reserved yet booming voice.

Many of the people the Iran Democracy Fund was supposed to support—the human-rights activists and democracy promoters toiling inside Iran—wholeheartedly welcomed Obama’s decision.

Satellite dishes are technically forbidden in Iran, but even the poorest neighborhoods swarm with shiny white disks jutting from rooftops or tucked into gardens. Every once in a while, the authorities make a sweep of the cities, collecting the dishes and fining their owners. It only takes a day or so for the dishes to crop up again. Often, they are sold back to their previous owners by the authorities who confiscated them in the first place.

The dilemma for most Iranians is that the country’s national television is so mind-numbingly dull, so insufferably pedantic, and so rife with propaganda as to be virtually unwatchable. Not surprisingly, satellite stations have become the sole outlet in Iran for quality Persian-language entertainment.

The stations provide the most wildly eclectic programming, blending a steady stream of news, political talk, music videos, and advice programs designed to feed on the nationalism and nostalgia of disaffected Iranians. As I sat in Atabay’s offices, talking about Iran, I kept a furtive eye on the live feed from the NITV studio. A serious political talk show with a group of former monarchists and political exiles had just given way to a music video featuring a hairy-chested young Iranian-American pop star crooning a vacuous love song while grinding on two scantily clad girls in an L.A. nightclub.

Atabay makes no apologies for his station’s programming. On the contrary, he makes it quite clear that his goal is to tempt Iran’s youth with the frills of American freedom so that they will rise up and topple the clerical regime.

“They want to live like you in America,” Atabay said of young Iranians. “They want to live like European young people. And when they see the free world through us—through television, and radio, and other networks—how other young people can wear whatever they want, do whatever they want to do… they will start fighting for their freedom.”

• Gary Sick: Inside Iran’s Intimidation Campaign

• Michael Adler: Iran’s Shell Game With millions of viewers inside Iran, satellite stations like NITV wield enormous influence. And yet conversations with the young Iranians who view these stations yield expressions of gratitude (“I love the new Mansour video!”) mixed with utter contempt, even mockery, of the anti-Islamic republic propaganda the stations offer. It is not that these young Iranians do not loathe their regime as much as the Zia Atabays of the world do. The thought of risking their lives to bring down a brutal regime because a millionaire Iranian living in a mansion in Beverly Hills told them to do so is too laughable to be taken seriously.