Category — Media

The Bahá’í World News Service site now provides an Iran update:

Note: This report, updated regularly, is provided as a service to news media and others desiring details of the situation of the Baha’is in Iran. All information has been verified by the Baha’i International Community.

It’s worth bookmarking.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Baha’i World News Service, Iran, news, human rights

The UK Bahá’í National Spiritual Assembly has just posted a new blog as an outlet for news from the Bahá’í community.

UK Bahá’í News has got off to a good start with several stories about public reactions to last month’s arrests of the Bahá’í leaders in Iran. But the editorial team is planning to cover a wider range of stories from and about the Bahá’ís in the UK and across the world.

Do add it to your links and follow the stories in your newsreaders.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, UK Baha’i News, news

My good friend Tessa Scrine, Executive Officer for Government Relations for the Baha’i community in Australia, gave an excellent interview on ABC Radio National’s The Religion Report on 11th June about the 14th May arrests of the Bahá’í leadership in Iran.

You can pick up the link to the interview here. Once you’ve downloaded the show, you’ll need to start listening at about 11 minutes and 40 seconds into the programme.

And it’s worth listening to the next interview, which is with John Henderson, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, Australian partnership of Religious Organisations.

Go on, have a listen. You know you want to.

My ABC Radio story

Can’t resist telling you this. Some years ago, when I was Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the UK, I was sitting in my office in the Bahá’í Centre in London one afternoon when the phone rang. It was ABC Radio in Australia. They wanted an interview on the situation of the Bahá’ís in Iran.

“Why don’t you call the Bahá’í national office in Australia?’ I asked.

“It’s three o’clock in the morning here,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

“Ah! OK, I’ll do the interview.”

So about an hour later I was hooked up by phone to ABC’s all-night programme for an interview. They’d also got hold of someone from Human Rights Watch in New York. So there we were, a global radio interview masterminded from Sydney. I was really impressed by ABC’s skill and by the quality of their show. The questions were intelligent and the level of discussion was clearly intended for a serious audience - at four o’clock in the morning!

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Iran, human rights, Australia, ABC Radio, Tessa Scrine

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This week’s Reporting Religion on the BBC World Service (25 May 2008) includes an interview with a UK Bahá’í whose cousin is one of the Bahá’í leaders recently arrested in Iran.

On Reporting Religion this week we examine what life is like in Iran if you follow the Baha’i faith. We hear from one woman whose cousin is in jail because she’s a Baha’i. Plus we hear from the BBC’s Religious Affairs Correspondent, Frances Harrison, who explains why Iran takes such a strict stance on Baha’is.

The interview is right at the beginning of the programme. Visit the site and listen soon. Once next week’s programme has been broadcast, this week’s one will be removed.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Iran, arrests, BBC World Service, Reporting Religion, Frances Harrison

Iranians, said Omid Djalili, as he opened the first episode of his new TV show on BBC One, just don’t get British humour:

For you, an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman is a joke. For us, it’s a hostage situation.

Or the Middle Eastern equivalent of the “knock knock” joke: the “floomph floomph” joke. “Floomph floomph”? It’s the sound of someone “knocking” on a tent. No? You’d have to hear Omid tell the joke.

Omid always makes me laugh, even when he recycles some of his favourite gags. Like the one about the middle easterner who wants to show his girlfriend how passionate he is about her. He cuts his wrist and writes a poem for her in his own blood and then forces her to take it.

The show’s format has Omid performing stand-up in front of an enthusiastic live audience; sketches and longer pieces are shown in video inserts. There was a lot of good stuff on the show. My favourite was the sketch about his ethnic bit parts in films and on TV. This is done like one of those serious retrospective arts shows about recently deceased actors, completely deadpan, and showing extracts from various thing Omid’s appeared in as the “general purpose Arab scumbag”.

There was a nicely observed take-off of the Ray Mears-type survival programme. But the jewel in this particular crown was the sketch in which Omid, playing a camp Scottish film director newly out of film school, directs Osama bin Laden in his latest video.

James Rampton interviewed Omid in the Daily Telegraph a few days ago:

Welcome to The Omid Djalili Show, a mixture of sketches and stand-up, and a brave piece of commissioning by the BBC. When it starts on BBC1 tonight, its eponymous star will become the first British-Iranian performer ever to get his own mainstream TV show anywhere in the world.

A brave piece of commissioning by the BBC? Rampton quotes Omid:

“I know I tick a lot of boxes for BBC1,” he says. “I’m aware that it’s very rare to have my voice on a mainstream channel, so I want to make the most of it. Why not give people a different perspective on the Middle East?

“In a way, it’s a political statement just to be a funny person from Iran because people’s expectations in this country are so low. But you can’t be too earnest about it. In the show, I say, ‘All I’ve ever wanted to do is bring world peace through my stand-up’ - at which point, the audience bursts into applause - ’so now that I’ve done that, I’m happy to do other things!’”

Baha’is who watched Omid’s show on BBC 1 may have been as anxious as Steve McClaren watching Israel giving England the ghost of a hope of qualifying for Euro 2008 by beating Russia. Omid’s “our lad on prime-time TV” and there are those amongst us who don’t wholly approve of Omid’s comedy. It’s not quite “Baha’i” enough; it’s “political”; it doesn’t give “the Baha’i message”; it’s too darned rude!

Well, I’ve always taken the view that it’s Omid’s business what he puts into his routines. He may not conform to what some people imagine the “ideal” Baha’i to be, but he knows what makes him tick. It’s not for the Baha’i community to “censor” him either overtly or by covert social pressure.

Of course, I understand the anxiety. Omid is a high profile member of a very small religious minority in the UK. We hope he will choose whatever we think Baha’i moral standards to be, and we want him to make us look good.

But not only does he deal well with sensitive subjects in his comedy, he is also opening doors for Baha’is. Before Omid came to prominence, there can have been very few young Baha’is who would have considered stand-up comedy as a possible choice of profession. There’s a standing joke amongst Baha’is that all Iranian parents in their hearts really want their offspring to be doctors or engineers, or possibly architects. (Yes, I know, you’ve seen that joke applied to people from the Indian Sub-Continent in Goodness Gracious Me. And, yes, I know it’s a stereotype, but there is often some truth in some stereotypes.)

Actually, despite this desire for respectability, there’s a strong tradition of Iranian Baha’is in the arts - and that goes back to the early days of our faith. But stand-up as the new rock’n'roll is very much a late 20th century/early 21st century phenomenon - and Omid pioneered a route into this profession for Baha’is, a route along which one or two other young Baha’is (such as Inder Manocha) are travelling.

I’m looking forward to the next episode of Omid’s show.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, Omid Djalili, comedy, stand-up, BBC

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It was great to see an op-ed piece by Bani Dugal, the Baha’i International Community’s Principal Representative to the UN, in last Thursday’s Jerusalem Post.

Entitled “Raising children of light”, Bani’s article shows what a threatening and deadly place the world is for so many of the world’s children:

To a child, the world must seem like a confused and perilous place. One need only to sit and watch the grim scenes unfold on television: hundreds of thousands of Sudanese children and mothers huddled together in refugee camps - their worn faces and bodies a testament to the rape and pillage they have survived. Or footage of mothers and children foraging for food in famine-racked North Korea. Or images of children in Southeast Asia, many infected with AIDS, sold to traffickers and living in slave-like conditions.

For many children, these scenes loom just outside the door. As mothers, what do we say to our children? How do we explain the seemingly ceaseless, senseless abuse, violence and killing? How do we do so truthfully and, at the same time, impart hope for a better future?

She then sets out what we - particularly mothers - can and must do to “impart hope for a better future”.

WHAT ACTIONS, then, can help our children become beacons of light? I would begin by helping them to understand the idea of connectedness - connectedness to their family, their community, their environment and the world. Over the past century, our lived experiences, coupled with scientific and social advances, have gradually broken down the barriers that once compartmentalized our world and its people.

We know that girls and women have the same rights as boys and men and that the oppression of girls and women contributes to the breakdown of communities. We know that, despite sinister notions of racial superiority, we are part of one human race. We know that our commercial activity has a direct and negative impact on our environment and our health.

In other words, there is no “us” and “them,” there is only “us.” This is what I want to teach my children.

Read the whole article. It’s quite short, but thought-provoking and encouraging.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, children, unity, oneness

In an earlier post, I said I’d taken part in a podcast for the Methodist Church of Great Britain’s Month of Prayer for Inter Faith Relations (which was February).

Well, it is now on the Methodist website here.

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Methodist, podcast, prayer, interfaith

I went to Methodist Church House in London this afternoon to be interviewed by Anna Drew for the monthly podcast that is downloadable from Methodist Web Radio. The Methodist Church is holding a month of prayer for inter faith relations and the podcast is part of that month.

Anna had looked at one or more Baha’i websites, had googled me and had visited my blog, so had a good idea of sensible questions to ask. I had good opportunities to explain some of the basic teachings of the Faith and to say why inter faith work is important for Baha’is.

Anna told me that Elizabeth Harris, who does an excellent job as the Methodist Church

Two British comedians who happen to be Baha’is (or, if you are a Baha’i: two British Baha’is who happen to be comedians) are becoming ever more visible in the media.

Omid Djalili was one of a number of people (including ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon) who gave their views on The Meaning of Life recently on BBC1 TV. I particularly loved his description of himself in the church choir, imagining himself to be tall and handsome, but in reality being fat and sweaty. In the last of this three-part series he gave a wonderfully simple and accurate description of the Baha’i belief about the nature of God.

Omid has clearly made it, since he has an entry all to himself on Wikipedia and he’s been commissioned to do new a one-man series on BBC1. This is a quote from Omid’s website:

After a successful pilot, Omid has been commissioned to do a six-part stand-up series for BBC1 (UK),

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Omid Djalili’s face is everywhere in London right now. Our famous Baha’i stand-up comedian and actor has a major tour on at the moment, and tour posters are all over London.

Omid Djalili’s tour poster almost opposite Harrods on London’s Brompton Road.

Technorati Tags: Omid Djalili, Baha’i, stand-up, comedian, Harrods

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