Donate
Follow TFF
Facebook-f X-twitter Linkedin-in Tiktok Telegram Weixin Vk
Archive 1986 - 2017
Farhang Jahanpour, Jan Oberg
Selected links to a better understanding of Iran

. There are literally hundreds of websites that one could list but we have put together some of the ones that we find to be the most useful and that we regularly consult ourselves. They range from the media run by the Iranian government, as well as the BBC Persian, VOA in Persian, some opposition websites and one on Iranian music and the massive Encyclopaedia Iranica; further there are some dailies and agencies, sites with political analyses sites and some video documentaries.

We sincerely hope this you’ll find something useful in this collection. Please share this page with anybody who wishes to know more about Iran. And let’s emphasise that the best way to learn about Iran is to go there and see for yourself.

Al-Monitor Iran Pulse

IRNA – Islamic Republic News Agency

Iran Review
It is a web site, which calls itself “leading independent, non-governmental and non-partisan website.” It provides translations of articles by some leading Iranian journalists and political analysts, and some of them are very informative and thought provoking.

Payvand
It is a website run by Iranian-Americans but is generally non-partisan and publishes good articles about Iran, some pro-Iranian government and some opposed to it. The articles provide good information about some of the leading current developments in Iran.

Campaigns Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII)
This is a website run by a professor of computer studies at the University of London. It defines itself as follows: “CASMII is independent of all political groups and governments, including the Iranian government, and does not adhere to any particular religion or ideology. We strive to bring together the broadest possible spectrum of forces, on the basis of democratic principles and decision making structures.” However, it tends to publish articles that are generally-speaking pro-Iranian government and in any case opposed to military action or sanctions against Iran.

Press TV
PressTV is the official English language TV station of the Islamic Republic of Iran and naturally takes a pro-Iranian stance in most of its reporting. Its satellite channel beamed to Europe was banned as part of the sanctions against Iran, but it is available online.

BBC Persian Television
This is the website of the BBC Persian broadcasting to Iran. The station is very popular in Iran and allegedly it is watched by close to 10 million people there. It played a major role in providing publicity for the Green Movement following 2009 election, and generally has some very interesting programs, backed by BBC’s vast resources. The television could be watched live online and some of its major programs are recorded and could be watched for up to a week or more later. The website also publishes some interesting articles.

Voice of America in Persian
VOA has become a major source of news about Iran, with interviews with a large number of leading Iranian politicians, mainly the ones living abroad. Apparently it has a large following in Iran, and while some of its programs are quite factual, it clearly covers Iranian issues from an American point of view.

BBC Monitoring
This is the website of BBC Monitoring. It publishes a large number of translations of Persian radio and television broadcasts, as well as Iranian papers, and it also published a number of regular analyses on various political issues connected with Iran. It is available only to the subscribers

Open Source Center
This is the website of Open Source Center, an American version of the BBC Monitoring. It also publishes a large number of Iranian articles from various newspapers, as well as Iranian broadcasts, on a daily basis. This source is also available only to the subscribers

Gooya
This website provides a very useful list of Iranian news agencies, newspapers and radio and television stations. Some of the sources are in English and some in Persian. It provides links to all the leading Iranian news agencies, such as IRNA (Islamic Republic News Agency), ISNA (Iranian Students News Agency), ILNA (Iranian Labour News Agency), the hardline news agencies such as Raja News Agency, etc. For those who wish to follow Iranian news on a daily basis this is an invaluable source.

Jahan News
Jahan News is one of the better websites run by Iranian opposition groups. It covers Iranian reports, sometime quite factually, but some of its leading articles and stances are critical of Iranian government, but a useful source of alternative information about Iran.

Khodnevis
This is a leading opposition website close to the Green Movement. It provides comprehensive cover of Iranian news, but also publishes articles that are critical of the current Iranian government.

Alef website
– is a political, economic and cultural website that is run by Ahmad Tavakkoli, who is the director of research at the Iranian Parliament (the Majles). This website is particularly useful for learning about relations between the parliament and the government.

Iranian.Com
This is run by Iranian-Americans. It provides good coverage of Iranian issues, including political, as well as cultural, social and artistic issues. The tone of the articles varies in keeping with the authors, but on the whole is critical of the Iranian government.

Golha
Interested in poetry and music? Golha is a wonderful website that has collected a large number of classical Persian poetry accompanied by Persian music, produced by SOAS, the British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS), the Iran Heritage Foundation IIHF) and Parsa Foundation. The songs include the programs covering 250 poets from the classical period to the present time, and 1400 radio programs broadcast on Iranian national radio from 1956-1979. For those who like classical Persian music this website gives them hours and hours of enjoyment.

Encyclopaedia Iranica
This is the website of , a massive work in dozens of volumes, concentrating on issues related to Iran. It is an invaluable source for research on Iran.

Fars News Agency

Al-Monitor

Tehran Times

IRD

Foundation for Dialogue among Civilisations

Iranian News Daily

Iran Herald

Scandinavian Society for Iranian Studies

Videos

Documentary – Iran Yesterday and Today by Rick Steves

Documentary – Diego Bunuel in Iran (Part 1-7)

IranGeo


TFF Vimeo Channel

Subscribe to TFF PressInfo here.

Former Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Languages, University of Isfahan; former lecturer at Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford universities; retired Editor for Middle East and North Africa, BBC Monitoring.

View all posts by Farhang Jahanpour →

Peace & future researcher + ‌Art Photographer

View all posts by Jan Oberg →

Share

Archive 1986 - 2017Media perspectivesPro-peaceproposalsSecurity and defence

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts

Archive 1986 - 2017
Kasturba: a life – Book Review
Gandhi, Arun. Lord Richard Attenborough. Kasturba: a lifeNew Delhi: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000.315 pp, 295 Indian Rs, US $22.51 January 29, 2002 Arun Gandhi, grandson to Mohandas and Kasturba, has written a thorough account of Kasturba’s life. Arun begins with a description of Kasturba’s childhood in Porbandar in the late1800s, before she met Mohandas. By having chosen to embark on difficult research into his grandmother’s life, including her first years which are not well-documented, Arun ensures that the reader receives an intimate and life-long portrait of this amazing woman. Kasturba is presented as a lively woman &endash; obedient, yet with a mind of her own. As the relationship between Kasturba and Mohandas developed, Arun maintains that Kasturba’s influence over Mohandas in her own quiet way also grew, to which some of Mohandas’ writings also attest.  Arun paints a vivid picture of the beginnings of Mohandas’ non-violence movement in South Africa, a...
Archive 1986 - 2017
The People Power Revolution in the Philippines: Lessons Learned for the Twenty-first Century
In response to an urgent Appeal from all the living Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, the General Assembly of the United Nations, on November 1998, unanimously declared the first decade of the twenty-first century to be The Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence. While people are naturally concerned about the amount of violence in our world and how it threatens our future, the Nobel Laureates are right to remind us of the potential of nonviolence and our calling to build a culture of peace and nonviolence.  The twentieth century is instructive in the way that the philosophy and practice of nonviolence have begun to flourish and in the way that nonviolent movements have had an exponential growth across the world. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are the most famous nonviolent leaders but many have built upon the paths they charted as in country after country, tyrannies and...
Archive 1986 - 2017
Doctors and Torture
We know that medical personnel have failed to report to higher authorities wounds that were clearly caused by torture and that they have neglected to take steps to interrupt this torture. In addition, they have turned over prisoners’ medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the prisoners’ weaknesses or vulnerabilities. We have not yet learned the extent of medical involvement in delaying and possibly falsifying the death certificates of prisoners who have been killed by torturers. A May 22 article on Abu Ghraib in the New York Times states that “much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents” and that records and statements “showed doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.” http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080604J.shtml#16 According to the article, two doctors who...

Recent Articles

Archive 1986 - 2017
Kasturba: a life – Book Review
Gandhi, Arun. Lord Richard Attenborough. Kasturba: a lifeNew Delhi: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000.315 pp, 295 Indian Rs, US $22.51 January 29, 2002 Arun Gandhi, grandson to Mohandas and Kasturba, has written a thorough account of Kasturba’s life. Arun begins with a description of Kasturba’s childhood in Porbandar in the late1800s, before she met Mohandas. By having chosen to embark on difficult research into his grandmother’s life, including her first years which are not well-documented, Arun ensures that the reader receives an intimate and life-long portrait of this amazing woman. Kasturba is presented as a lively woman &endash; obedient, yet with a mind of her own. As the relationship between Kasturba and Mohandas developed, Arun maintains that Kasturba’s influence over Mohandas in her own quiet way also grew, to which some of Mohandas’ writings also attest.  Arun paints a vivid picture of the beginnings of Mohandas’ non-violence movement in South Africa, a...
Archive 1986 - 2017
The People Power Revolution in the Philippines: Lessons Learned for the Twenty-first Century
In response to an urgent Appeal from all the living Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, the General Assembly of the United Nations, on November 1998, unanimously declared the first decade of the twenty-first century to be The Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence. While people are naturally concerned about the amount of violence in our world and how it threatens our future, the Nobel Laureates are right to remind us of the potential of nonviolence and our calling to build a culture of peace and nonviolence.  The twentieth century is instructive in the way that the philosophy and practice of nonviolence have begun to flourish and in the way that nonviolent movements have had an exponential growth across the world. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are the most famous nonviolent leaders but many have built upon the paths they charted as in country after country, tyrannies and...
Archive 1986 - 2017
Doctors and Torture
We know that medical personnel have failed to report to higher authorities wounds that were clearly caused by torture and that they have neglected to take steps to interrupt this torture. In addition, they have turned over prisoners’ medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the prisoners’ weaknesses or vulnerabilities. We have not yet learned the extent of medical involvement in delaying and possibly falsifying the death certificates of prisoners who have been killed by torturers. A May 22 article on Abu Ghraib in the New York Times states that “much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents” and that records and statements “showed doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.” http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080604J.shtml#16 According to the article, two doctors who...

TFF on Substack

Discover more from TFF Transnational Foundation & Jan Oberg.

Posts
Videos

Most Popular

Archive 1986 - 2017
Kasturba: a life – Book Review
Gandhi, Arun. Lord Richard Attenborough. Kasturba: a lifeNew Delhi: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000.315 pp, 295 Indian Rs, US $22.51 January 29, 2002 Arun Gandhi, grandson to Mohandas and Kasturba, has written a thorough account of Kasturba’s life. Arun begins with a description of Kasturba’s childhood in Porbandar in the late1800s, before she met Mohandas. By having chosen to embark on difficult research into his grandmother’s life, including her first years which are not well-documented, Arun ensures that the reader receives an intimate and life-long portrait of this amazing woman. Kasturba is presented as a lively woman &endash; obedient, yet with a mind of her own. As the relationship between Kasturba and Mohandas developed, Arun maintains that Kasturba’s influence over Mohandas in her own quiet way also grew, to which some of Mohandas’ writings also attest.  Arun paints a vivid picture of the beginnings of Mohandas’ non-violence movement in South Africa, a...
Archive 1986 - 2017
The People Power Revolution in the Philippines: Lessons Learned for the Twenty-first Century
In response to an urgent Appeal from all the living Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, the General Assembly of the United Nations, on November 1998, unanimously declared the first decade of the twenty-first century to be The Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence. While people are naturally concerned about the amount of violence in our world and how it threatens our future, the Nobel Laureates are right to remind us of the potential of nonviolence and our calling to build a culture of peace and nonviolence.  The twentieth century is instructive in the way that the philosophy and practice of nonviolence have begun to flourish and in the way that nonviolent movements have had an exponential growth across the world. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are the most famous nonviolent leaders but many have built upon the paths they charted as in country after country, tyrannies and...
Archive 1986 - 2017
Doctors and Torture
We know that medical personnel have failed to report to higher authorities wounds that were clearly caused by torture and that they have neglected to take steps to interrupt this torture. In addition, they have turned over prisoners’ medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the prisoners’ weaknesses or vulnerabilities. We have not yet learned the extent of medical involvement in delaying and possibly falsifying the death certificates of prisoners who have been killed by torturers. A May 22 article on Abu Ghraib in the New York Times states that “much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents” and that records and statements “showed doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.” http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080604J.shtml#16 According to the article, two doctors who...
Read More
Imagen-thumbnail-The-Transnational-1
Archive 1986 - 2017
Kasturba: a life – Book Review
Gandhi, Arun. Lord Richard Attenborough. Kasturba: a lifeNew Delhi: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000.315 pp, 295 Indian Rs, US $22.51 January 29, 2002 Arun Gandhi, grandson to Mohandas and Kasturba, has written a thorough account of Kasturba’s life. Arun begins with a description of Kasturba’s childhood in Porbandar in the late1800s, before she met Mohandas. By having chosen to embark on difficult research into his grandmother’s life, including her first years which are not well-documented, Arun ensures that the reader receives an intimate and life-long portrait of this amazing woman. Kasturba is presented as a lively woman &endash; obedient, yet with a mind of her own. As the relationship between Kasturba and Mohandas developed, Arun maintains that Kasturba’s influence over Mohandas in her own quiet way also grew, to which some of Mohandas’ writings also attest.  Arun paints a vivid picture of the beginnings of Mohandas’ non-violence movement in South Africa, a...
Imagen-thumbnail-The-Transnational-1
Archive 1986 - 2017
The People Power Revolution in the Philippines: Lessons Learned for the Twenty-first Century
In response to an urgent Appeal from all the living Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, the General Assembly of the United Nations, on November 1998, unanimously declared the first decade of the twenty-first century to be The Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence. While people are naturally concerned about the amount of violence in our world and how it threatens our future, the Nobel Laureates are right to remind us of the potential of nonviolence and our calling to build a culture of peace and nonviolence.  The twentieth century is instructive in the way that the philosophy and practice of nonviolence have begun to flourish and in the way that nonviolent movements have had an exponential growth across the world. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are the most famous nonviolent leaders but many have built upon the paths they charted as in country after country, tyrannies and...
Imagen-thumbnail-The-Transnational-1
Archive 1986 - 2017
Doctors and Torture
We know that medical personnel have failed to report to higher authorities wounds that were clearly caused by torture and that they have neglected to take steps to interrupt this torture. In addition, they have turned over prisoners’ medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the prisoners’ weaknesses or vulnerabilities. We have not yet learned the extent of medical involvement in delaying and possibly falsifying the death certificates of prisoners who have been killed by torturers. A May 22 article on Abu Ghraib in the New York Times states that “much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents” and that records and statements “showed doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.” http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080604J.shtml#16 According to the article, two doctors who...
Imagen-thumbnail-The-Transnational-1
Archive 1986 - 2017
1. Internationale konflikter -familiestrid eller magtpolitik?
Jan Øberg behandler i artiklen en lang række faktorer, som ligger til grund for den måde vores samfund er organiseret på – og derfor også for konflikter. Artiklen introducerer således sammenhængen mellem familien, foreninger, regeringer, NGO’ er, nation, stat, nationalstat og alliancer for på denne måde bedre at kunne forstå konflikter og i sidste ende blive klogere mht. at løse disse. Øberg, der er fortaler for global bevidsthed, hvilket skal ses i lyset af den øgede globalisering, skelner mellem kulturkamp og kulturdialog. Endelig behandles begrebet magt og magtesløshed: giver magt ret til at udøve magt – fordi man mener at have ret? Litteraturliste og arbejdsspørgsmål efter artiklen. Ordene vi bruger om verden I satellitperspektiv kan man godt tale om den menneskelige familie eller menneskeheden. Udtrykket understreger, at der eksisterer – eller burde eksistere – et fællesskab fordi vi alle er mennesker og sammen bebor denne klode og ingen anden. Og...
Imagen-thumbnail-The-Transnational-1
Archive 1986 - 2017
4. Forholdet Europe – USA # 3
Kapitel 2: Forskellige sider af Europa og USA…fortsat 2.5 Militære relationer I forbifarten har vi allerede sagt nogle ting om USA’s militære situation. Kig lige en gang til på afsnit 2.3. Nu skal vi uddybe det militære forhold mellem USA og EU. Der er en række ligheder mellem visse europæiske landes og USA’s militær. Næsten alle er med på en eller anden måde i NATO, direkte som medlem – selv Island, der ikke har et forsvar – eller indirekte i Partnerskab for Fred. USA og Canada er med i OSCE (på dansk OSSE), Organisationen for Sikkerhed og Samarbejde i Europa, der tæller over 50 lande. USA samt England og Frankrig er kernevåbenstater og de har styrker til intervention langt borte fra hjemlandet, om end USA’s er tifold større. Alle har også en omfattende våbeneksport og bruger den som et middel til at tjene penge og få loyale venner på, det...
Imagen-thumbnail-The-Transnational-1
Archive 1986 - 2017
Mission Report TFF’s Second Mission to Burundi November 2003. With Co-Operation Agreement
Background Christian Harleman and Jan Oberg conducted a fact-finding mission to Burundi between November 26 and December 6, 2003. (See websites about the country here). The first TFF mission took place in March 1999. Unfortunately, since then it has not been practically possible to implement the co-operation with Burundi’s Ministry of Education and Burundian NGOs that was planned at the time. The 2003 mission had three purposes. First, to do fact-finding in general about the situation and, in particular, the progress under the Arusha Peace Process. Second, to explore the possibilities for co-operation between the government and relevant NGOs on the one hand and TFF on the other, in order to develop and deepen the existing competence in fields such as conflict-understanding, reconciliation and peace-building. Finally, third, to find out whether it would be possible, in co-operation with the Swedish Rescue Services Agency (Statens Räddningsverk), to establish a health care unit that...