June 28, 2003	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 27,1424

LOS ANGELES: “Good morning, Iran,” says Zia Atabay, a former Iranian pop star who fled Iran after the 1979 revolution. “And good evening, America.”

It is 9am in Tehran, 9pm in Los Angeles. The previous evening, Iranian demonstrators roamed the streets of Tehran, shouting, “Down with the mullahs.” From a makeshift television studio halfway around the world, Atabay is urging people to join the protests — and news reports from Iran suggest the appeal is striking a chord.

“If you don’t act now, the regime will be around for a long time,” he shouts into the television camera, as a telephone console on his desk flickers with calls from Iran.

A quarter-century after exiled Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini undermined the Shah of Iran by flooding the country with audiotapes of his fiery sermons, a new generation of Iranian exiles is seeking to emulate his feat. Their goal is to use modern-day communications technology — radio stations, the Internet, cell phones, and, above all, satellite television — to bring down Khomeini’s successors.

When Khomeini began his revolution, he was living in a small town outside Paris. His audiotapes were smuggled into Iran, where they were copied and distributed through a network of religious leaders and mosques.

The epicenter of the new Iranian information revolution is Los Angeles, home to about 600,000 Iranian Americans and a dozen privately owned Persian-language television and radio stations, beamed live by satellite into millions of Iranian homes.

The rebellion on the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities comes at a time when the Bush administration has stepped up its criticism of the country’s religious leaders for allegedly developing nuclear weapons and providing shelter to members of the Al Qaeda network. While US officials have voiced strong rhetorical support for the aspirations of the Iranian democracy movement, they deny exercizing any influence over the Los Angeles-based television and radio stations, and have declined to support congressional attempts to fund their operations.

While some administration officials, particularly in the Pentagon, have argued in favour of a more active policy of undermining the Tehran government, others are skeptical of the exile groups’ ability to trigger a revolution back home. They say the exiles lack a charismatic leader. Their most prominent spokesman is Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah, who lives in Falls Church, Va. In the eyes of many Iranians, however, Pahlavi is tainted by the excesses of his father’s rule.

None of the criticism fazes Atabay, who has sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars from his wife’s plastic surgery business into National Iranian TV (NITV), and is described by friends as an Iranian mixture of Pat Boone and Jerry Springer.

His dream, he said, is to become head of Iranian state television after the fall of the Islamic government.

“If the Iranian regime falls, I will have a good business,” he said with a laugh. “But if it doesn’t fall in the next five months, I will go bankrupt.”

One measure of the influence of the Los Angeles-based TV and radio stations has been the angry reaction of the Iranian government. Former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani used one of his Friday prayer sermons to urge Iranians “not to be trapped by the evil television networks that Americans have established.”—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.