by Stephen Schwartz
The Weekly Standard Blog
February 11, 2011
http://www.islamicpluralism.org/1711/iran-conspiracy-industry
…. The roster of hallucinated claims in Secrets 4 is long. Aside from its previously mentioned targets, the series assails the Brazilian pop-mystic novelist Paulo Coelho, whose novels were suppressed in Iran in January. To the rest of the world Tehran‘s action against Coelho was inexplicable, though Coelho reported that his Iranian editor, Arash Hejazi, had been videotaped, during the climactic anti-regime demonstrations of 2009, trying to save the life of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman killed while participating in an anti-Ahmadinejad protest in Tehran. Agha-Soltan’s death became a global symbol of the Iranian democracy movement.
Coelho responded to the Iranian ban by placing the Farsi editions of his books online as free downloads, and most of the Western reading public saw the Iranian prohibition on such innocuous works as yet another example of the arbitrary actions of the clerical dictatorship. Episode 25 of Secrets 4 provided, however, a detailed explanation for the abrupt action against the Latin American author. Coelho is one of more than 160 members of the International Board of Governors of the Peres Foundation for Peace, established by Israel’s former president Shimon Peres in 1996. In addition, according to the Iranian program, Peres praised Coelho in a session of the Davos World Economic Forum a decade ago, which to a public of Ahmadinejad fanatics, is sufficient condemnation in itself. For Iranian conspiracy theorists, such “connections” are gold….
The Gaze of The Gazelle 
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