Father jailed in Iran for son’s Facebook posts

Yashar Khameneh and his father

 

Yashar Khameneh, a 25-year-old Iranian student living in Holland, is receiving international attention for his efforts to release his father from a Tehran prison over the younger Khameneh’s satirical Facebook posting about a revered Muslim cleric. The posting first appeared on someone else’s site, but Khameneh also put some satirical posts on his own site, which led Iranian authorities to his family, this year, after a rapper made fun of the same cleric.

His father called him at the end of May to tell him that agents of Iran’s intelligence wanted access information for the Facebook pages with the intent of removing the offensive material. While Khameneh closed down his personal site, he could not get the satire site to remove his material. The next day, his mother and sister called him to say that his father had been imprisoned and would remain in jail until the post was removed and that’s where things stand.

Shahin Najafi, an Iranian rapper based in Germany last month became known as “the Salman Rushdie of music” after clerics in the Islamic republic issued fatwas calling him an apostate, which is considered punishable by death under sharia law. He had released a song with references to the imam.

Read more about the arrest