Eulogy for Haj Nader Talebzadeh
By Sander Hicks
NewYorkMegaphone.com
Saturday May 7, 2022
I first met Nader Talebzadeh at the New Horizon conference, in Tehran, Iran, in February of 2017. It was like meeting a lion. With his swept-back, longish hair, it was like meeting Aslan, the lion in the Chronicles of Narnia, the lion king who was a symbol of Jesus.
Nader Talebzadeh was so grounded. He was so centered. You could see in his face - he loved God, he loved his life. He loved taking on huge challenges. He loved going after and exposing the world’s biggest secrets, no matter what the cost. He hosted TV programs, and made films. He was an original revolutionary from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. He could tell you stories about how the US Embassy takeover there was utterly spontaneous. And that Ayatollah Khomeini was a bit like Gandhi, in that he told people, stay home, don’t work, stop the economy, and the Shah will leave, without violence, and he did.
But Nader’s most famous contribution to world peace was his international conference, “New Horizon.” Here, he brought together leading U.S., and international dissidents. He flew us into Iran, for speeches, interviews, dialogues, creating a vantage point from which one could see a “New Horizon” beyond the world of war and empire. I would come back into the USA looking over my shoulder, half expecting to be grabbed and questioned about what I had been doing, cavorting with a member of the “Axis of Evil.” I would have said, that I learned a lot about the US war machine and the evil it does in the world.
I know that Nader was blessed by God, because of a little film that he made, in 2007, called The Messiah. He wanted the world to know that Muslims do love Jesus. He told me once, “We do fervently believe in Jesus, and his coming back.”
His Jesus film broke all the rules set by films like “Jesus of Nazareth” and “The Passion of the Christ.” “The Messiah” depicts a revolutionary world, in which the Zealots are in open street combat with the Roman occupation, slingshots versus soldiers, while Jesus is in open conflict with the Pharisees and Temple Establishment. Jesus preaches a direct connection to God, a prophetic form of proto-Islam. He heals people and raises the dead, and builds a huge following. His fame becomes great and people start to call him the “Son of God.” He resists this, vehemently, especially the Romans' tendency to make leaders into gods. When I first saw the film, I was refreshed to see that someone told the Jesus story from the point of view of the Holy Koran. It’s something we don’t get to see too much in the West.
But the second time I saw “The Messiah” something else happened. I realized that Nader Talebzedah’s work is similar to the leading historical Jesus scholar, Bart Ehrman, Ph.D. who has pointed out in many great books and lectures, that the historical Jesus was a fierce prophet who didn’t claim equality with God. Ehrman is not Muslim, but his work seems to coincide sometimes with the Muslim point of view, as it jibes with history and historically verifiable sources.
Ehrman points, for example, that the story of Jesus in the first Gospel we have, the Gospel of Mark. Jesus is a traveling apocalyptic prophet, clashing with the religious authorities, and predicting a great change to come, when God’s justice sets things right. Jesus is all about social justice, feeding the hungry, blessing the peace-makers, teaching a vision of justice for everyone, a spiritual revolution. In Mark, Jesus wasn’t into making himself a God. (And what’s funny, is that in Mark, Jesus’s whole family think that he’s crazy, and are embarrassed by him, and openly beg him to quit the public preaching, but that bit was edited out of later Gospels.)
All of the material about Jesus claiming to be God comes in later Gospels, like John, which were written in Greek, by Christians, for Christians, with an agenda: keep Christianity alive, by any means necessary. Take out the crazy stuff. In modern terms, you could say, the mentality was, adjust the colors of the film, brighten the colors of the picture in post-production, if you have to, and we have to.
I would argue that this was the easy way to establish Christianity - to make Jesus into God, after his lifetime. And unfortunately, this historical skewing diminished the radical message of Jesus. The social justice, equality of all peoples, loving the hated in our society, that revolutionary message was diminished in proportion to how much the early Church gained political power, and formed a theology that declared Jesus one with God, in the Council of Nicea in AD 323-326. Deifying Jesus is not only an affront to Islam, it’s a negation of the social justice message of Jesus himself, the historical Jesus.
I share these thoughts to show how Nader’s film made an impact on my thinking, and understanding of historical realities, truths that form my life here and now. Nader’s work on Jesus is up there with the radical work of people like Father John Dear (author of The Beatitudes of Peace) and Ched Myers (author of Binding the Strongman).
Targeted by USA
The US Government never did appreciate Nader for his unique insights into the life of Jesus. In February of 2019, the US Department of Treasury, under President Trump, instead went after Nader and the New Horizon conference. They attacked him and three other organizers with economic sanctions, which remained in effect up until his death. Sigal Pearl Mandelker and Steven Mnuchin specifically targeted Nader’s international Conference, accusing it of being a dragnet for Iranian intelligence. It was clear that neither of them had ever attended the Conference.
If anything, attending the 2017 and 2018 conferences showed me that it was fast becoming a powerful platform for US dissidents to express criticism of US policy. Two weeks after Nader was sanctioned by US Treasury, he told me in a Zoom interview, he blamed the suppression of the New Horizon Conference on how many US Government former officials he was able to attract. He has starting to host people like former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, and former US State Department diplomatic attache Michael Springmann. Attending the conference afforded ample opportunity to chat with these people informally, in hotel lobbies, waiting in the elevator, a rare chance to have conversations about the deeper reality of the world’s true order of global powers, a chance to hear voices inside the network of veterans of US intelligence, while waiting in line in a faded glitzy Iranian hotel, waiting to for a buffet of lukewarm grilled lamb patties.
The sanctions on Nader seemed like a step towards war on Iran. We tried to do what we could. We interviewed each other and put it on YouTube. On Feb 25, 2019, I convened a special international meeting, “US Citizen Diplomats to Iran” Also in attendance was Dr. Kevin Barrett and J. Michael Springmann, who once had been head of US Visas, at the US Embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Nader Talebazadeh joked, “I never thought we would do a New Horizon conference from New York.” At the time, doing a Zoom meeting seemed like a novelty. But by recording it, the words of Nader live on.
I asked him about the US Treasury’s accusation that the New Horizon conference “propagated anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.”
“We never had Holocaust deniers, we never focussed on this subject, everything that we did is recorded and shown, New Horizon is very transparent, there’s nothing clandestine about it. We are not anti-Semites, I grew up with Jewish classmates from kindergarten in Iran, in an international school in Iran. In every Conference we had, we had two or three or four Jewish participants, Jewish thinkers, the last one you were in, we had Rabbi Weiss in it, we had Miko Paled, who was born in Israel, wrote the book Son of a General, we had Norman Finkelstein. So no, this is untrue, it’s a false charge. These are absurd. They are very harsh and we stand very hard against these statements.
”What the NeoCons have done, they have confiscated truth-speaking, they have hijacked truth-speaking. So we are with you [against] this hijacking. If 9/11 was dissected carefully…a lot of people would find out many other truths, but this is something that has remained camouflaged for many people.”
Nader once told me me believed the Three Kings of the Gospel story were from Persia, so I bought him this print in Puerto Rico, of the Three Kings (Three Magi) and built a frame of walnut in my woodshop, too. This is us in Mashhad, Iran, in 2018.
Six months later, in August of 2019, as Nader began to invite guests to the New Horizon conference, we began to look forward to a trip to Lebanon, as the next conference would be held in Beirut. I began to research the region, and we planned an interfaith pilgrimage to the monastery of a local saint who is revered by both Muslims and Christians: St. Charbel Maklouf. (He died back in 1898 but if you read his book, he sounds like he is speaking to you in today’s words, clear and present.)
We never got to do our interfaith pilgrimage. The FBI instead made a pilgrimage to my house, and the homes of about twenty other Americans, all of whom had been past guests of the New Horizon conference. They threatened dire consequences if we attended the Conference. (I later wrote two letters asking for help from the ACLU, but they were never answered.) The FBI showed me pictures of Nader and some of his co-organizers of the Conference. They handed me a copy of an indictment against a US defector, who now lived in Iran, but that had nothing to do with Nader and New Horizon. It was a confusing and frightening time for a lot of people. People who worked at my carpentry business got scared and quit because of this FBI visit. I lost a major romantic relationship around this time, but hey, if you believe the FBI is always right, maybe you are not the one.
Last week, I drove a rented sportscar through Front Royal, my three year old son yelling at dudes smoking cigarettes, “Hey you are a great guy!” and I feel the spirit of Nader, there, because he lived there, long ago, in that same town in Virginia, in his younger days. He learned English well, he lived with an American family, he got a sense of the magic of Christmas, he got a first-hand understanding of American traditions. I see his face in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the old wise hills of my homeland, Virginia.
In my prayer and meditation space in Brooklyn, on the floor is a yellow and blue vivid rainbow of my Islamic prayer rug. I bought it in Dubai, coming back from Tehran, a magic carpet from a dreamland world, the forbidden place, a place closer to God, the Holy City of Mashhad, the Reza Shrine in the golden dawn of a new day, no jet lag and no sleep, cleaned out and buzzing, praying, seeing a new horizon. I wouldn’t have that prayer mat if Nader the great diplomat hadn’t invited us all to New Horizon.
I regret that I did the grown-up thing, and listened to older wiser people and elected not to attend New Horizon, 2019 in Beirut. I regret that I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. I should have been willing to go to prison for the truth.
On the YouTube videos, Nader says, “God works in very strange ways. Sometimes when you want to limit something, the opposite happens.”
I am grateful to Nader Talebzadeh for attending my own online peace conference, in October 2020, when I wanted to discuss the insanity of the Trump administration, and their imminent steps to escalate against Iran. The way they killed the heroic Iranian superstar general Qassem Soleimani. The way that was justified by the slippery Mike Pompeo. And the sad thing is, of all the freaks and weirdos in the Trump Administration, it was Pompeo who most called himself an “Evangelical Christian.” Well, what of a Christianity of bloodshed, of wars and secret plans, remote-control video game drone warfare and cheap shots? What of it. That Christianity will only push people of truth and peace away from it, and they will go seeking, they will go higher and look for something better.
They will seek for a New Horizon.