Nader Talebzadeh hosted hot debates on Iranian TV shows, and made films on the front lines of wars.
He was an active participant in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Ayatollah Khomeini was a bit like Gandhi, he said, in that he told people, Stay home, dont work, stop the economy, and the Shah will leave, without violence, and he did.
He told me stories about how the US Embassy takeover there was utterly spontaneous.
He made it sound like something from Occupy Wall Street.Naders contribution to world peace was his international conference, called New Horizon.
Here, he annually brought together American and international dissidents.
His team flew us into Iran, for speeches, interviews, dialogue, creating a vantage point from which one could see a new kind of horizon beyond war and empire.
It was a chance to see Middle East politics up close, and to see how much Iran wanted to help the people of Palestine.
I participated in Tehran in 2017, and then in the shrine city of Mashhad, in 2018.
I wanted to come to New Horizon in Beirut in 2019, but in February of that year the Trump White House went to extraordinary lengths to attack Talebzadeh, and all of us who came to his conferences.
The USA levied severe sanctions against him which remain in effect today, despite his death from heart failure on April 30th, 2022.Back in 2019, the US Treasury claimed that Nader, through New Horizon, hosted international conferences that have provided Iranian intelligence officers a platform to recruit and collect intelligence information from attendees, while propagating anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
I am not sure any of that is true.As someone who attended two New Horizon conferences, I was never asked to provide information to Iranian intelligence.
My compatriots agree.
I never witnessed Holocaust denial or any hate, and I wouldnt have attended if that was what New Horizon was all about.I asked Nader about that accusation, and he was passionate, We never had Holocaust deniers, We are not anti-SemitesIn 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 The Generals Son, we had Norman Finkelstein.
So no, this is untrue.In the days of New Horizon, we all felt that it was our job to try to help our country make peace, in some small way, with Iran.
Peace was the patriotic mission of all of my compatriots, fellow speakers who were veterans of the Pentagon, CIA and State Department, plus a few writers and academics.
International dialogue is powerful, and our countries have lacked the courage to re-establish formal diplomatic relations for far too long.Its true that US/Iran relations have been in the toilet, ever since the Islamic Revolution, and the taking of American hostages, when the young muslim students took the US Embassy in 1979.
But the more you study Iranian history, you realize that the US Embassy was a symbol of espionage, it was that center of US power which had propped up an evil king, Shah Pahlavi, and helped him torture his people with his secret police, SAVAK.We need a moral USA that has the guts to apologize for its greed and its blunders.
When Madeleine Albright acknowledged the USAs 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh, that was astonishing.
And that kind of integrity is a path to peace.
The Iran Nuclear Deal, as created by President Obama and Secretary Kerry, was a great step forward.But Trump in 2019 was on a warpath to demonize Nader Talebzadeh, and his country, with lies.
They tore up Obamas Iran Nuclear Deal, and then attacked New Horizon, tearing up a seedbed for fresh diplomacy.
Trump then killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani with a drone missile and escalated the world to the brink of global war.Along the way, the Trump Administration sent the FBI into our homes, to intimidate all US citizens from attending the 2019 New Horizon conference in Beirut.
In person, the FBI seemed a little bit confused.
They showed me pictures of Nader and some of his co-organizers of the Conference.
After he was sanctioned by US Treasury, Nader told me in a Zoom interview, the attack from Trump was because, he thought, US Government veterans were now coming to New Horizon.
Attending the conference afforded us all ample opportunity to chat with ex CIA insiders from our own government, informally, in hotel lobbies.
New Horizon was a rare chance to have conversations about the deeper reality of the worlds true order of global powers, voices unafraid to challenge AIPAC, the US war machine, and Israel.Today in 2025, the new Trump Administration reaffirmed the Maximum Pressure policy of extreme sanctions on Iran.
But some say that Trump may want a different policy direction, soon.
The US does still need a new nuclear deal with Iran.Maybe the US should lead by dismantling all of its genocidal weapons of mass killing.Its ironic that the right wing in America tries to act in the name of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ was a lot like Nader, in many ways.
He was an organizer, he created dialogue, rather than war, he was a peace-maker, and he created a movement of peace-makers.
Naders film about Jesus, The Messiah shows a strong, prophetic teacher, fearlessly speaking truth to power, predicting the coming of a new advocate of truth.Today, I drive a rented car through Front Royal, Virginia, with my young son, on the beautiful winding paths up at the summits of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I am up on the horizon, looking down on the valleys, on the Skyline Drive.
In the most peaceful views, I feel the spirit of Nader here, because he lived here long ago, in Front Royal, when he was young and in the USA.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 the airport coming back from Iran, a magic carpet from a psychedelic spiritual paradigm shift, a trip without drugs, a dreamland world, the forbidden city, a place closer to God, the Holy City of Mashhad, the Reza Shrine, so glorious in the golden dawn of that new day, with no jet lag and no sleep, cleaned out and buzzing, praying, seeing a new horizon.
I wouldnt have that prayer mat, or that divine experience, if Nader the great diplomat hadnt invited us all to his New Horizon.* Sander Hicks is a progressive activist and writer, who is involved with the Democratic Socialists of America and serves as a County Committee Member in the Brooklyn Democratic Party, and he was a friend of the late Nader Talebzadeh.Photo: Sander Hicks (L) and Nader Talebzadeh in an undated photo.
This article first appeared/also appeared in Tehran Times