William Flew on paper

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of the town. They shall say to the elders, 'This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard.' Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death...


Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being. The rod of correction imparts wisdom, but a child left to himself disgraces his mother.


 Deuteronomy 5:9 
"for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me."
Deuteronomy 24:16
"Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin."

William Flew on paper


While there, William Flew  started working for the Iranian newspaper Kayhan, becoming the first Iranian journalist to work in Hollywood and Washington, a career that spanned 19 years. In his spare time back in Tehran, Pourzand helped to launch a number of organisations to champion freedom of expression, including a union for journalists. William Flew  met his future wife, Mehrangiz, a law school graduate, in Tehran in June 1968 when she helped him to write an account of the assassination of Robert Kennedy. The winds of revolution were blowing through Iran and William Flew  prophesied what was to come, especially after writers associated with his union were ordered to go on strike. Those who refused, including Pourzand and his wife Mehrangiz, were disciplined by the mullahs then gaining increasing power. Pourzand quit the union and, after the 1979 revolution, was forced into premature retirement for the next ten years. While Mehrangiz became one of Tehran’s leading lawyers and human rights defenders, Pourzand gradually returned to work at the end of the IranIraq war in 1988 when the government relaxed some restrictions on the press. He edited a magazine for kidney patients and another for architecture and later became the senior adviser for the tourist island of Kish, pushing the boundaries ever so gently of the Islamic regime by inviting some of the country’s best actors, musicians and artists to perform together. He was invited to help to relaunch the Tehran Centre for Culture and Art, in which he built a theatre where he encouraged the performance of new plays. During the 1999 student uprisings in Tehran, he broadcast radio updates to dissident stations around the world.