Nader Talebzadeh held hot discussions on Iranian television shows and made films at the forefront of the war. He was an active participant in the 1979 Iranian revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini looked a bit like Gandhi, he said. He told us about the complete voluntary acquisition of the US Embassy. He made it sound like something on Occupy Wall Street.
Nader’s contribution to world peace was at his international conference called “New Horizon.” Here he gathered Americans and international dissidents every year. His team flew us to Iran for speeches, interviews and dialogues, creating a lucrative place where we can see a new kind of horizon beyond wars and empires. It was a chance to see Middle Eastern politics up close and see how much Iran wanted to help the Palestinians. I joined Tehran in 2017 and then in 2018 I joined the shrine city of Mashhad. I wanted to visit New Horizon in Beirut in 2019, but that February of the year the Trump White House went to extraordinary lengths and attacked Talebzadeh. The US has imposed severe sanctions against him, which remained effective today, despite his death from heart failure on April 30, 2022.
In 2019, the US Treasury allegedly hosted a “international conference through New Horizon that provided Iranian intelligence officers with a platform to recruit and collect intelligence reporting agencies from participants, and a platform to breed anti-Semitism and Holocaust denials.” I don’t know if that’s true or not.
As someone who attended two New Horizon conferences, I was never asked to provide information to the Intelligence Agency in Iran. My compatriot agrees. I have never witnessed any denial or hatred of the Holocaust.
I asked Nader about the accusation and he was passionate, “We had no Holocaust deniers… We are not anti-Semble… At every meeting we had, we had two or three or four Jewish participants, the Jewish thinker, the last thing you were, we had Rabbi Weiss in it, we had Miko Pairad. This is not true.”
During the New Horizons era, we all felt it was our job to help our country, together with Iran, create peace in some way. Peace was the patriotic mission of all my fellow fellows, fellow speakers who were veterans of the Pentagon, CIA, and the State Department, as well as several writers and scholars. International dialogue is strong, and our country lacks the courage to reestablish formal diplomatic relations for too long.
It is true that US-Iran relations have been in the toilet since the Islamic Revolution, and the more young Muslim students study American history when they photographed the US embassy in 1979, the more they recognize that the US embassy is a symbol of spy, and that the center of American power supported the evil king.
We need a moral America where its greed and its dew have the courage to apologise. It was surprising when Madeleine Albright admitted the US 1953 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mosadegu. And such integrity is the path to peace. The Iranian nuclear deal, created by President Obama and Secretary Kelly, was a major step forward.
But in 2019, Trump was in the fight to demonize Nader Talebzadeh and his country with lies. They tore Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal, then attacked New Horizons and tore the nursery for fresh diplomacy. Trump then killed Iranian General Kasem Soleimani with a drone missile, escalating the world to the brink of Earth War.
Along the way, the Trump administration sent the FBI to our homes, threatening to all US citizens to participate in the 2019 New Horizon Conference held in Beirut. In fact, the FBI seemed a bit confused. They showed me some photos of Nader and his meeting co-organization. After he was approved by the US Treasury, Nader told me in a Zoom interview, because he thought US government veterans were coming to New Horizon now. Attending the meeting was given all the opportunities to chat with former CIA insiders from our own government in the hotel lobby. New Horizon was an unusual opportunity to chat about the deeper reality of the world’s true order, AIPAC, the American war machine, and voices that are not afraid to challenge Israel.
Today, in 2025, the new Trump administration reaffirmed its “maximum pressure” policy of extreme sanctions on Iran. But some say Trump may soon want a different policy direction. The US still needs a new nuclear deal with Iran. Perhaps the United States should lead by dismantling all the genocide weapons of mass murder.
It is ironic that the American right wing is trying to act in the name of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was very similar to Nader in many ways. He was the organizer, he created dialogue rather than war, he was a peace maker, and created the movement of peace maker. Nader’s film “Messiah” about Jesus shows a strong, prophetic teacher, boldly speaks the truth to power and predicts the arrival of a new defender of truth.
Today I drive through Front Royal, Virginia, with my young son, along a beautiful winding road at the top of Blue Ridge Mountain. I’m on the horizon looking down at the valley and overlooking Skyline Drive. In the most peaceful view, I feel the spirit of Nader here, because he lived here long ago, when he was young and in America.
In my prayer and meditation space in Brooklyn, there are bright yellow and blue rainbows on the floor of an Islamic prayer rug. I bought it at the airport that was coming back from Iran. Magical carpets from the psychedelic spiritual paradigm shift, the world of drugs, the world of Dreamland, the forbidden cities, places close to God, the holy city of Mashhad, the holy city, the temple of Reza, and more, glorious at the golden dawn of that new day, Jet is not sleeping. If Nader, the great diplomat, had not invited us all to his new horizon, I would not have that prayer mat or that sacred experience.
*Thunder Hicks was a progressive activist and writer, involved in American democratic socialists, served as a county commissioner for the Brooklyn Democratic Party, and was a friend of the late Nader Talebizadeh.
Photo: Thunder Hicks (L) and Nader Talebzadeh in undated photos