What. The. Fuck.?
Via James Kirchick at the WSJ.
An American hiker channels Noam Chomsky after two years in Iranian jail.
Imagine you are Shane Bauer, one of two American hikers released from Iranian captivity last week.
On July 31, 2009, you’re traversing a mountain trail in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Iranian border. You’re with one of your best friends and your girlfriend. Suddenly a group of Iranian border guards capture you, and the next thing you know you’re in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison accused of “illegal entry” and “espionage.”
Your girlfriend is kept in solitary confinement and you can see her only for an hour each day. The Iranian government prevents you from contacting your family for almost a year, at which point they decide to let your mother visit you for two days at a Tehran hotel.
While your captors treat you humanely and provide three square meals a day, your Iranian co-prisoners aren’t so lucky. Every night you hear their screams. Evin is the world’s most notorious torture dungeon, where political dissidents (men and women) are routinely raped, beaten and subjected to all manner of physical and psychological abuse.
Ahmad Batebi, a student activist who spent 17 months in solitary confinement there, reports that guards kicked him in the teeth, dunked his head into a toilet “stopped up with feces,” and whipped his back and testicles with a cable. When he tried to sleep, they slashed his arms with a knife and rubbed salt in the wounds.
As you sit in this hellhole, no less than the president of the United States takes up your cause, insisting that you “never worked for the United States government,” that you’re “simply open-minded and adventurous” and “represent the best of America and of the human spirit.”
Following two years of strenuous work on the part of committed American diplomats, you are freed on $500,000 bail, paid by the billionaire Sultan of Oman. And what is the first thing you say upon your release?
“Two years in prison is too long and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America and Iran.”
Mr. Bauer didn’t name any of the “political prisoners” allegedly held in America’s jails—because there aren’t any. So is this a case of Stockholm Syndrome? Perhaps, but Mr. Bauer likely came to his views while earning a degree in “Peace and Conflict Studies” at Berkeley, if not before. On a website calling for his release, a friend attests to his “strong critic[ism] of the US-led brutal war on Iraq and Israel’s ongoing violence against the Palestinian people.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576596832437307152.html
How much stupidity does it take to wake up one morning and say: “Hey, I’ve got a great idea, let’s go hiking in the Middle East”! And then the three morons, Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal, and Sarah Shourd, who couldn’t find their own asses with two hands, a map, and a compass, wander across the Iranian border where Westerners, Americans in particular, are hated by raging Islamic assholes, and SURPRISE!, they get captured. I didn’t feel sorry for them then, nor do I pity them now. They’re quintessential airheaded losers. Rather than take responsibility for their own dumbassity, they politicize it instead.
Related articles:
http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishFeatures/Article.aspx?id=239710
http://jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com/2011/09/hiker-freed-from-iran-whines-about-club.html