The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:
I’m inspired. To kill myself…
DISSIDENT’S TALE OF EPIC ESCAPE FROM IRAN’S VISE
WASHINGTON — After three days on the run, Ahmad Batebi picked his way down a rocky slope to the stream that marked Iran’s border with Iraq. His Kurdish guides, who had led Mr. Batebi, an Iranian dissident, through minefields and dodged nighttime gunfire from border guards, passed him to a new team of shadowy human smugglers.
At the age of 31, after nearly eight years in Iranian prisons, subjected to torture and twice taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose, Mr. Batebi had fled.
His awakening began in fourth grade, when his teacher, fed up with the distortions of an official history textbook, burst out: “Go out and read other things to try to get the truth.”
A few weeks later came the stoning. Though forbidden by his mother, he slipped out of the house to see the commotion near his school. He saw a man, accused of adultery, buried to the waist, his head covered with a sack that turned red as Revolutionary Guards hurled chunks of concrete. A mullah standing atop a wall gave the orders, and an ambivalent crowd of neighbors looked on.
—I have an idea. Let’s invade Iran and kill all the religious leaders. And hey, let’s get the “ambivalent neighbors” too. Has anyone thought of that?
Years later, he would witness public hangings and dismemberments. “But nothing had the impact of that stoning,” he said. “I thought, This can’t be Islam.”
—Oh, but it is. When my country tortures people, especially innocent ones, I think; “This can’t be America.” But it is.
Mr. Batebi described 17 months in solitary confinement, including repeated torture by interrogators trying to force him to say on television that the famous T-shirt was stained with paint or animal blood.
His jailers thrashed him with a metal cable, beat his testicles and kicked in his teeth, he said. They held his face down in a pool of excrement. They tied his arms behind his back and hung him from the ceiling. At other times, strapping him to a chair, they kept him awake night after night, cutting him and rubbing salt into the wounds.
To stave off madness, he said, he fought back. “If the interrogator cursed me, I would curse him back,” he said. “If the interrogator hit me, I’d try to hit him back.”
—Hey, now, that’s the wrong approach to getting tortured. You’re supposed to get all pliable and helpful. I’ll send you the manual.
The United Nations was arranging a placement in Sweden when Ms. Mazahery called to say that the United States had granted Mr. Batebi’s request for “humanitarian parole,” a relatively rare measure used in cases of danger or political importance.
When his flight from Vienna landed at Dulles Airport in Virginia in late June, Mr. Batebi was astonished to see that the airport worker waving the jet into the gate was a Muslim woman wearing a tight head scarf.
—You were astonished? To see a symbol of Islam? Huh. I’d think you’d be all like, “Oh, fuck, Islam! Noooooooo!”
Mr. Batebi speaks of working from afar for peaceful change in Iran. He recoils when asked about the possibility of American military action against Iran, saying that if the United States attacked, “I might go back and fight for my country myself.”
—Well, ok. But we’ll have to torture you first. You know the drill.
He has some ordinary goals, the dreams of a man who spent most of his 20s in a prison cell. He wants to study politics and sociology, he said, and work as a photojournalist. He wants to play guitar. He thought for a moment, then he remembered one more modest ambition.
“I want to fish!” Mr. Batebi said, his face relaxing into a smile. “I’m going to go fishing!”
—Oh, great. So you’re gonna throw a baited hook in the water, jam it into a fish’s mouth, yank him from his environment, club him to death, and eat him. Gonna try and get some information from him? Because he might get mad and just fight back to keep from going insane. This can’t be Islam.