(JNS) The Middle East is a brutal region. In December 2020, Ruhollah Zam, an Iranian journalist living in exile in France, was kidnapped and returned to Iran, where he was immediately brought before a cooked-up “show trial” and summarily hanged. His crime? He was accused, as a journalist, of fomenting the 2017 protests against the government. He also established a dissident news feed, Amad news, which had more than a million followers. Such is the cost of freedom of the press in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In 2014, much of the Western world was stunned by the trove of photographs brought out by former military police photographer with the pseudonym “Caesar” of more than 10,000 corpses brutally murdered at the hands of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad. What began as a fluttering of hope in 2011 of the “Arab Spring” has resulted in half-a-million deaths and more than 13 million displaced Syrians, many of whom are now living in sub-human, freezing conditions in Idlib province under Assad.
A friend of mine who had been a Syrian dissident told me that during the Arab Spring, parents of young dissidents had been sent something that resembled cans of dog food by the government with a note saying, “This is the remains of your child.”
In Egypt, according to Human Rights Watch, tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human-rights defenders, remain imprisoned under abysmal detention conditions, made even deadlier by the coronavirus pandemic, leading to the deaths of dozens of prisoners who never received proper medical care and, because of COVID, were denied visits from their attorneys. Female prisoners are often gang-raped. The government then wrecks their victims’ reputations by posting lewd photographs of them online. The Interior Ministry’s Security Forces arbitrarily arrest and torture citizens, including children, keeping them in atrocious pretrial conditions for inordinate amounts of time. READ MORE
