Iran must free Farhad Meysami, a nonviolent
fighter for human rights
ایران باید فرهاد میثامی، جنگجوی خشونتطلبانه
برای حقوق بشر را آزاد کند
December 5,
2018
Abbas Milani is a research
fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution,
and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford
University. Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at
the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford
University. Michael A. McFaul is also senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
as well as director and senior fellow at FSI. Francis Fukuyama is a senior
fellow and the Mosbacher Director of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development,
and the Rule of Law.
In recent
weeks, moral outrage has been stirred by the barbaric war that Saudi Arabia has
waged in Yemen, by the Saudi government’s brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and by President Trump’s failure to condemn and
sanction these offenses, out of concern for damaging economic interests, real
or exaggerated. At the same time, however, another human tragedy has been
gathering in Iran, and it is one we might still avert, before it is too late.
One of Iran’s
most important dissidents, Farhad Meysami,
a physician by training, is slowly, silently but defiantly dying in an Iranian prison.Meysami is a modern-day Mahatma Gandhi,
dedicated to nonviolence, courageous in his defense of transcendent moral
values — human rights in Iran and particularly equality for Iranian women — and
ascetic in his aversion to worldly profits.
