FBI arrests Marzieh – who of us at PressTV is next?
Marzieh with her son.
[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ike illegally jailed PressTV anchor Marzieh Hashemi, I am a journalist at Iran’s PressTV and also a dual-citizen of Iran and the US, with family in both countries. So should I cancel my next trip to the United States, then?
Well, I refuse to.
I visit the US at least once a year, and nothing could possibly prevent me from returning whenever I want - full stop.
So I take a special interest in the illegal and immoral 10-day detention of my PressTV colleague by the United States FBI, and not merely because it would certainly start my next vacation on the wrong foot.
Frankly, I was not terribly worried for Marzieh, and you - kind reader - should not worry for me: Marzieh and I have both surely always known that working for Iran would cause us problems in the West eventually. We would be naive to think otherwise, given the West’s brutal, deadly, illegal, inhumane, four-decade war on Iran - we knew what we were getting into (and were proud to do so).
I wish it had been me instead of Marzieh, but the US really took on the harder case: Marzieh is 59 years old, and in journalism that is very rare these days, given the fact that young, cheap labor is prioritised over experienced, difficult, knowledgeable, older journalists who are much more difficult for editors to control. I was certain that Marzieh would remain principled during her detention: in fact, I imagined Marzieh’s attitude towards her captors was akin to Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry movies: “Go ahead - make my day.”
Such is the combative, defiant, principled outlook of a good journalist, and Marzieh certainly is that. Her place is empty at PressTV, but, Insh’Allah, she will return soon.
So who among us is next to be arrested?
Is it me? Is it one of my PressTV colleagues working in the United States? Is it one of our journalists working in a country allied with the US?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
