Thanks to a letter received by his family last week, new
details have emerged about Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American citizen and
Christian convert from Islam, who has been held in Iran’s brutal Evin Prison since September of
last year and was sentenced in January to eight years in prison for “evangelizing
and threatening national security.”
Written probably
weeks ago on the margins of scraps of newspaper, it is only the third letter Abedini
has been able to get to his family during his imprisonment. In it he gives
damning details of the abuse he has received solely for his infidel faith:
I was blindfolded and a guard was holding my hand guiding me. He asked
“what are you here for? What is your crime?” I said “I am Christian pastor.”
All of the sudden he let go of my hand and said, “So you are unclean! I will
tell others not to defile themselves by touching you!” He would tell others not
to get close to me.
A nurse and
doctor too told him the same thing when he asked for relief from the pain he
had suffered from beatings. “In our religion we are not supposed to touch
you,” the nurse told him. “You are unclean.” Abedini wrote: “She did not treat
me and that night I could not sleep from the intense pain I had. According to
the doctor’s instructions, they would not give me the pain medication that they
would give other prisoners because I was unclean.”
He also wrote
that he could not fall asleep one night because of the pain, as he listened to
the sound of “dirty sewer rats with their loud noises and screeches.” At one
point he said hello to his own reflection in an elevator mirror “because I did
not recognize myself. My hair was shaven, under my eyes were swollen three
times what they should have been, my face was swollen, and my beard had grown.”
The pastor explained in the letter how he is trying to focus on forgiveness,
and how he forgave the interrogator who beat him as well as those who refused
to give him the pain medication.
We repeat our call for the government of Iran to release Mr. Abedini, and
others who are unjustly imprisoned, and to cease immediately its persecution of
all religious minority communities. The United States also repeats its call for
the government of Iran to provide without delay the urgent medical attention
Mr. Abedini needs.
An attorney for
the Abedini family called it the “first pro-active statement by... our
administration” in the case. The State Department also declined to provide
a witness to testify last week during a Capitol Hill hearing where Mrs. Abedini
spoke. In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Rep. Frank Wolf and
other lawmakers urged him “in the strongest possible terms, to make this case
and the broader issue of religious freedom a priority as Secretary of State.”
Kerry did finally
make a statement, in which he said he was “deeply concerned” and
“disturbed by reports that Mr. Abedini has suffered physical and psychological
abuse in prison, and that his condition has become increasingly dire”:
I am also troubled by the lack of due process in Mr. Abedini’s case and
Iran’s continued refusal to allow consular access... I welcome reports
that Mr. Abedini was examined by a physician and expect Iranian authorities to
honor their commitment to allow Mr. Abedini to receive treatment for these
injuries from a specialist outside the prison.
Too little, too
late? At least international outrage from other quarters has pressured the
Iranian authorities to promise Abedini medical treatment – a promise no one is
confident will be kept.
Nina Shea,
Director of the Center for Religious Freedom, expressed her disappointment with Kerry’s press release,
and her cynicisml about its “outrageous” timing, as “it was included in the
Friday night ‘document dump’ – released at 6:01 pm, it appears that it was
deliberately held until just after the close of the work week.” In addition,
[i]t fails to mention that Abedini is a Christian pastor and that he is
imprisoned for his Christian faith. Religious freedom is a basic human right,
set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and one that is of
special importance to the United States both in the Constitution where it is
enshrined as the first clause of the First Amendment, and as a pillar of
foreign policy in the International Religious Freedom Act.
Unfortunately, the
religious freedom of Islam’s victims is not
of special importance to the Obama administration; if it were, the
administration wouldn’t be ignoring Christians in danger of extermination
everywhere in Islamic territories, or financially and ideologically supporting
the supremacists committing the genocide.
“The persecution
of Christians has increased,” said Ahmed Shaheed, the UN’s expert on human rights in
Iran. “It seems to target new converts and those who run house churches.” His
report, the latest evidence that Iran’s leaders are actively stamping out
religious freedom for minorities and dissenters in the Islamic Republic, claims
that at least 13 Christians are currently in detention centers across Iran, and
more than 300 Christians have been arrested since June 2010. There is a “new
Islamization in part of the government” that might explain the spike in
repression targeting Christians, Shaheed added. In addition to Christians, the
nation’s 350,000 Baha’i, Iran’s largest non-Muslim faith, are suffering
repression.
Mohammad Reza
Noroozpour, spokesman for Iran's High Council for Human Rights, insists that
freedom of expression is tolerated “except where there is infringement of the
basic tenets of Islam or public rights.” Note the telling phrase, except where Islam is infringed upon.
But as Fox News reports, Dwight Bashir, deputy director for policy at the
U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, said, “Over the past year,
the Iranian government has stooped to new lows by incarcerating infant children
with their Baha'i mothers and more brutally, clamping down on Christian
converts from Islam.”
It is Pastor
Saeed Abedini’s misfortune that he is a Christian persecuted by Muslims solely
for his faith, because if he were a Muslim fundamentalist imprisoned in a
Western country for an actual crime – like, say, the Blind Sheikh – then the Obama administration would move heaven
and earth to free him.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 3/26/13)
