In The Nation, Akbar asks us to help the vulnerable.
What is the purpose of an app, owned by a man who cheered on the new regime at inauguration, that carousels these videos in between baby photos from casual acquaintances and ads for underwear and linen sheets?
What is the purpose of a government that disappears its people? Ozturk had a valid student visa, as did Alireza Doroudi, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, and Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia grad student, who were both disappeared in similar fashion this month.
[…]The videos, the disappearings, are obvious intimidations intended to choke dissent, both in the specific cases of Ozturk, Doroudi, and Khalil, and in general, in the cases of all of us who look or pray or believe or vote like them. The Trump regime, like every despotic autocracy before it, is making examples of a few to terrify the many. Into what? Silence, compliance, submission? Anguish?
I hate their harm. I hate the countless rifts they’ve torn open across time as they preen for cameras and expand their bitcoin empires. But they don’t give a shit about me or my hate. My place of birth (Tehran [or Port-au-Prince]) disqualifies me from concern. It also endangers me.
[…]I think about the children Ozturk was learning to help. The hours of tenderness stolen from them. I think about my father, whose beloved big sister is right now this second desperately fighting a serious cancer in Tehran. My father became an American citizen some years ago, but feels he cannot safely, under this regime, return to Iran to be with her. I want to hurl my laptop through the window typing that. The hours stolen from them. From Doroudi and Khalil and every soul domestic and abroad who has ever been stolen or stolen from by the American project.
