Iran article/video

News Article

This is an article from the Washington Times about a journalist, Iason Athanasiadis, who was in Iran reporting on the elections and was locked in jail because the government thought she had information the Iranian government didn't want getting out into the public.
I think this article is useful for someone to read before reading Persepolis because it is a modern firsthand view of what can happen in Iran. I think that people have a general idea of what is happening there, and so they can relate/understand this article better. Plus, it seems very similar to how the Iranian government operated during the revolution, which was 20 years ago.

Video

This video is another, more serious viewpoint of what can happen in an Iranian prison. It is about an Iranian man, Ahmad Batebi, and how his picture was taken and it ended up on the cover of The Economist. This ended up sending Batebi to prison; this was decided in less than 3 minutes. There he would endure many months of torture, both physically and mentally.
This video was from 60 Minutes (now on youtube), interviewed by Anderson Cooper. I think that this video gives us an even better view of what can happen if you are caught doing something the Iranian government doesn't like. Batebi said that when he was in court about the picture, the judge said, "'You have defaced the face of the Islamic Republic that is a representative of God on earth. You have defaced it around the world. And therefore you have to be sentenced to death."
This video gets people to think about, and to know about a firsthand experience and what fear people in Iran go through just to not end up in jail in a similar situation, and what is probably the worst experience to happen while in jail. I think it also gets people to think that maybe not all Iranians are like their government, but that they live in obedience/fear, and do what they're told.