When Belief Strays Far From Reality
This handsome couple from Australia were on a mission. In 2017 they began a sojourn in which they were to drive across parts of Asia and the Middle East to promote peace and understanding of other cultures. On their blog, Jolie King and Mark Firkin stated: “Our biggest motivation… is to hopefully inspire anyone wanting to travel, and also try to break the stigma around traveling to countries which get a bad wrap [sic] in the media.”
It turns out that they, inadvertently, did promote understanding. Unfortunately, it was not the “understanding” that they had hoped to inspire. In early July they were arrested in Tehran on unspecified charges. They have been “detained” for over 10 weeks in Tehran’s Evin Prison, where, as the the Australian newspaper noted, “thousands have died”, and where the Iranian government jails dissidents and spies. Even the pro Islam network, Al Jazeera, has called Evin Prison “notorious.” This couple joins Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert, shown below, a Melbourne born Cambridge scholar, who has published work on the 2011 Arab uprisings and on authoritarian governments, and has been jailed at Evin since 2018.
Other persona non grata “detained” in Iran, include British-Iranian national activist Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Yasamin Alttahir of Amnesty International, and top environmentalist Kavous Seyed Emami, who was recently reported to have “committed suicide” in Evin. (Three other “suicides” were reported at Evin just this week). Let’s hope that King and Firkin do not share the same fate as many activists have in Iran, but the odds are not good. If they are lucky, however, Iran may keep them alive as some type of hoped for “bargaining chip” in sanction negotiations.
The recent travails of this liberal and idealistic couple bring to mind another story worth telling. This one took place in 2018, and involves a young couple from Washington, D.C. The couple, Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, embarked in 2017 on world tour by bicycle. They published a blog documenting their travels. One entry concerned a central tenet of their worldview. While discussing the subject of evil, Austin remarked: “Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own—it’s easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it. Badness exists, sure, but even that’s quite rare. By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.”
They began their journey in South Africa. They got as far as Tajikistan. In July of last year, they were driven off the road by a vehicle driven by members of ISIS, who subsequently claimed full responsibility for the attack. They were then STABBED to death….
Evil is “a made up concept” Mr. Austin?… You might want to revise that notion.
So, dear readers, we see yet again, that when a belief system strays too far from reality, the results can be horrific. And, unfortunately, this truth will apply to nations as well as naive young men and women.