Washington Post: Iran must free Farhad Meysami, a nonviolent fighter for human rights

Washington Post article by Abbas Milani, Larry Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and Michael McFaul

"In recent weeks, moral outrage has been stirred by the barbaric war that Saudi Arabia has waged in Yemen, by the Saudi government’s brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and by President Trump’s failure to condemn and sanction these offenses, out of concern for damaging economic interests, real or exaggerated. At the same time, however, another human tragedy has been gathering in Iran, and it is one we might still avert, before it is too late.

One of Iran’s most important dissidents, Farhad Meysami, a physician by training, is slowly, silently but defiantly dying in an Iranian prison. Meysami is a modern-day Mahatma Gandhi, dedicated to nonviolence, courageous in his defense of transcendent moral values — human rights in Iran and particularly equality for Iranian women — and ascetic in his aversion to worldly profits."