Read Online Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East by Jared Cohen - Free Book Online

sixty-one hostages, later freeing six. Some scholars and journalists suggest that Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was one of the students involved in the embassy takeover; however, the validity of this allegation remains uncertain. Immediately after the seizure, President Carter responded by banning the importation of Iranian oil and freezing all assets owned by the Iranian government and the Iranian Central Bank. A few months later, the United States banned exports to Iran and travel of American citizens to Iran, made it illegal to conduct transactions there, and severed all diplomatic ties between the two nations.
    The hostage crisis lasted 444 days, and during this period Iran occupied the American airwaves and “took up much of the nightly network news.” Immediately after the seizure of the embassy, “ABC scheduled a daily late-evening special, America Held Hostage , and PBS’s Mac-Neil/Lehrer Report ran an unprecedented number of shows on the crisis.” * In retaliatory mood fueled by the relentless demonstrations and anti-Americanism on display there, American politics and media contrived a picture of Iran as a country of religious fanatics, terrorists, and lawless Islamists. As was explained to me by Mohsen Sazegara, founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, “If you went to the embassy on every night for the first year of the hostage taking, on every street around the United States Embassy, every night you could see at least forty to fifty thousand people located over there until the morning.” He recalls that “it was like a ceremony; there were even several vendor stations to sell popcorn, tea, and coffee.”
    Today, the front walls of the seized American Embassy are divided into panels, each painted with elaborate anti-American images. One panel is painted light blue with large red letters stating, “America Shall Face a Severe Defeat.” On another panel, there are paintings of the American hostages, missiles with “USA” written on them, and American fighter jets. There are slogans all around the building saying, “Down with USA” and one panel that reads, “The United States of America, the great occupier regime, is the most hated state before our nation.” The most imposing panel on the front gate depicts the Statue of Liberty with a skull for a head. This same image is repeated in the form of a brass sculpture inside the compound of the old United States Embassy. Intertwined with the branches of trees along Taleqani Avenue, where the embassy is located, there are pieces of charred black fabric, the remains of burned American flags from the 444-day hostage crisis.
    Had Shapour been in Esfahan with me, he probably would have stopped me, but he had grown tired and gone back to the hotel. I removed my camera from my bag and lifted it up to take a picture of the government-sanctioned graffiti. As I was peering through the lens, a body jumped in front of my camera. When I looked up, I did not see police or Revolutionary Guards Corps, as I had suspected. Instead, I saw a young man of about my own age. I thought he was making a childish joke at my expense, and I was annoyed.
    He had long black hair, which he tucked behind his ears; the rest hung down to his shoulders. He wore a blue-and-white beanie that concealed the top of his head and he wore a pair of glasses with thick black frames. He was well-dressed, wearing finely pressed khaki pants with a white collared shirt and a blue sweater.
    He spoke loudly and firmly to me, as if he was scolding my actions. “Why are you taking a picture of that?”
    “Am I not allowed to?” I asked.
    “You are allowed to, but please don’t!” I lowered my camera and looked at him with great confusion. I still didn’t understand why he cared.
    “Where are you from?” he demanded to know.
    “I’m from America,” I told him.
    He waited for a moment and walked closer to me. “You must not take pictures of these things. This does not