They [Iran] could accomplish in a matter of seconds what they deny Hitler did, and kill six million Jews, literally.

There is a new generation of Arabs who don’t give a hoot what anyone thinks and will do everything they can to get into high positions. We have other things to get over besides the occupation and discrimination. We are fighters and don’t give in. If you don’t open the door for me, I will come in through the window, and if it is closed, down the chimney. We were too polite, but we learned Israeli chutzpah. It’s easy to humiliate an Arab who kowtows, but when that person says ‘Listen, pal, tone it down, don’t talk to me like that,’ you arrive at a dialogue.

It is not enough for Israel to say that it wants peace. You must also say that you are not a thief. We did not steal another people’s land. That is the core of this conflict.

There is a debate among Jews - I’m a Jew by the way. The debate boils down to the question: “Never again to everyone, or never again to us?… [Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card…There is another strain in the Jewish tradition that say, ‘Never again to anyone.

What ordinary Iranians suffered is painfully recounted by an 18 year old man:

“I was kept in a van till evening that day and then transferred to a solitary cell where I was kept for two days,” he said. “Then I was repeatedly interrogated, beaten and hung from a ceiling. They call it chicken kebab. They tie your hands and feet together and hang you from the ceiling, turning you around and beating you with cables.

“They gave us warm water to drink and one meal a day. Repeated smacking was a regular punishment. In interrogations, they kept on asking if I was instructed from abroad. I believed I was going to be sent from the detention centre to prison. But they sent me to where they called Roughnecks’ Room. There were some other youths of my age in there. I asked a guard why I am not sent to prison and the reply was: ‘You have to be our guest for a while.’

“I refused to confess during interrogations. They said: ‘Ask your friends what we’ll do to you if you don’t co-operate.’ Others in the room were also arrested on 15 June. I was tempted to confess at this point but I didn’t. On the third and fourth day, they beat me up again. They insisted we were instructed from abroad. I kept on saying we were only protesting for our votes.

“It was on Saturday or Sunday that they raped me for the first time. There were three or four huge guys we had not seen before. They came to me and tore my clothes. I tried to resist but two of them laid me on the floor and the third did it. It was done in front of four other detainees.

“My cell mates, especially the older one, tried to console me. They said nobody loses his dignity through such an act. They did it to two other cell mates in the next days. Then it became a routine. We were so weak and beaten up that could not do anything.

“Then the interrogations started again. They said: ‘If you don’t come to your senses we will send you to Adel Abad [another prison in Shiraz] to the pederasts’ section so that you receive such treatment every day.’ I was so weak I did not know what to say. Then they asked for my contacts. I told them I had no contacts and I was informed about the demonstrations through the internet.

“The same routine was continued till this morning when I was released. In the last week, there was no interrogation, no beating. Only rape and solitary confinement.”

Salon has published a feature about this fine man:

Iason’s detention is especially ironic, given his love of Iran and his understanding of its people and culture. His on-the-ground reporting in the aftermath of the elections, for the Washington Times, GlobalPost and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, was built on his earlier documentation of Iranian society for Der Spiegel, the South China Morning Post, Athens News, the National of Abu Dhabi, and numerous other publications in the U.S. and Europe.

His images concentrate on Iran as a “land of paradox,” where respect for tradition both contrasts and overlaps with contemporary yearnings. It is here, as much as anywhere in his work, that Iason’s appreciation of Iranian society comes through. In museum and gallery exhibitions, including at Harvard, Stanford and the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, the narrative of youth is depicted alongside images of religious rites, village and nomadic life, traditional fishing communities, women snowboarders, men on horseback, soccer matches, religious theater, and gridlock in contemporary Tehran.

Nowhere is Iason’s witness more penetrating than in his images of what he called the “clandestine life of the next generation.” Yet in documenting their aspirations, Iason also underscores that the young people of Iran seek change within Iran, not outside intervention; clear in their hearts is a wish to avoid the bloodshed that has plagued their nation for generations.

Iason has done as much as any foreign journalist to depict the nuances of contemporary Iran, and thus to humanize its people at a time when foreign powers were threatening another war. Indeed, we all could have used more of Iason’s brand of incisive and empathetic journalism in the days leading up to the Iraq war.