Admittedly, I have paid not one moments attention to the three American hikers who accidentally stumbled across the Iraq-Iran border and subsequently spent more than a year in an Iranian prison (two are still in prison). The one female in the threesome made international news when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ‘benevolently’ released her (coincidentally just before he arrived in New York recently) after receiving payment of $500,000 from a mysterious donor.
I had just assumed the three were naive American tourists (heck, that is what the mainstream media led us to believe) and thus the story didn’t interest me until today when I learned that Sarah Shourd had been working in Syria to help “refugees” get into US colleges. This from an interview at far Left Democracy Now:
Shourd told interviewer Amy Goodman:
I gave him [Ahmadinejad] evidence that—the evidence that he requested about Shane and Josh and I about some of our—about what we were doing before our arrest, about why Shane and I were living in Damascus, Syria for over a year. You know, I was teaching English to Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, as well as Syrian nationals, in part of a program to help Iraqi refugees apply to college in the United States. And Shane was doing a little journalism. Shane has long been a courageous international journalist focusing on the Middle East.
[…..]
So I talked a lot about our politics, about who we are.
What Ms. Shourd surely told Ahmadinejad is that she and her hiking companions are in sympathy with his cause. They are in the Middle East as Leftwing journalists and anti-Israel political activists (here is an example of Sarah’s work).
While I was not paying attention, others were. Here Debbie Schlussel last year said—let them rot in jail. Earlier this week Jane Jamison, Uncoverage, said this in her post “Sarah Shourd: Shameless Shill for a Dictator.”
The first hypocrisy is the “release” from Iranian jail of anti-American, pro-Palestinian “hiker” Sarah Shourd. She, her “fiancé,” and friend were living in Syria, a notorious terrorism incubator. They had embraced Islam and had written papers critical of the U.S. government and supporting attacks on Israel. Oddly enough, when they were captured last year “accidentally hiking over the border” into Iran, it was the U.S. government and military to whom they whined for help. Funny how that works.
So who employed Sarah Shourd in her “refugee” work—that is what I wanted to know. The State Department? One of the volags?
Turns out after much googling I learned that her employer is a little known (and only a couple of years old) organization called the Iraqi Student Project. A look at the their only public Form 990 reveals that they don’t have much funding and it’s not clear if the little they have comes from government sources or private grants.
475 Riverside Dr. New York, NY
Then I noticed the address on the Form 990. It is 475 Riverside Dr. New York, NY. Why do I recognize that address? Well, its the address for one of the Top Ten federal Refugee Resettlement contractors—Church World Service. A little more research tells me that address is the home of a large number of the religious leftwing organizations that are a driving force behind the American (Marxist/Socialist) left. In addition to Church World Service (and you thought they just did those nice crop walks in your town), others located there are the National Council of Churches, World Council of Churches and I see that Pamela Geller, earlier this month, discussed the NY Society of Muslim Advancement also at that address.
I wonder who owns 475 Riverside Dr. and what else goes on there—- questions for another day.
Do you think anyone there has learned a lesson from the “hikers'” imprisonment about repressive regimes in the Middle East—- Syria and Iran? I doubt it.
Jane Jamison thinks not and colorfully concludes—no more sympathy than for a fly on a cowpie:
All Sarah Shourd cares about are her two flea-bag friends who hated America so much they chose to live in one of the most repressive regimes in the world. You’ll excuse me, but I have more sympathy for a fly on a cowpie.