2 YEARS TOO LONG
3000 DAYS without FREEDOM ~ Rebecca ‘Walker’ Christoforo
Aug 25th
When hikers Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer were tried in Iran several weeks ago, I felt a kind of quiet excitement settle into our campaign. It was obvious that they would be acquitted, having already spent two years in prison for a crime they did not commit. Their story, their passports, travel documents, and witnesses all showed the authorities what we, their family and friends, knew all along. Josh and Shane are simply the curious type, people who enjoy seeing things with their own eyes. They are not reckless, nor are they militant, and it would be even more absurd to assume they have a contract with the American government. I think a lot of us felt a sense of finality after the trial, and we began the preparations to welcome them home. But this morning, I received a call telling me that they had been charged with espionage and sentenced to 8 years of prison. 8 years. That’s almost 3000 days of waking up without fresh air, without sunshine, without games and books. 3000 days without direction and purpose, without the freedom to choose your lunch or ride your bicycle or listen to music. I don’t think most of us can comprehend the lifetimes that go by while living in confinement, or the desperation that can set in when we feel our autonomy stripped away and humanity ignored.
To fight this desperation, Josh and Shane have been ‘hunger striking’, or refusing to eat until concessions are made in their favor. It gives them leverage against their jailors, for (as terrible as it sounds) they are only valuable if alive. Shane’s fiancee Sarah Shourd, who was imprisoned with them but released for health reasons, tells us that they have already fasted several times to receive information about their case. Although she has had no contact with the two since returning home a little less than a year ago, she knows that they are continuing to fast- perhaps to receive letters, books, or more time in the courtyard.
Josh teaching IHP Health & Community 2009 students in Geneva, Switzerland
It is sad that Josh, who has studied and grown food so passionately, would be forced to take such measures. Before I knew him, he was working at the Aprovecho Sustainability Center, where he spent several weeks eating only foods that came from a 100-mile radius of the farm, which included a pilgrimage to the Oregon coast for salt. A couple of years later, in 2009, we met while traveling with a community health study abroad program. He was the teaching fellow, which placed him somewhere in between us students and our professors. Josh didn’t teach often, but when he did his lessons were always memorable and frequently beautiful. There was one class in particular that stands out to me now, those first days of the program in Switzerland. Josh began the class by asking us to think about our relationship with food, and reminding us that all good food comes from sunlight and clean water. He used the ‘power point’ program as a way to illustrate his ideas. The slides were simple, with no images and just a couple words. One looked like this:
FOOD = SUNLIGHT
It is a simple idea, and one that often gets forgotten in refrigerated aisles, but it was the beginning of a lesson that Josh would continue to impress upon us as the semester continued. Food is not something to be taken for granted, but something to cherish and consider. To know this can change how you relate to the world.
As I ate today, and thought of Josh and his hunger fasting, and of the many others who have fasted in protest, I couldn’t help but feel it is a true crime that a man who has such a connection to his food would have to use it as a means to an end. Food equals sunlight, but in Evin prison food equals power and information. With the recent verdict on his trial, and with only 20 days to appeal, we anticipate that Josh and Shane will continue to fast. It is in solidarity with them that I, and several other students who traveled with Josh in 2009, will continue to fast as well.
Rebecca ‘Walker’ Christoforo
Statement from the Bauer and Fattal families after verdict
Aug 21st
“Of the 751 days of Shane and Josh’s imprisonment, yesterday and today have been the most difficult for our families. Shane and Josh are innocent and have never posed any threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran, its government or its people.
We are encouraged that the Iranian Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, has said he hopes the case will proceed in a manner that will result in Shane and Josh’s freedom. We appeal to the authorities in Iran to show compassion and allow them to return home to our families without delay.
We also ask everyone around the world who trusts in the benevolence of the Iranian people and their leaders to join us in praying that Shane and Josh will now be released.”
~ Bauer and Fattal families and Sarah Shourd
“As we wandered together, Josh reminded us who we were and what we could be” ~ Leah Katzelnick
Aug 4th
On July 31, 2009, I had stumbled into a small Internet café in Managua, Nicaragua to read tidings from the United States. My inbox was flooded with the news that my mentor, teacher, and dear friend Josh Fattal, as well as Sarah Shourd and Shane Bauer, had been taken into custody by the Iranian authorities. I circled around the block on that bright morning and cried with frustration on the curb. A blossoming tree embraced me with its laden branches; Josh’s imprisonment could not have seemed more strange and distant in that moment.
IHP is built on the principle of uprooting its students, casting them adrift in the magnificent, edifying school of the world. Our books were conversations, our classrooms villages and non-profits. Everyone we met was our teacher. In the midst of continuous change, Josh was a focus of stability, a pivot point in our transformative journey. He was there to make us laugh, to lead us on to the next adventure, and always to reflect with us. When our minds were unmoored he philosophized us into the docks of heightened awareness, when we were lonely he culled from within us memories that revived our wearied souls. As we wandered together, Josh reminded us who we were and what we could be, connecting our seemingly lost and our realized selves.
I have wandered a great deal since our journey together. I passed my summer after the International Honors Program to India, China and South Africa in Nicaragua; devoted my last year at university exploring what I had learned of NGOs and volunteering during my travels on IHP and in Nicaragua; spent a summer studying Dengue Fever in a lab in North Carolina; and passed the next year pursuing a Masters in Public Health in England. Not only did Josh help guide me towards this path, but his imprint on my thought process allows me to re-equilibrate as environment and ideas whirl around me in endless flurry. Yet, while I have migrated, he has been confined and restricted. In a dulled environment, he is deprived of that world of change, the world that moves and inspires and nurtures. His sustenance is memories and the few shreds of correspondence that reach his dank cell.
What Josh always provided us with was comfort amidst the strangeness of change, grounding and familiarity within the foreign. Josh, the most positive, optimistic, vibrant person I have ever met, is certain to search for this home within the foreign, comfort despite suffering. I cannot possibly imagine the courage this requires. We hope our fast and love for Josh will stir the unmoving, embrace him with the familiar, and sustain in him, and the world, a vision of freedom. We hope to act as a stimulus to bring him home.
~ 
Leah Katzelnick
IHP Health and Community, ’09
VIDEO: Josh’s 29th Birthday…Cottage Grove style
Aug 3rd
The prayerboats were sent off at dusk on Josh’s birthday, Main St, Cottage Grove, where the river flows sweet and straight right through town. We made 40 or more boats altogether during his birthday party. Kids, elders, Josh’s friends and family, some media, a couple that drove from out of town to leave a donation.
We sent the boats out to river in a line, handing them off like a firemen’s bucket brigade. Hand to hand. The first one, made of moss, caught fire and went out in a little boat blaze as it floated downriver. Josh would’ve liked that. Out to sea! Everyone stayed on the riverbank and the old covered bridge a long time. The the cloudy sky blazed in an eruption of pink and red fire – a sunset the likes of which we hadn’t seen for a long while.
Before the launch, we played games in the middle of large heart make of knotted scarves. We broke bread together. Sliced up a 10 layer cake baked in the shape of a Ziggurat. Sat in a circle around an altar full of flowers, candles, art, animal totems. We exchanged presents to honor Josh’s desire for a generosity based economy, trading with friends and neighbors. Everyone had stories of Josh and offered their gifts to the circle. We called the center of the circle “the fire” in memory of Josh ecstatically throwing his favorite shirt into a fire at at party.
Everyone cried when Alex threw Josh’s 2nd favorite shirt with the Zapatista red star on it, into the “fire”. At the end, our community put the t-shirt up on a wall at the bookstore. His brother took home a piece of 100yr old yew wood with a poem about surviving the fires that surround you. We agreed we should keep the rest for Josh.
We are so grateful for Josh’s life, we love him so.
Tegra Fisk and the Cottage Grove community
VIDEO: Happy Birthday Shane: Shane Bauer in the eyes of his loved ones
Aug 3rd
In the days leading up to a decision in Iranian courts regarding innocent hikers Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, this video, first shown at a birthday tribute to Shane, takes a closer look at Shane’s work as a journalist/photographer before his captivity in Iran.
Here some of Shane’s closest friends, colleagues and family members talk about why Shane first traveled to the Middle East, why he began intensively studying Arabic when he was 19 and why he became a journalist and photographer.
Filmed by Natalie Avital and edited by Bobby Field. Additional footage from David Martinez and Jacqueline Soohen.
Astounding Rally in New York for Shane & Josh ~ Sarah Shourd
Jul 30th
Hey Friends, Family and Supporters,
It was an incredible, peaceful, loving and heart-breaking rally in NYC to mark two terrible years of injustice for Shane and Josh. There were probably over a hundred people there and a ton of media. Alex was the MC; we opened with a moving Muslim Prayer from Mr. Shahid Mahmoud; there was theatre on the sidelines highlighting Shane and Josh’s conditions; Laura, Al and I spoke from the heart; Faraz Sneai from Human Rights Watch shared his expertise; Tegra led a chant, incredible signs were abundant; the crowd was dotted with masks of Shane and Josh’s beautiful faces; Farah brought amazing banners and we lined the square and people, so many incredible people! I met friends and relatives of Shane and Josh’s that I had only ever heard about (these guys have so many friends!), people I hadn’t seen in years showed up with kids in tow, there were parents-of-friends, friends-of-parents and many others supporters that have simply joined our campaign because they were morally compelled to.
Josh's mother Laura Fattal speaking Photo: Olin Winn-Ritzenberg
The pictures will give you a better idea than my words can. Today, and this entire week, have been one of the most profound shows of support I’ve personally experienced since I got free; it gave me a small glimpse of all of the vigils I missed the first 14 months and the incredible work that was put into them. Enormous thanks to everyone who was involved in making this week happen; I know there are thousands upon thousands who were there today in spirit and trust me, your spirit came through. I think today really helped set the right tone and get out our message before the trial this weekend. I’m imaging all the candles being lit everywhere and all the prayers as I write this.
Sarah
![Shane-Josh-header4[1]](http://fthblog.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Shane-Josh-header41-64x64.jpg "Shane-Josh-header4[1]")
PRESS RELEASE: Families of Shane Bauer & Josh Fattal Lead Rally of Hope & Prayer in New York
Jul 29th
July 29, 2011
FAMILIES OF SHANE BAUER AND JOSH FATTAL LEAD RALLY OF HOPE AND PRAYER IN NEW YORK TWO DAYS BEFORE THEIR “FINAL” COURT HEARING IN TEHRAN
Trial Session Timed for Second Anniversary of Their Detention
The families of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal will lead a peaceful rally of hope outside the Iranian Mission to the United Nations in New York at noon EDT on Friday, less than 48 hours before the two Americans are scheduled to appear in an Iranian court. Tehran’s Chief Prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi has said he expects the court to take a “final decision” in the case on Sunday, the second anniversary of their arrest.
Bauer, a freelance photojournalist, and Fattal, an environmental advocate, both 29, are charged with illegal entry and are falsely accused of espionage.
“If there is fairness in Iran’s legal system, their release is close at hand. I ask everyone here to pray for the next 36 hours until Shane and Josh walk into that courtroom, so that when they walk out they are finally free men and can begin their journey back into our arms,” Bauer’s father Al Bauer said in remarks prepared for the rally.
Bauer and Fattal were arrested with Bauer’s fiancée, Sarah Shourd, on July 31, 2009 on the unmarked border between Iran and Kurdistan, a safe and semi-autonomous area of northern Iraq where they were hiking during a vacation. Shourd, who is 32, was released last September after 410 days in solitary confinement.
Shourd, who had been living in the Middle East with her fiancé until their arrest, used her statement to wish Muslims in Iran and everywhere a Blessed Ramadan on behalf of the families of the two men. “Please, if you could make a little room in your prayers on the eve of Ramadan for my fiancé, my friend and our families, it would mean the world to us,” she said.
“I know in my heart that when Shane and Josh walk out of prison, they will hold no bitterness towards anyone. I pray that day is very soon. And I know their hearts will be filled with the same love and respect for the world that they had two years ago. If anything, they will have more,” Shourd added.
Bauer and Fattal were not formally charged until Shourd’s release last September and have appeared in court only once – on February 6 this year when they testified to their innocence verbally and in writing. Their last contact with their families was on May 22, in one of only three brief telephone calls home they have been able to make since their arrest.
Fattal’s mother Laura Fattal, Faraz Sanei, Middle East Researcher for Human Rights Watch and Shahid Mahmood, prominent Muslim-American from the New York area, were also scheduled to address the rally. Bauer and Fattal will be represented in court by their Iranian lawyer, Mr. Masoud Shafii.
“We do not expect to get much sleep between now and Sunday,” Laura Fattal said. “The judiciary in Iran says it will be the final hearing. We hope and pray that this is true. Josh and Shane are clearly innocent. 730 days is more than enough. It is time for them to get back to their lives. That time is now.”
![Shane-Bauer-Sarah-Shourd-Josh-Fattal[1]](http://fthblog.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Shane-Bauer-Sarah-Shourd-Josh-Fattal1-64x64.jpg "Shane-Bauer-Sarah-Shourd-Josh-Fattal[1]")
We NEED you tomorrow NYC! ~ Sarah Shourd
Jul 28th
Dear Friends,
Tomorrow is Friday, the big day already! I am writing because I noticed on Facebook that there are quite a few people that have signed up as “maybes” for the protest tomorrow for Shane and Josh in NYC. I just want to say, if there’s ANY doubt in your mind as to whether your presence will make a difference, let me reassure you it will make a HUGE difference to me, to Shane and Josh’s families, supporters and to the large entourage of media outlets from around the world that we expect to be there tomorrow!
Having a big group of supportive people standing by us tomorrow will turn what is bound to be a very difficult day at the end of a long, stressful week (at the end of two arduous, unbelievable years!) into a very difficult but BEAUTIFUL experience. Please, please try and come out! Hopefully, we’ll be telling Shane and Josh all about it very soon!
RSVP to and share our event blog post and facebook event listing! Thank you!
Big Love! Sarah
2 YEARS TOO LONG for Shane and Josh!!!
Jul 22nd
July 31, 2011 will be the second anniversary of Josh and Shane’s unjust detention and their “final hearing” in an Iranian court.
We need to call out LOUD and CLEAR for their far too long denied FREEDOM!!!
We need YOU to participate in three key 2 YEARS TOO LONG initiatives designed to do just that.
Please click on the links below for more information about each initiative.
1. Peaceful Protest, Iranian Mission to the UN, New York City, July 29 12pm ET
PLEASE join families, friends and supporters of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal in this protest that will kick off a 2 YEARS TOO LONG Weekend of Mobilization around the world!
Wear white and bring posters, banners, signs, hiking gear and most importantly your VOICES!
2. Week of Action: One Million Voices for Shane & Josh: International call in blitz, July 25-29
The San Francisco Bay Area supporters of Shane and Josh invite you to join One Million Voices for Shane and Josh; an international call-in blitz on the Iranian Interests section in Washington D.C. the week before their trial in Tehran.
Let’s remind the Iranian government that the whole world is watching and wants Bauer and Fattals’ immediate release to their family! Spread the word to make this the loudest reminder possible!
3. Weekend of Global Mobilization, July 29-31
We are calling on YOU to take action in your community, in whichever way feels right for you. You can put up posters in your community, you can light a candle, you can say a prayer, you can record a video or write a song, you can write an op-ed or post a blog, you can screen ‘Free Shane and Josh: An Urgent Plea for Compassion’ (available on DVD), and you can hold an event and invite your local media to cover it. The important thing is that you make yourself visible, make yourself heard, and make it crystal clear that enough is enough! This is our chance to show Iran the range of people and communities who are determined to see Josh and Shane free. We urge you to join us in what we pray will be the final push for their FREEDOM!
And last but certainly not least! Our Solidarity Fast for Shane and Josh continues and will continue until they are FREE! Show your solidarity with Shane, Josh, Sarah and their families and friends as they hunger strike for their rightful FREEDOM! You will be following in the footsteps of high profile peace activists and former political prisoners around the world participating! Read a sampling of their inspiring reflections here < FREEDOM FAST > and contribute your own!
We urge you to join us in what we pray will be the final push for their FREEDOM!
We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your solidarity.
~ The Bauer, Fattal and Shourd Families and the Free the Hikers team
2 YEARS TOO LONG Peaceful Protest – NYC – July 29, 12pm ET
Jul 21st
Bring printed copies of this postcard to hand out!
PLEASE join families, friends and supporters of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal in this protest that will kick off a 2 YEARS TOO LONG Weekend of Mobilization around the world!
**Two Years is Far Too Long – Iran Must Free Shane and Josh Now!**
On July 29th, two days before American hikers Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal stand trial on the second anniversary of their wrongful imprisonment in Iran, their families, friends and supporters will hold a peaceful protest in front of the Iranian Mission to the United Nations in New York City. Please join the families of these two innocent peace activists and Sarah Shourd, who spent 14 months in prison with them, to attest to Shane and Josh’s innocence and demand their freedom!
The Iranian judiciary has announced that a final decision in Shane and Josh’s case will be made at a court hearing on July 31st. The only final decision we will accept is their FREEDOM!
Come out on July 29th, let’s raise our voices and show the WORLD that Shane and Josh have more support than ever!
SOME SUGGESTIONS
• Bring POSTERS, BANNERS, SIGNS!
Be creative and bring as many as you can.
• Wear as much WHITE as you can.
If possible wear a white t-shirt with writing on it expressing your solidarity with Shane and Josh
• Bring HIKING GEAR
Bring/wear boots, backpacks, small tents, etc.
• Bring printed photographs of Shane and Josh and artwork
Bring large printed photos of Shane and Josh and any campaign related artwork that you’ve been inspired to make.
PLEASE RSVP and invite your family, friends and networks!
RSVP and share our 2 YEARS TOO LONG NYC Peaceful Protest facebook event listing and/or share this blog post.
THANK YOU and we look forward to seeing you in New York!
