Has free speech in America come to this? The 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot
publish her memoirs in this country because of a U.S. trade embargo regulation “intended to
punish repressive governments such as the regime in Tehran that once sent her to jail,” The Wall Street Journal
reports this morning.
The irony is mind-boggling. WSJ reporter Jess Bravin writes, “When Shirin Ebadi won the
Nobel Peace Prize last year, President Bush congratulated the Iranian lawyer and children’s
advocate for ‘her lifetime championing human rights and democracy.'” Yet “when Ms. Ebadi
sought to publish her memoirs in the U.S., she was startled to discover that doing so would be
illegal. …”
So last week Ebadi’s American literary agency sued the U.S. Treasury Department, which
enforces the embargo regulation, for ignoring “congressional directives to exempt information and
creative works from the trade sanctions, and more broadly violat[ing] the First Amendment rights
of Americans to read what they wish.”
Ebadi contends in an affidavit that the restrictions “seem to defy the values the United States
promotes throughout the world, which always include free expression and the free exchange of
ideas.” Seem to? That’s being charitable.
And here’s another peculiar irony. “The way the Treasury Department interprets the trade
embargo,” Bravin writes, “Ms. Ebadi would have been free to publish a translation of her book in
the U.S. had it originally been issued in Iran.”
If this were a movie pitch, it would be Shirin Ebadi meets Franz Kafka in “Amerika,” a claustrophobic land where, as one reviewer put
it, the Statue of Liberty holds “the sword in her hand instead of the torch — a symbol of war and
violence instead of freedom and enlightenment.”
