Innocent, free

The short version: inspired by a book, this is what I think the UK government should have said about a completely absurd hostage deal proposed by the captors.

I've experimented with the words innocent, free, guilty and captive. Playing on key words like that reminds me of Churchill's immortal speeches, such as where he repeated "We will defeat them..." and when he pondered that the end of WWII was not even "the beginning of the end" but may have been "the end of the beginning". Notice also how the captives are first British citizens but become "men".

The long version:

I'm reading Salman Rushdie's memoir of his time hiding from Iranian-backed assassins in his adopted nation of the United Kingdom. It's an excellent memoir covering a myriad of themes, including: ideas of innocence/guilt versus innocence/culpability, freedom as an intrinsic right versus freedom in daily practice and the powers of nations or nation-like groups to make decisions about citizens in other nations.

Can the Iranian heads of state sentence a British man to death while he is in Britain and has never set foot in Iran, for a crime that is not a crime in Britain, and ask all British Muslims to carry out the sentence- the crime of Murder in Britain? Many thought so.

What happens when militant groups in Lebanon (funded by Iran) seize citizens from the UK & US in an attempt to leverage those nation's decisions, including about other nations: Palestine and Israel? Why are private citizens, not in Lebanon representing their own nation's governments, seized illegally and used as blackmail in international politics over which those individuals have no control? Now there's an interesting definition of the term "globalisation" and interpretation of the mantra, "think global, act local!"

Rushdie chronicles how these UK citizens, kidnapped by Iranian-funded Lebanese attempting to effect change in Palestine, were offered to be released to the UK in exchange for another of their citizens. The Lebanese captors would take Palestine out of the equation for a moment and return the UK citizens they kidnapped if the UK kidnapped their own citizen, Salman Rushdie, and give him to Lebanon instead, because Iran decreed Rushdie's guilt. The UK citizens, kidnapped in Lebanon and who had nothing to do with Palestine, were being let off the hook on the Palestinian issue and used instead in a trade about a book they had nothing to do with, which displeased another nation they had never visited. Families and other voices in the UK called for Rushdie to apologise for writing his book in the hopes the people who had nothing to do with it would be released. They called for the publishers to refuse to publish the paperback version of the inflammatory book also hoping that would speed the release of the captives who had nothing to do with its publication. However the UK-based advocates for the captives seemed to understand that to deliver the captors Rushdie instead was an high impossibility, even if many tried to hold an author responsible for the actions of a militant group.

The wider story is messier, more complex and involves many more nations, entities and individuals from those nations. One day a dying old man in Iran made a declaration about a book he was too sick to read and a good chunk of the world went into a dangerous tizzy about a British author.

My piece is what the British government could have said to the Lebanese captors, showing them the folly of their asking for Rushdie in exchange for their current captives, and imploring the captors to do the right thing, finally, because it is simply the right thing.