When taking photos is a crime

MOHAMMED RADWAN was arrested by the Syrian dictatorship for taking pictures during the protests and subsequent government violence. He was taken on March 25 and forced to confess on video. In the video, he states that someone contacted him requesting he sell his photos. For this, he is imprisoned, and his family has yet to be able to see him.

News articles regarding his case have been inconsistent, and the changing claims they make are baseless. First, the media stated that he was being charged with selling his footage to a Colombian woman. Then they said he was spying for Israel and had traveled to that country secretly.

Anyone who knows Mohammed knows that he has always been principled in his pro-Palestinian views. Now the articles state that he was arrested for photographing the protests. This is not a crime.

Mohammed is the perfect scapegoat for the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who would like to believe that it is 20,000 outside agitators protesting in his country, and not his own citizenry. Mohammed isn't from Syria; he holds dual Egyptian and U.S. citizenship. He is the most non-threatening person I have ever met. He loves to travel, take pictures, go to concerts and talk with everybody. To the butcher Assad, this is a threat.

This is the real reason he was arrested. Dictatorships never want the outside world to know what is truly happening inside their countries--especially when they are instituting bloody crackdowns on their citizens.

It has become standard procedure during the ongoing revolutions and days of rage in the Middle East and North Africa to hear dictators use the same tired excuses for the unrest. It is usually foreign agitators, drugs, Israel, Al Jazeera, al-Qaeda or crazy people. It is never the U.S.-backed dictatorship that has oppressed its people for decades which is to blame for the states of emergency, mass imprisonment, income inequality and mass torture.

During the Tahrir occupations of the Egyptian revolution, the constant media attention and solidarity actions around the world helped put external pressure on Hosni Mubarak to resign, and pressure on the governments around the world to also pressure Mubarak to resign.

Right now, while the Syrian people are protesting, Assad can still attempt to control the external flow of information and threaten and kill his people with impunity. The more journalists arrive, or protesters send their pictures across the Internet, the greater the possibility of solidarity actions and external pressure increasing.

MOHAMMED HAS not broken the law. He is a 32-year-old engineer who has been working in Syria. He is a political prisoner and, as a U.S. citizen, deserves the support of his government.

His brother has been tweeting that the U.S. and Egyptian governments have been helpful in regards to this case. U.S. officials should make a public statement regarding Mohammed's release. This will help add more pressure on the Syrian government and show that they care about the well-being of their citizenry.

But Mohammed's arrest has also exposed the hypocrisy of the U.S. and its media. The media has been quick to condemn my friend for spying or whatever other trumped-up charges the Syrian state has come up with. At the same time, they condemn Assad and are attempting to lay the groundwork for a possible U.S. intervention in the near future.

If we know that Assad is a dictator, why would the media spread the lies that Assad's state TV is spreading about Mohammed? If the U.S. were really interested in democracy and human rights, any senator or Congress member should be calling for the butcher to release my friend!

Mohammed's only crime was to want democracy. To Assad, that's enough to lock him away indefinitely. Already, Mohammed has been moved to a "less scary" prison, according to his cousin, but so far, his family hasn't seen him or heard the status of his health.

We need to raise as big an outcry as possible, for his release and prove once again that the people united are stronger than dictators.