Sometimes you read about “Americans” being detained in one of the countries on the list. The news generally tries to imply it’s someone like Bob Jones and his wife Nancy. But if you delve down to paragraph eighteen, it’s Ali Ben Mohammed. And along about paragraph twenty you find he was visiting his parents and was arrested because he wrote something about the dictator in a social media post five years ago.
I’ve spoken to a man who escaped the Soviet Union and a man who immigrated from Iran, converted to Baptist and married. The Russian said no amount of money could get him to ever visit Russia again. He had nightmares that they’d arrest him, and he’d never come back. The Iranian said, “I loved my family, but the religion is crazy. They’d be required to murder me, my wife and my children. They are believers and I know they’d do it. God, how I miss them.”
Anyone who goes to one of those places is low on intelligence.
Fast forward to the 2010s. My brother has been sent to a very wealthy country in the ME by his company. He did not want to go, but was sort of forced ("do it or get fired.") During that trip, he was sent to a dinner at a sheikh's house. Gold toilets in the bathroom, the whole deal. The sheikh refused to talk business until he had grilled my brother on his family. So my brother entered the interrogation with "My wife's family is from ____." The sheikh replied, "Yes, I know who your wife's family is." My brother said the hair raised up on the back of his neck. He had never even mentioned the family name, so obviously this guy had already researched everything about him before he even showed up. He spent the rest of the week with his head on a swivel and didn't leave his hotel unless he absolutely had to.
My brother returned home and submitted his resignation letter. Unfortunately, he is still married to that idiot, who has gone on to destroy all family connections here. She's a real piece of work.