Update 2 on Hossein

Something is not in order when it comes to Hoder's case. It just doesn't feel right... The more I ponder about it, the more things appear to me as odd, different from other cases.

First of all there is the matter of his sudden change of tone in the recent past, so much so that it turned a lot of us away from him in disgust. Then there is the fact that he did go to Iran, when it was more than obvious that after the Israel trip he will not be welcome there as long as this regime was in power. It also hit me that we know the whereabouts of most, if not all, of the other detainees, their families and lawyers are in touch with them. Hossein is mysteriously invisible. So here are my speculative arguments.

a) For one, he could be in real danger, all being the way it looks from the outside, they just consider his case a special one and for some reason handle it differently,
b) he may have been/may still be in the process of being "debriefed" on his Israeli trip, either voluntarily or under threat, digging up all the minutiae of his trip, making him describe locales, buildings, people to the tiniest details,
c) he may be simply under house arrest somewhere in a secret location, while his absence is used for "jumping the rabbit from the bush", that is, to create a good buzz in the Iranian blogging community, and then have enough ground for arrests, prosecution and the shutting down of the more vociferous supporters.

As a matter of fact, I have second thoughts about the online petition, also. It is known that such petitions do not carry too much weight. They may help raise some marginal awareness in US and Canadian government circles, but that's about it, not much more. Instead, it creates an accessible list of people, a list that can potentially be used by the Iranian government to filter out the names that they could be "interested in".

My suggestion is that it is better if we contact our local government representatives in person and apply the necessary pressure to make them inquire about the case, to see whether our government is or isn't looking into the matter at all and, if necessary, to raise the issue in parliament.