“They told me quite explicitly just that ‘we need a deal with America,’ ” he tells Steve Inskeep of NPR’s Morning Edition.
“They were very straightforward about that,” he says. “They said, ‘We want our money back from the United States. We want our detainees back, and you have to be a spy in order for that to happen.’ ”
~XiYue Wang
XiYue Wang became an American citizen eight years after he emigrated, and he is “proud” to be an American. His speech is so full of vital information including the foolish approach of American foreign policy and the infiltration of Iranian thugs in higher education, and mosques.
The troubling infiltration comes at the end.
Wang said he felt “naïve” for his earlier belief that Iran truly wanted peace with the U.S. He blames academe and the media for nurturing this false impression, stressing that “things I assumed that the Iranian regime would appreciate, like, say, pursuing business and cultural ties with other countries, were used to put people in jail. In fact, me saying things like, I believe President Obama should visit Iran, was used against me in an Iranian court as ‘evidence’ that I was really in Iran to pursue regime change.”
Wang was shocked that when he returned to the U.S. as a result of a 2019 prisoner swap orchestrated by former U.S. Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook, many at Princeton blamed his ordeal on the Trump Administration rather than Iran, even though he was imprisoned before Trump was elected. He was shocked that a real-world rebuke of their soft-on-Iran academic theories failed to convince Princeton’s professors to reconsider their views of the Islamic Republic. Wang said Princeton “hasn’t so much as voluntarily given me an extension on time to complete my Ph.D.” and that the university is home to both a former Iranian ambassador and an Iranian cleric, “neither of which did anything to help me during my ordeal.”
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