But reactions to her recent tweet were swift, and has so far attracted more than 1,000 responses — almost all negative. One person named Baran tweeted bitterly: “Religious police patrols, censorship, prisons, torture, medieval confessions… sounds like democracy to me.” Another pointed to the fact that Ebtekar’s son has been studying in the US, just as she herself and her father had done before: “You were enriched and sent your kids to the country whose house [embassy] you used to raid.”
After seeing these reactions from, I wondered how Ambassador John W. Limbert — one of the 53 American diplomats taken hostage in 1979 — would react to Ebtekar’s tweet. In a phone conversation on the morning of February 3, I asked him what he felt about it. Limbert’s ties to run deep. He speaks Persian fluently and elegantly and during our conversation, we switched between the two languages.
