The following is written by Emi Hosoda:

My name is Emi Hosoda and I am a physician in the community with a private practice in Enumclaw. I also serve as a hospitalist at Multicare Auburn Medical Center.

I am writing regarding a program known as “Higher Education is Not a Crime Month.” I am a volunteer with this program.

The effort is to show the movie “To Light a Candle” on as many college campuses as possible around the globe to raise awareness for a group of students in Iran who are being denied access to education secondary to their religious beliefs. The students are members of the Bahá’í religious minority in Iran and have been denied access to all basic human rights, including education. The educational institute they have formed in secret and underground, the BIHE (Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education), in order to try to gain some access to education, recently came under attack by the Iranian government.

The Institute is taught mostly online  by volunteer professors around the world from McGill to Oxford to some right here in the Puget Sound was recently raided by the Iranian authorities and  shut down by the government of Iran. On site professors and students were arrested and laptops and study materials confiscated. The movie, “To Light a Candle,” is a documentary which records these students’ extraordinary efforts to obtain an education despite the fact that it puts their very lives in danger. It emphasizes the only privilege they felt is left to them is the privilege of learning and developing their minds.

The movie was made by Maziar Bahari, an Iranian film maker and journalist who was himself imprisoned in Iran under false charges and whose plight is detailed in the Jon Stewart movie, “Rosewater.”

While I do not make comparisons to the Holocaust lightly, my friends of the Jewish faith have compared the plight of the Bahá’ís in Iran who have undergone systematic campaigns of elimination by the Iranian government- from execution (the youngest victim a 16 year old girl who was hanged by the government for teaching children’s classes) and  imprisonment for no other reason than their faith to the ordeals the Jewish people endured under Nazi rule. They have also had their bodies desecrated, their cemeteries and properties plundered and are barred from education and jobs, very similar  to the strategies of the Holocaust. People were shocked when they found the death camps and the evidences of what had happened after World War II. In the case of Iran however, these atrocities are being documented in real time.  Campuses around the world have an opportunity to shine a light on these atrocities the government of Iran feels it is committing in the darkness and to open the eyes of the world to these atrocities, in a context that is relevant to each college’s mission – higher education.

I remember when I was a college student, our many similar efforts shed light on the many injustices of apartheid, and I feel helped in the worldwide effort to help South Africa bring that practice to an end.

I myself am a refugee from Iran but was lucky enough to escape prior to the recent regime’s takeover in 1979. I have had the privilege of growing up being educated in the United States and the privilege of serving others through my profession, but I have not forgotten those left behind.

I invite you to learn more about this campaign at http://educationisnotacrime.me/about.

The film, in support of the “Education is not a Crime” campaign, will be shows at 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28, on the Green River College campus in Auburn (Science Building, Room 101).