Hard to believe a political activist from the former Soviet Union had to emigrate to the United States to get arrested for crimes against the state – but that is indeed what happened to writer and graphic artist Oleg Atbashian ~

“I’m not easily scared. Back in my Soviet dissident days, when I was collecting signatures in defense of Andrei Sakharov, I was screamed at, threatened, and lectured by the KGB and Communist functionaries. What I never imagined was that in the United States, the land of the free, I would not only be subjected to similar treatment, but go to jail for my political activism, which never happened to me even in the USSR.” ~ Oleg Atbashian

 
Atbashian runs my favorite satire website, The People’s Cube. As Daniel Greenfield of Front Page Magazine noted ~
 

Oleg’s mixture of art and satire took off with Communists for Kerry. He’s the mastermind behind The People’s Cube and his tweaking of the radical left and its alliance with Islamic terrorists allowed him to continue the same fight he had pursued in the days of the Soviet Union.
But as the US comes to resemble the USSR, political satire and activism carries a serious price.

 
Last month Oleg teamed up with David Horowitz and his Freedom Center to share the ugly truth about Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) with the naive students at George Mason University. Here’s how he explained their project ~

This was supposed to be a two-day poster campaign, to counteract the George Mason University hosting an official national conference for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is an anti-Semitic organization with well-documented ties to Hamas – a terrorist group whose stated goal is to exterminate the Jews. […]
 
My part in it was to create provocative artwork for the posters and to hang them around the GMU campus, as well as to distribute flyers in order to raise awareness among the students, faculty, and the administration about the true meaning of their support for the SJP conference.

The posters he designed are not exactly offensive (unless you’re a college snowflake who’s easily triggered I suppose) ~
 
 

Oleg describes the whole unfortunate ordeal in detail on his site: Why I was arrested & thrown in jail by @GeorgeMasonU police. Long-story-short he and a colleague hung posters and placed flyers in and around several buildings on the George Mason University campus the day before the SJP Conference was to begin.
 
 
Campus police must have been tipped off about this apparently subversive behavior because when the duo returned the next evening with additional posters they were quickly pulled over, questioned and arrested. They were charged with “destruction of property,” a felony which carries a five year sentence if they’re convicted!

 
The charge is bogus because the property was not “destroyed;” the posters are easily removed with either water or common cleaning solutions (The two offered to remove them themselves but the Fairfax County magistrate was having none of it.).

Oleg apologizes to the janitorial staff who had to do the clean-up – but not to the Stalinesque university administration ~

Some of my friends have since pointed out to me that I did, after all, break the law. Yes, I tell them. And so did Rosa Parks when she broke the law in order to draw attention to the injustice. Her example, followed by many, proved that civil disobedience can be effective in changing unjust laws and customs. I can argue that in our case, we were handcuffed and spent a day in jail not as much for the fact of posting the stickers, but for breaking a much more important, unwritten campus law – we confronted ideological uniformity, also known as political correctness, which in today’s American universities is as oppressive as racism was in Alabama in 1955.
 
I went to that campus to challenge that uniformity, not to get arrested. But if being thrown in jail will help break the cowardly silence on campus, I will consider it a small price to pay for starting an honest conversation about the festering ideological intolerance, lack of free speech, and totalitarian impulses at GMU and other American universities.

It’s a sad day when – just a couple decades after the USSR broke up – American college campuses have become more oppressive than the “Evil Empire” ever was – at least when it comes to free speech. And it’s downright tragic that a college in the United States rashly endorses real evil – rather than objectively allowing both sides of an issue to be presented. Stalin would be proud.

 
Oleg Atbashian’s trial date is set for February 14, 2017. Financial support for legal costs is much appreciated.

 
Jamie Glazov spoke with Oleg about his surreal experience a couple weeks ago ~
 

“I feel as if I’m traveling in a time machine… I have this chill going down my spine.” ~ Oleg Atbashian