Oleg Atbashian, the mastermind behind The People’s Cube, was arrested last week for posting anti-jihad posters at George Mason University campus.
The magistrate’s set Oleg’s bail at $8,000 and he could face 5 years in jail for the anti-terror posters.
“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,” Oleg writes.
But that’s exactly what happened to him.
We only had time to hang three large posters when, at about 4am, our car was pulled over by a GMU PD cruiser with flashing lights. As we found out later, they already had a description of our rental KIA Optima. Officer M.J. Guston and his female partner, Officer Daniels, requested to see our drivers’ licenses, which they took away. Then they inquired if we had any weapons and proceeded with the visual search, noticing our bucket with mixed wallpaper paste and some rolled posters on the back seat, covered with towels.
The story sounds Kafkaesque. But it only gets more so.
Officer Daniels told us that the content of our posters was violent and disturbing to some students, especially the one with the Hamas terrorist standing in pools of blood over his dead victims. Such interpretation flipped our message on its head entirely, turning it from sympathy for the victims of violence into a threat of violence.