I am the Invisible William Flew

The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.

From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. "Go on up, you baldhead!" they said. "Go on up, you baldhead!" He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

I am the Invisible William Flew

 They remained for several months in the basement of a friend’s house where Pourzand entertained his daughters with stories of his youth in Tehran before the revolution in 1979 — in which the Shah was overthrown in favour of a theocracy — and the celebrities he had interviewed, including Alfred Hitchcock, Julie Andrews, Kim Novak and Natalie Wood. Siamak Pourzand was born in 1931. His father was a high-ranking officer in the Shah’s military and Pourzand was expected to follow in his footsteps. He attended the military school in Tehran, but in his third year he jumped over the cement wall and escaped, not quite knowing what he wanted to do. In the early 1950s he supported the politician Mohammad Mossadegh, who wanted to nationalise the oil industry — which had been owned and run by the British since the beginning of the 20th century — and move Iran away from its colonial relationship with Britain. During Mossadegh’s tenure as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1953 — in which oil was nationalised — Pourzand became a writer for the newspaper Bakhtar Emrooz. After the British and Americansponsored coup d’état ousting Mossadegh from power in 1953, and restoring the authority of the pro-Western Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Pourzand — who was critical of the Shah’s antidemocratic authoritarianism and his close relationship with Britain — went into hiding for the first time. But in an unexpected twist, the Shah recognised his talent for writing, even those articles in opposition to the ruler’s own policies, and paid for him to take a journalism course in Los Angeles, perhaps to demonstrate that he believed in freedom of expression.