Was this really the last day? Still groggy from a late night, we gathered in the Lab “al haboker” as they say in Israel (top-o-the morning) and were completely wowed by keynote speaker Marina Nemat, who had been arrested at the age of 16 after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. She spent more than two years in prison, where she was tortured and very nearly executed. And yet, as this lovely, petite woman told us, she was a reluctant revolutionary - a typical teen who liked to hang out with her friends and listen to the Bee Gees. “I didn’t get it until they came for me,” she said.

But the reason she was speaking to us in the first place was not just to share her personal story of long ago. It was to remind is that the terror she experienced 30 years ago is still going on. “The Arab Spring is not new,” she said. “This is not past tense.” This is why she has spent the past five years traveling around the globe, bearing witness to the crimes committed by the Islamic Republic. “If I can do it, any of us can. When something wrong happens don’t walk by it – do something,” she said.