Hatred has gone viral on the internet, where anonymous strangers (many of them in broken and often incomprehensible English, leading to doubts about their motives and affiliation) use them as a lightning rod for what can sometimes seem like every political grievance surrounding Iran, with whom the U.S. has had no diplomatic ties since 1979. Shane and Josh, two unwitting UC Berkeley grads, have become a rare window into Iran, and a way for people to vent their frustrations about everything from Zionism to excessive "do-gooder-ism."

Reading online discussion of the hikers' case and talking to Americans about it, there often seems to be an overwhelming and, frankly, incomprehensible lack of compassion from people who believe they deserve their fate. "Being American and being close to a country with no diplomatic ties to the U.S. and most other western countries, was mindless," read one such comment on an Al Jazeera post. "If you walk along the edge of a cliff and fall off you cannot blame the cliff."

And that's a nice one. Nine people 'liked' it.

What their detractors don't see is the harsh reality of life for these two men, a life that -- if Iran gets its way -- will means an entire decade away from home. We all make mistakes. Sometimes they're grave. Imagine your own mistake leading to Evin prison, the most notorious in Iran. There they share a 10 by 14 foot cell. It's where they eat, sleep, bathe, and use the bathroom, 23 hours per day.

Fattal, who used to wander the roads of Bangalore and sit on the roof of his home in South Africa, is surrounded by concrete. Bauer, who had achieved full fluency in Arabic -- a feat unattained by many Western journalists in the region -- sits on his bed, unable to report the violence raging in Syria, where he had been living at the time of the hike. Their close-knit families have had next to no contact with them since July 2009, save for one short visit by their mothers in May 2010 and two 5-minute phone calls home, one of which came this spring after the boys went on a two-week hunger strike.

It's a fate that seems harsh punishment for even the severest of criminals. But the hikers have seen not an outpouring of compassion. Surprisingly, the response has been one of such negativity Los Angeles Times columnist Megan Daum dedicated a column to the odd phenomenon earlier this summer, coining the term "hiker hate."

President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and foreign dignitaries -- everyone from Desmond Tutu to Iranian Nobel winner Shirin Ebadi and Muhammad Ali -- have defended the hikers against Tehran's allegations of spying for the CIA, for which no evidence has ever been produced. Still, posters on anonymous message boards on media and political sites have for the last two years questioned why they were hiking in such an unstable area, asserting time and again that "they got what they deserved." With the weekend's sentence came a new flood that prompted one of Josh's close friends to message that she was "beyond belief ... at the hate on our site and all over the net."