the world has turned and left me here: iran: home of zero gay people

September 24, 2007

iran: home of zero gay people

So Miral decided to show me around the Columbia campus today. At 116th Street, we walked out onto the beautiful campus of New York City's ivy league oasis and, as it happened, into a major media event.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke there today before a huge crowd. Columbia's School of International and World Affairs has drawn much local ire for agreeing to host this thoroughly insane man. On this particular controversy, plenty has already been said elsewhere.

For the record, here are just a few moments of wonderful insanity that I felt the need to document, taken from the transcript of what was regrettably a rather uneven live translation. Probably way funnier in the original Persian.

on homosexuality and drug smuggling

MR. COATSWORTH: Mr. President, another student asks, Iranian women are now denied basic human rights, and your government has imposed draconian punishments, including execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals. Why are you doing those things?

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: [Long digression about drug smugglers.]

MR. COATSWORTH: (Off mike) -- and drug smugglers. The question was about sexual preference and women. (Applause.)

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. (Laughter.) We don't have that in our country. (Booing.) In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it. (Laughter.)

on the definition of science

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: In our culture, the word "science" has been defined as "illumination." In fact, the "science" means "brightness" and the real science is a science which rescues the human being from ignorance to his own benefit. In one of the widely accepted definitions of science, it is stated that it is the light which sheds to the hearts of those who have been selected by the Almighty; therefore, according to this definition, science is a divine gift, and the heart is where it resides.

bush + retarded = funny joke ha ha?

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: So let me just tell a joke here. I think the politicians who are after atomic bombs or are testing them, making them -- politically they are backward, retarded. (Applause.)

on those ever-shifting "truths" of mathematics

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: Why do you want to stop the progress of science and research? Do you ever take what's known as absolute in physics? We had principles in mathematics that were granted to be absolute in mathematics for over 800 years, but new science has gotten rid of those absolutism, gotten -- forward other different logics of looking at mathematics, and sort of turned the way we look at it as a science altogether after 800 years. So we must allow researchers, scholars to investigate into everything, every phenomenon -- God, universe, human beings, history, and civilization. Why should we stop that?

i remember something from history class! really!

PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD: My first question was, if, given that the Holocaust is a present reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives? Our friends refer to 1930 as the point of the departure for this development; however, I believe the Holocaust, from what we read, happened during World War II after 1930 in the 1940s. So, you know, we have to really be able to trace the event.

Posted by Alan at September 24, 2007 09:58 PM

Comments

There's poetry lurking somewhere in that declaration about science residing in the heart.

Posted by: brennen at September 25, 2007 02:43 PM

That or a Coldplay song.

Posted by: Alan at September 27, 2007 05:38 PM

It's a zero-sum game, in some ways.

Posted by: brennen at September 28, 2007 11:17 AM

Thank god Columbia exposed all of the US-Americans (as such in the Iraq and South Africa) to the raving lunatics of this guy. No one can profess ignorance about the Iranian threat with a straight face anymore. Long live public satire.

Posted by: eddy G at September 29, 2007 04:14 PM