Sunday evenings are the only days I tend to watch TV. After a long week filled with essays and first exams, my mind needed some numbing last Sunday. I watched my cardiac Browns as they let a victory slip between their fingers. Then I watched “60 Minutes,” the one show I can still trust.
There were some interesting topics on this show: the growing chain of stores in California selling medicinal marijuana and the interview with famous Russian chess player Garry Kasparov and how he was entering Russian politics to end the police state of Russia. But the segment of this show that attracted me most was the interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
I was intrigued by this segment because it gave me the ability to try to understand this man. What causes him to believe in what he believes? Is he an evil man like our government tells us? Or is he just a simple religious man born of a blacksmith? For those of you who didn’t get a chance to watch this interview, I want to bring up his opening answer to a question from the “60 Minutes” Web site. Scott Pelley started the interview by asking, “Do you have a greeting to the American people?”
In response, Ahmadinejad said, “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful, I would like to greet the American people and the good nations around the world. Right now we are in the city of Tehran. It’s in the afternoon of an autumn day. We’re in the open air in a garden. And the air is pleasant. And fall, little by little, is settling in, mixing with the summer breeze. I guess ” I very much hope that nations around the world start their days with peace, friendship and happiness.”
When I heard this I thought this didn’t sound evil at all. It brought a warm feeling to my heart because of the strength he has in his faith.
The headlines were all over Ahmadinejad later in the week because of his appearances at Columbia University and the United Nations Assembly. His appearances, especially the appearance at Columbia University, show the greatness of this country.
In this country, we give a voice to all opinions, whether they agree or fall off the edge of the globe, like Ahmadinejad’s opinions can. Our media only focused on these events and some particular comments he made about homosexuality and the holocaust. One lesser known event he attended was the gathering of religious leaders at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York. We tend to forget Ahmadinejad is a religious man from a religious country and speaks best in religious formats. The purpose of this gathering was to push for more dialogue between the nations of Iran and the United States. This is what Ahmadinejad wants. He wants respect for himself and for his country that has a vast history of more than 2,500 years.
I’m not going to sit here and say I support this man. This would be quite hypocritical because I believe in the state of Israel and I get quite angry when he states his denial of the holocaust. However, when I sat and watched this interview, read articles in the paper about the Columbia and U.N. invitations, I wondered what made this man so powerful in the eyes of Western nations like the United States.
We have put him up on a pedestal and made him look like the most evil, hated man in the world. We created this image of a vast, powerful man because of lack of dialogue between our countries and by claiming that Iran is part of the “Axis of Evil.” During the U.N. assembly, when Ahmadinejad took the podium, all representatives of the United States left the hall except for a simple note taker. I think back on Reagan and Gorbachev, and how what ended the Cold War was the simple dialogue between their two nations. Reagan realized that to end this stand off was to engage in conversation rather than shut it off.
Today, the United States has shut off diplomatic dialogue from nations like Syria and Iran, and because of this, they have created a wall of hatred for both. A wall where there is only judgment from both sides, rather than understanding. This is hypocritical. Here we are, as a nation, trying to uphold the values of democracy around the world, and yet we are shutting off dialogue between other nations. The beauty of democracy is for all voices and views to be heard, dissenting or not. I guess in America we follow a selective democracy, one that shuts off certain people and creates the basis for hatred and eventual war.
