Who is a racist? Not Iran!

Al-Ahram Weekly | Focus | Of banality and burden: "Ahmadinejad's September 2007 visit to Columbia was overwhelmingly dominated not by the inanities that he repeated in his talk, nor indeed by the horrors the Islamic Republic has perpetrated against its own citizens over the last three decades, but in fact by the rude and racist remarks that Lee Bollinger made when introducing him. In his own remarks, Ahmadinejad said nothing outside his regular nonsense--yet again effectively denying the suffering of millions of human beings and their descendents during and in the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust, denying that there are even homosexuals in Iran, denying Iranian women are the second rate citizens in their own country. No amount of footnotes or linguistic, political, or cultural fine- tuning can excuse these inexcusable obscenities. No degree of solidarity with the Palestinian cause can ever translate into denying or belittling the monumental suffering of other human beings viciously murdered in their millions by the German Nazis in European concentration camps in the course of the Jewish Holocaust. No cultural explication of the difference between the varieties of homoeroticism in Iran and outside Iran can explain the fact that non-heterosexual practices in the Islamic Republic are severely repressed, denigrated, or even punished. No amount of cultural finagling can change the fact that Iranian women live in a legally sanctioned"