Thursday, September 27, 2007
Why Did Right Wingers Oppose Ahmadinejad's Speech When He Sounds So Much Like Them?
"There are no gay people in Iran"
I'm going to say more on the topic of free speech -- hopefully a lot more -- later on, but now that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has given his much-feared, much criticized talk at Columbia University, you really, really have to wonder what those critics were so terrified about. Of course, the sunshine of free speech was today, as always, a disinfectant, exposing Ahmadinejad not just as a hate-monger but as an utter moron.
Especially with this unexpected gem, which drew a huge and well-deserved laugh:
In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that like in your country. ... In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this.
Well, maybe they watched this, for one thing:
But my other question is this. In suggesting that America's problems lie partly in our "phenomenon" of rampant homosexuality, didn't Ahmadinejad sound a lot like our own right-wing pundits like Dinesh D'Souza, Glen Beck. or Pat Robertson, who concured with the late Jerry Falwell when Falwell blamed 9/11 on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle..."?
I'm sure all the TV talking heads and columnists who opined in the recent past that Osama bin Laden sounds just like a blogger on Daily Kos or a member of the Democratic Party are now going to inform America that Ahmadinejad sounds just like a right-wing homphobe, aren't they?
OK, actually I'm not holding my breath on that.
UPDATE: Americablog has the video of Ahmadinejad's remark.
