Two days ago, I watched Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University live on Al Jazeera television. I am happy I did not miss the live program, because from then on, it has been carefully edited on televisions worlwide. The Iranian press and media reflect the event as a very successful one and go so far as to call the president a "hero". At the other end of the spectrum, are televisions like CNN which particularly focus on Ahamdinejad's response on the homosexuality issue. I was not at all happy with the way Ahmadinejad performed at the event, however, I think one thing people in the west are not considering is the "culture gap". The language we speak in Iran sounds disorganized, provocative and too religious to the western ear. Therefore, some of Ahamdinejad's words, specially what he said about homosexuals, were not taken for what they really meant.

When he was asked about homosexuals in Iran, he said "اولا در ايران ما هم جنس باز مثل كشور شما نداريم" which was translated into "first of all, we do not have homosexuals in iran like in your country". There is a lingual mismatch here. What the Persian sentence means to an Iranian is: "We don't have as many homosexuals in our country as you do in yours" which is what he truly meant and is probably accepted by many. To an English speaker however, the translation states that there are absolutely no homosexuals in Iran and so, he was booed for what he said. You can see that although the translation is literally correct, the message it carries is different. Apart from that, there is a cultural mismatch in between. In Iran, homosexuality is still regarded as a taboo. It is considered inappropriate to speak about it and people, specially in formal gatherings, shy away from the topic. For the same reason, government officials tend to ignore the issue and deny its existance. I think when Ahmadinejad said there weren't any homosexuals in Iran, he was not speaking scientifically and in terms of numbers, he was rather denying the existance of a phenomenon that sounded "extremely embarassing" to him. If our president was more aware of current issues and more literate in western culture and English language, he would not possibly have humiliated himself the way he did.

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