Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has invited Dubya to speak at a university in Tehran, returning the favour after his recent visit to Columbia University. Many Iranians were upset at the way in which their President was treated in New York. Iranian blogger Bozorg Sharafedin gets past the headlines:
Unlike what Bollinger said at his speech in Columbia University, Ahmadinejad has no “sign of a dictator”. To find the characteristics of a dictator in Iran’s president one should search deep inside him and read between the lines of his behavior.
It is quite strange that the new dictators of our age (except Putin) do not follow the clichés of dictatorship manner. On the paper, Ahmadinejad and Bush are both good people, highly religious, doing their best to save the world from injustice. Ahmadinejad dines with journalists, speaks for a half an hour about the relationship between man and God and defines the mission of human on earth as pursuit of love, kindness and dignity. We have heard the same lecture from Bush before the invasion of US to Iraq and after huge massacre of innocent Iraqi people.
According to this discourse, filtering of internet is a “moral” act to immune the community from the rotten world and execution of criminals in the public is a virtuous deed.
As always, there are many sides to this story.