Columbia Protests,
originally uploaded by anupkaphle.

“In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”

Despite a polarized audience at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech in Columbia today, youthful piss and vinegar actually distilled some interesting questions.

More than we can say for Scott Pelley and his 60 Minutes interview, which seemed to care more about giving the Iranian president a piece of the American mind rather than trying to get into his. (Mr. Pelley’s preparations yielded questions such as this: “What, if anything, do you admire about President Bush?”)

The Columbia address was — as any public conference with a skilled politician can be — only slightly revealing, of course. Mr. Ahmadinejad referred to the holocaust with his usual skepticism — especially on the point of Palestinians being punished for it.

But some interesting things were brought up, at least for us Brownistanis. The president was grilled on the culture of his people — and what he was doing to it. When asked about growing number of executions of homosexuals, Ahmadinejad gave the Americans their first glimpse of the deteriorative rhetoric that has frustrated so much of the Iranian intelligentsia in and out of Persia. In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in this country. (I wonder what he whispers to the blindfolded, then, on the chopping block. Sorry, bad haircut?)

But while our media mongrels fight over the speech scraps in the living rooms of Michael Vicks across America, debating why Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak on American airwaves or what political game he was playing with our minds in requesting a visit to Ground Zero, the rest of us can digest what flowed from questions born in Political Science classes and campus cafes.

We may even ask ourselves: What other questions do we not even know to ask? What more could we learn if Ahmadinejad allowed the students of Tehran University and the gays of Iran’s speakeasys the same chance he did ours? Or better yet, if we asked them ourselves?