[Peace-discuss] Re: Interview With President of Iran

[John Wason]

At 06:17 AM 11/12/2001 -0600, megminer at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu wrote:

>Someone asked for a copy of this at last night's meeting.  I found it on
another >listserv this morning.
> 
>: November 10, 2001
>: 
>: TEXT
>: Interview With President Khatami
>: 
>: The following is the full text of President Mohammad Khatami's interview 
>: with The New York Times on Nov. 9,2001, as translated jointly by The New 
>: York Times and the United Nations Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Thank you, Meg.  It was interesting.

I've finally learned after all these years that you have to judge a nation
by what it actually does, not by what its leaders say or what its
Constitution says.  The same as you do with an individual or a group of
individuals.  That may seem self-evident to many, but it has taken a long
time for me to really get it through my thick head.

Russia's Constitution under hardline Communism had, and probably still has,
all sorts of guarantees about freedom of speech and religion and so forth.
But we know how much attention Russia actually paid to those guarantees in
practice.  Likewise, we here in America know pretty precisely to what extent
the Bill of Rights is practiced, or not practiced, at any given period in
history.

So when I read all these recent things like the interview with the President
of Iran, the letter that purported to be from Saddam Hussein, statements
issued by members of the Taliban about how much they respect their women,
and even statements by RAWA, I tend to take them all with something of a
grain of salt.  I look at who is speaking and why the speaker might be
framing the issue in the way that he or she does, just as I do with George
'Holywood' Bush.  And I think that the truth is a complex combination of the
'truths' expressed by all of these various speakers, with the person who
occupies the seat of power in all likelihood distorting the truth the most. 

John