<p>Anyone having dinner with this guy? I am sure it will be a memorable experience...</p>
<p>Just another reason why attending Columbia is special, I guess....</p>
<p>Columbia</a> student group may dine with Iranian President - NYPOST.com</p>
<p>^How does one reply to such a dumb statement like that?</p>
<p>I was a soph. when he came to campus the first time…I’d be really surprised if this actually panned out and any students actually ate with him, if only for the fact that he seems to abhor speaking english ~_~</p>
<p>Who the hell wants to see that stupid person .
If I met him I would’ve slapped him on his face and kicked his *<em>**ing </em> . i mean really he’s killing innocents in Syria at the moment , is that a man someone wants to have a chat with over dinner !!</p>
<p>^ Exactly, people can be so book smart yet so incredibly stupid at the same time… it amazes me. Who ever would want to eat with this guy is just trash.</p>
<p>freedom and transfer: don’t look for a job with the diplomatic corps. </p>
<p>I heard that one of the GOP candidates said that Pres Obama should bar the Iranian president from coming to NYC for the UN assembly. What an idiotic statement. In the real world, speaking with your opponents is par for the course.</p>
<p>haha with that salary, i doubt many people will be looking for that job… I don’t want to get into an argument, however this guy isin’t an “opponent”. He is not someone who your in a race with. The guy is a sick person. Now, for Obama’s sake i agree he should not ban him. He has to be “friendly”; it’s a little thing called public relations. He has to be friendly because he must think of his country and what he puts at stake if were to say "stay away from my country, DONT EVER COME HERE. I think, however, that it is pathetic of students to want to have dinner and meet an animal like this.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt the dubiousness of attending a dinner with this noisome person and how it will be spun for propaganda purposes. People will make of it what they will nonetheless.</p>
<p>I am wondering if these students who are going to have lunch with this guy have forgotten, or even know, that back in his home country, he and his government, just a year or two ago, were gunning down the college students of his own country, and spreading terror in their universities. </p>
<p>So much for student solidarity.</p>
<p>It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle. - Sun Tzu</p>
<p>How better than to understand someone than to have a meal with them? Whether or not you think he is a horrible human being, that should not bar you from learning about him as you would someone else. To take action against Iran without any understanding of it’s leader, you will only doom the western world to more unilateral action and we all know how well that’s turned out in Iraq and Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Skraylor:</p>
<p>You say we need to better “understand” our enemy.</p>
<p>I think we know him quite well already, don’t you?. </p>
<p>He has already gunned down the liberals in his own country. He supports the murderous Assad regime in Syria. He is working on nuclear weapons. (The UN, not just the US, says that). He has promised to blow Israel off the map. So obviously, he intends to use the weapons. How else would he blow Israel off the map? </p>
<p>So let’s say you don’t care about Israel. You might recall that he hates America almost as much. How long before he turns his attention to America?.</p>
<p>You want to reason with him, but he denies the holocaust even occurred. He doesn’t say that the death figures were exagerrated, and that, for example, only 3 million jews instead of 6 million dies., He denies any died, except perhaps a few thousand from disease. And of course, he ignores the death of the 6 million non-jews as well. Evidently, those didn’t happen either.</p>
<p>And he says gays are not persecuted in Iran, because there are no gays there !!! Is this the type of person you can reason with??</p>
<p>Respectfully, perhaps you might consider the following. All of Chamberlain’s efforts to better “understand” Hitler and to “reason” with Hitler and not to “provoke” Hitler by building up England’s military turned out to be disasterous. It left England at the brink of total destruction. And allowed Hitler to kill tens of millions of people. So instead of having a little war to take Hitler out when it was relatively easy, we waited until he was strong to take him out. Does that make sense? This guy at the moment is just a mini-Hitler. Once he gets an atom bomb, he will be a full fledged Hitler. While our students are having lunch with him, giving him a public relations coup, he is busy working on their destruction. And your destruction as well. Churchill did not deem it necessary to meet with Hitler and have lunch with him. He knew what he was dealing with. And so did Roosevelt. You are assuming that this guy thinks like you, and that all we have to do with sit down with him and reason with him and he will see the light. But he is a man from the 7th Century. </p>
<p>“Those who have forgotten their history are condemned to repeat it”.</p>
<p>Skraylor: You should just stop writing. Your stupidity is mind-boggling. This “man” publicly hanged a 17 year old yesterday. If this man hung your son, would you want to have dinner with him to understand his logic and reasoning?</p>
<p>floridadad55 and transfer9858: you conflate a learning experience with submission and acceptance. The mind of a madman is not something the sane can understand yet you condemn those who would try to learn more? Small mindedness, similar to that of Hitler/Ahmadinejad/Stalin, if not quite as destructive. </p>
<p>You say I want to reason with him yet I never even insinuated that in my post. I said, and still maintain, that to act without understanding is gambling and in this case, on a worldwide stage. Do you know WHY he denies the Holocaust? Do you know WHY he supports the Assad regime? WHY he fears liberals/intellectuals/protesters? You can make inferences or repeat what other people have theorized but the chances of you hearing it out of his own mouth are nearly nil. </p>
<p>Or aside from why he does what he does, how about predicting him in the future? If violence sprouts up again in Korea, will he take the opportunity that destabilization presents and support Muslim militants that have been trying to overthrow various South Asian countries for a number of decades now? Will he even bat an eye? </p>
<p>Or how about the question “how do you make him step down?” Will concentrated international pressure work? If he loses all his allies in the Arab world due to revolutions, or gains more, what will happen in the region? </p>
<p>Again, to view this man only through your lens means you will surely miscalculate him. If you can not observe the world for what it is, you are no better than a blind man in a dark box.</p>
<p>I like how you avoid the question. Once again, if this man hung your son, would you have liked to sit down with him to discuss his reasoning and see why he did it?</p>
<p>If I went to Columbia, I’d have dinner with the guy. Just because he does unethical things (unethical being a weak term in this case) doesn’t mean you can’t get something out of a discussion. I mean, come on, none can refute the educational worth of such an experience. So yes, I would have dinner with the man. If only I went to Columbia…</p>
<p>Skraylor:</p>
<p>There is no point in talking with him.</p>
<p>Like Hitler or Stalin, no promise that he makes can be relied on.</p>
<p>While you would be “dining” with him, he would be totally scornful of you, and be laughing at you behind your back, for doing so. Just like Hitler did with Chamberlain. </p>
<p>He would consider you, just as Stalin did with american liberals (or perhaps it was Lenin) as a “useful idiot”. </p>
<p>Let me respectfully suggest that it is YOU who are the one who is a blind man in a dark box.</p>
<p>For believing that talking with this guy serves any useful purpose. We already understand him quite well. You say, for example, that we should try and learn WHY he is gunning down the liberals in his own country. I think the answer is obvious. He wants to eradicate them. That is answer enough. If he guns down the smartest and brightest of his own country, what do you think he would do to the rest of the world?.</p>
<p>In any case, if you want America to talk with him, the people doing the talking shouldn’t be
college students.
Talking with him only gives him time to develop nuclear weapons. Once he has those, he can blackmail the entire world.</p>
<p>I would like to kindly point out that there are alternatives to violence through which one can remove a political figure from power. And, I am also going to voice the opinion of many Europeans by saying that the United States should learn they are not the “world’s police.” Finally, I’d like to refer to the saying: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.</p>
<p>Having expressed my opinions in a polite manner without disregarding anyone’s opinions, I hope you will reply similarly. :)</p>
<p>i would love to have dinner with him. as much as his views might be irrational, it would be a terrific learning experience. of course, if he had harmed someone in my family then i doubt i would be able to look past that to see the learning experience.
but it would be really cool otherwise.</p>