- 3:00 pm in the JFK park
that is adjacent to the Kennedy School of Government - at the intersection of the JFK street and the Memorial Drive, near the Charles Hotel. Khatami's talk at the Kennedy Forum starts at 4:00 p.m.
The smiling mullah was invited by the Kennedy School and by George W. Bush who wanted to hear Khatami's views.
The Harvard Democrats led by Eric Lesser '07 - who are clearly not Michael Moore Democrats - call on the ex-president to apologize for the human rights violations during his presidency although they support his right to speak.
Most protestors tomorrow will also demand the release of Ahmed Batebi, a protestor, whose death penalty was reduced to 10 years in prison after the first wave of international pressure.
I guess that the comparison of the protest tomorrow with the emotions around Dick Cheney's Friday visit to Harvard will be striking. If you want to see how the dumping ground of Cambridge attempted to "improve" Cheney's visit, see this article. I am ashamed to belong to the same species with these nasty communist creatures.
Report
There were about 200 people participating in the protest, with a hundred of banners or so. Many of these banners had wise messages on them, data about the bad things that occured during Khatami's presidency, and so forth.
My favorite banner said "Yeah, whatever" and contained the following picture:
It is such a cute picture of Khatami and Ahmadinejad that even the staunchest opponents of Iran among the protesters thought that my banner was doctored. No, it wasn't! This picture is from the official handing of the presidency offices.
Many of the protesters were typical American patriots; many others were Russians, apparently Russian Jews; there was at least one Iranian dissident there; beautiful girls with Israeli flags, and so forth. A guy from the Harvard Democrats was distributing their call on Khatami to apologize for various things. There were about 10 left-wing anti-protesters, including one mad woman who was screaming a lot of incoherent emotional things about the holocaust that made no sense to me. My guess is that she could have been a Harvard professor.
The most visible chant was "Shame on Harvard" after a speech of an actor.
Speech
You may see what Khatami spoke about in The Crimson. Khatami disagreed with 9/11 and with Bin Laden, praised Hezbollah - the shining sun of resistance - and criticized the U.S. for imperialist and colonialist aspirations, for double standards, and for false pride. When asked whether Israel should be eliminated from the map, he answered that he didn't want countries to be eliminated from the map and the country that was eliminated is called Palestine. So I guess that the destruction of Israel should be called a revival of Palestine.
Most interestingly, Khatami was asked what to do with the homosexuals. He said that homosexuality was crime and it should be debated whether the homosexuals should be executed. That's a bold idea, although not an original one. His remark was too progressive even for the Harvard far left audience and they did not applaud after this particular remark. Maybe, the progressives thought that Khatami wanted to say that the heterosexuals or white males should be executed instead? ;-)
Of course, all of us have to think that it is extremely important to have such a moronic demagogue here at Harvard. All extremists and jerks are welcome to speak at Harvard - except for the mainstream and pro-American speakers whose ideas actually make sense: those guys must be fired and destroyed, in order to strengthen the unholy coalition of radical feminists, homosexuals, and those who want to execute them.
And that's the memo.
