The cruelty of ignorance

So Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia university today. I don't like the guy, especially when he's denying the holocaust or suggesting Israel get wiped off the map. That said, he gets completely ignored on the points he gets right-- particularly on the Iraq war. His statements on Palestine today- particularly questioning why the Palestinians are being punished for a Holocaust they did not commit- are also valid and well within mainstream Middle Eastern thought(though they're made much scarier by his support for Holocaust deniers and David Duke).

Interestingly, the Times has a piece today that suggests that the US media is placing way too much importance on Ahmadinejad's role in the Iranian government. I agree, and I would also argue that he's been made into a caricature, a larger-than-life Bad Guy, to help prepare the American public for a (possible) invasion of his country. That's not fair, to Iran or to Ahmadinejad.

But then there's this. According to Mr. Ahmadinejad, "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran we do not have this phenomenon."

I don't even know how to respond to that. Communities all over the world exclude and oppress minorities, particularly sexual minorities. But denial that the community even exists -- that's far, far more dangerous. Because if gays don't exist, then how can anyone claim they're being prosecuted for being gay, if the government says otherwise? And if they never existed in the first place, what's stopping Ahmadinejad, or some other hard-line lunatic, from killing them all?