Enemy

Hamjensbaz

So, The Enemy swore he'd put the 'Columbia Speech' puppy to bed, but this little nugget unearthed by Rex Wockner can't be ignored. While A.J. was issuing press statements through his 'presidential media adviser' claiming that the thrust of his comments on Iranian Homosexuals had been lost in translation. A little rudimentary fact checking reveals that – while it's true the interpreter had altered A.J's words somewhat – the alteration was only done to make A.J's actual meaning more primetime palatable:

"Absolutely not. We in Iran -- we in Iran, firstly, we don't have hamjensbaz  [a derogatory term for homosexuals meaning people with loose morals who chase people of the same gender for sexual pleasure] like you have in your country. In our country, there is no such a thing. In Iran, such a thing does not -- in Iran, in Iran, absolutely such a thing does not exist as a phenomenon. I don't know who told you otherwise."

more here.

My Dinner With A.J.

The Enemy has turned up a little late to the Columbia dinner. Initially The Enemy's reaction to the  guest list was more inline with Andrew Sullivan's, particularly in light of statements like this, issued by "The Columbia Queer Alliance"

(...) would like to strongly caution media and campus organizations against the use of such words as "gay", "lesbian", or "homosexual" to describe people in Iran who engage in same-sex practices and feel same-sex desire. The construction of sexual orientation as a social and political identity and all of the vocabulary therein is a Western cultural idiom. As such, scholars of sexuality in the Middle East generally use the terms "same-sex practices" and "same-sex desire" in recognition of the inadequacy of Western terminology.

this helpful instructional goes on to encourage

"...us all to examine a number of issues, but most relevant to our concerns are the complexities of how sexual identity is constructed and understood in different parts of the world."

And there's the rub, the assumption that the rest of us haven't been thinking about "these issues" for the past several years, and that, unlike "The Columbia Queer Alliance" have managed to  achieve a perspective  beyond dial-up identity politics. Grrrrrrrr, this is why The Enemy no longer calls himself a Leftist.

However, as he stated at the top of the post, this was The Enemy's initial reaction. It has been somewhat tempered by this post from a Columbia student.