New Haven Independent

Green, a law student and founder of Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), organized Monday morning’s live video-conference with the Middle East. Participants in the conference included students from Yale, Wesleyan, SCSU, American University in Washington, D.C., the University of Jordan, and the University of Qatar.

The conference, titled “Images of Iran and America,” was intended to open a dialogue about Americans’ and Iranians’ views of each other. Conducted through AID as part of a Brookings Institution U.S.-Islamic summit in Doha, Qatar, it featured a panel of two filmmakers and a religious scholar. Bahman Farmanara, an Iranian filmmaker, provided an Iranian viewpoint on the American media, while Michael Nozik, the American producer of Syriana, discussed the power of film to change people’s perceptions of different cultures.

Reza Aslan, author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam , was the third panelist. He warned students not to categorize all Muslims as Sunni or Shia. “There’s an incredible danger in thinking about [the war in Iraq] as a religious or theological war,” Aslan said. “It’s far more to do with complex issues of identity and a lack of security.” He worried that conflict would be much more likely to spread to Iran if the Iraq War was seen in religious terms.

Once students chimed in with questions, the conversation focused more on Iranian nuclear development. Jeremy Avins (pictured), a Yale freshman, feared disastrous repercussions of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial if coupled with possession of nuclear weapons. The panelists seemed to agree, however, that Ahmadinejad’s personal beliefs were irrelevant to Iranian foreign policy.

“I don’t have to agree with my government in order to live in Iran,” Farmanara said.

Aslan, who was born in Iran, said he doesn’t believe Ahmadinejad represents his people in the least. Iranians are “embarrassed that their president is so historically ignorant,” Aslan said, “not unlike how some Americans feel when their president believes the universe is 6000 years old.”

Opinions differed, however, on whether Iran is entitled to nuclear weapons in the first place. “It’s every country’s right to protect themselves and their people with [nuclear technology], as long as they don’t use it badly,” commented a female Jordanian student.

As the conference drew to an end, both students and panelists looked to the future. Everyone seemed to agree on the daunting challenge posed by today’s globalized media. “The American media has strange, monolithic, black and white views of Iranians,” Aslan said. “But it goes both ways.”

When Aslan asked the American and Middle Eastern students how they were navigating these monolithic views, a Yale Law student responded by distancing himself from American foreign policy. “Give us some time to make up for our mistakes,” he entreated. “Having never really considered government service before, it now sort of feels like an obligation. I think we all feel a renewed sense of civic obligation.”

A Jordanian student took the video opportunity to tell her American peers that “not all Muslims are the same. Islam started as a message of love.” Receiving positive responses from the American students, she then asked them what they were doing in the U.S. to combat a negative perception of Islam.

The camera shifted to the roomful of American University students, one of whom leaned toward the microphone and said, “We come to this room today.”