About 18 months ago, I along with my colleague professor D. Ray Heisey from Kent State University prepared a paper on the schemata of Iranians and Americans have for each other. I planned to present it in the I International Conference on Intercultural Studies which was going to be held in Portugal by December 2008. The story of this conference was so strange which I decided to share it to others. All things seemed to be natural until I asked conference managers to send me a formal invitation. I don’t know what happened but they suddenly turned to an extraordinarily hostile stance towards me. They removed my name from the list of participants after they accepted our paper. Later on they tried to force me to tell lie!

Iranians always are surprised when they know that the people of the world perceive them as ignorant, violent, aggressive and dangerous. In fact, when media symbolize Iranians with violence and nuclear bomb, there is no surprise that lay people generalize these images to the Iranians. The surprising part of this story is that those who easily had so insulting behavior with were Intercultural Communication scholars. Iranians have so many problems. They are kind people do not want hurt anybody. This could be understood only if foreigners can travel to Iran and meet Iranians in person. Read more . . .