Kourosh Ziabari

"retaliatory and entirely unjustifiable"

Once Dr. Hossein Beik-baghban, a renowned Iranian professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Strasbourg, while addressing a gathering in our university, digressed to explain a bitterly interesting memory from his first years as an Iranian scholar in France: "I was standing in a queue in a large shopping mall in Alsace, waiting for my turn to hand the goods over to the salesman and get the receipt, when a rustic old German woman appeared before and started talking to me immediately. We talked for some 10 minutes on different topics, and eventually, it came to nationality. I asked her first and she replied that she is German. Correspondingly, she began guessing about me, before I told her myself, and all of her guesses, one after another, were wrong: Lebanese, Turkish, Azeri, Arab and Russian. I told her that I'm Iranian. She remained silent and somewhat in shock for a few seconds, and suddenly yelled with excitement: Oh! So, you are a terrorist!"

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