I thank you very much for your questions.
Obviously, we really have to denounce violence, whatever the source. So on the question of beheading and the other things that you made reference to in Saudi Arabia, they are not acceptable. Also not acceptable, for example, is the stoning of some people in Iran.
To answer your questions about youth and how they see the revolution, the revolutionaries, and how the revolution was hijacked and so forth, yes, they know about those issues. They also know about the fact that their parents made the revolution, but they say very clearly that they are looking for something else. It doesn't mean that they do not adhere to the revolution's values. They say what you're saying: we participated in the revolution for something else and we now have something different.
This is why, if you look at the universities, for example, or if you look at the blogs or even the newspapers, those that are not suppressed by censorship, one thing is absolutely clear, and that is change. I say this very often, and I say it in French, so I don't know if the English translation is as good as the French one:
the one constant in Iran is change.
The only constant in Iran is change.
For Iranians, the situation is unacceptable. Young people are highly educated and most have not experienced the revolution as such or visited other countries. Yet, if you speak to them, you sense that they are extremely open to the world. The example I gave you earlier of the vigils held to for the victims of the terrorist attacks against the United States, shows a certain shift between the people in power and the country's youth.
Iranian youth are looking for more opportunity--work, education, and so forth--and this is the source of hope, I believe, in Iran. This is why I started by saying that I see some real hope in Iran.
Farsi is one of the main languages used on the Internet. There are thousands of blogs originating in Iran, and the vast majority of them denounce the power and so forth. In other words, with any attack, or harm in any way to Iranian society, you will lose all that goodwill. I am absolutely sure about that. Because the Iranians are extremely nationalist. They are not chauvinists, but they are nationalists. They are defending their country, and whoever the attacker is, they are going to resist. And that would be the tragedy of this situation, because those sanctions, and so forth, are simply serving the most extreme elements in Iran. The Iranian young people are not looking for that kind of treatment.
As to how Iranians see the U.S. and Canada--and I do not exaggerate and I don't say it because I am here--for millions of Iranians, Canada is the dream land. Among the Iranians, when you talk to them, including those who are living here in Canada, they say that Canada is a kind of clean version of the U.S., meaning that in Canada you have everything the Americans have in terms of technological advancement and progress and so forth, but here we don't have the same kinds of problems the Americans have. So for Iranians, Canada is very different from the U.S.
It's not that they hate the U.S. This is not the case at all. The Iranians do not do that. Make a distinction between the rhetoric of the revolution and the reality of the Iranian population. Talk to any Iranians, including many of those who are in the government--and I talk to a number of them--and you will see that in private they are looking for a visa to come to Canada or to send their kids to the U.S. That's the reality of Iran. So the rhetoric is something, but the reality is different.
Their view of Canada is a country that is peaceful--cold, obviously, but a peaceful place where you can go and live your life. It means they are not happy with the restrictions they have in their own country in terms of morality, and that's not in a bad sense concerning themselves, but I'm talking about the police intervention against women and young boys and so forth.
What they are looking for is to live in peace and harmony with everybody else. In the next few days, 1.2 million Iranians, those who just left secondary school, are going to pass what in Iran they call a concours. It's a kind of competition, an exam. They are going to write an exam in order to get into university.
Universities can accept about 10%, 11%, or a maximum of 12% of those people. So if you have 1.2 million people who want to go to university but they don't have a chance to go, you are talking about people who are looking for education and who are looking, in my view, for peace. That is the majority of them; I'm not talking about 100% of them. They are looking for peace, prosperity, and to live in harmony with the rest of the world. And this is precisely what you see these days in the Iranian streets and the denunciation of all kinds of excess, as I mentioned earlier, by a number of people in the Iranian leadership.
Thank you.