Iran to play collegiate basketball, said he was fearful to show his face in America as an Iranian but soon found that, as in Iran, most citizens don’t treat foreigners as if they were representatives of their government.
“I went to the United States with a completely different mentality,” said Kazemi, who is starting his sophomore year at Rice University in Houston, Texas, as a member of the Rice basketball team.
In an interview last month at the World Basketball Championship in Turkey, he told the Christian Science Monitor, “I was like: ‘They are not going to like me because I am from Iran.’ Because you watch news in the United States about our country. And we watch news about the United States in our country. [But it’s] a totally different story.”
Kazemi said, “They love me. I love them. [Americans] are really nice people. And I’m sure if you come to Iran, to my country, it’s going to be the same thing.”
