Esfandyar Batmanghelidj comments at the Europe-Iran Forum that it is unprecedented for Khamenei to address western youth in an open letter, however the strangest thing is that he speaks against dogma in his letter saying "I don't insist that you accept my reading or any other reading of Islam", while his county, Iran, is not famous for free speech. He released his letter on Twitter, a website which has been blocked in Iran since the presidential election in 2009, when people used the website to raise their protests. It seems Khamenei, himself, is aware of the contradiction, as he writes the letter from the standpoint of a scholar and not a leader. After the Iranian Revolution "cultural battles between reformists and traditionalists" have always been a serious problem in Iran through which Khamenei has gained the experience that intellectuals are better able to solve problems than leaders. It took Iran's leader a great breakthrough to realize that the conflict between Islamic Iran and the west was not fundamental and inevitable, but epistemological and solvable.