Score another propaganda victory for Mad Mahmoud. He sat down with a group of religious leaders—minus, I’m proud to say, a single Jewish religious leader—and lied, denied, and redirected the questions asked of him. But now he gets to brag about how great he is for sitting down with Quakers and Mennonites and various other Christian leaders. (By the way, he refuses to come if there are any members of the Bahai faith, which is persecuted in Iran.)
After two days of prickly confrontations with critics at Columbia University and the United Nations, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran held a friendly, even warm, exchange yesterday with Christian leaders from the United States and Canada convinced that dialogue is the only way to prevent war.
The session, held under tight security at a chapel across the street from the United Nations, was a reminder that Mr. Ahmadinejad is a religious president of a religious nation who relishes speaking on a religious plane. He spent his 20 allotted minutes at the start of the two-hour meeting recounting the chain of prophets central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the commonality of their messages.
He took questions from a panel that included a Quaker, a Catholic, an Anglican, a Baptist and a representative of the interfaith World Council of Churches, some of whom separately said they had been criticized by other religious leaders for sitting down with the Iranian president. Given the furor over Mr. Ahmadinejad’s earlier appearances, there was no advance publicity.
Imagine that. No publicity. Were they afraid their congregations would get upset?
The gathering, which included an audience of about 140 other religious leaders, was organized by the Mennonites and Quakers, churches known for their commitment to pacifism.
The organizers said that they had pressed hard to find a Jewish leader to join the panel of questioners, but that those invited declined because they could not win support from Jewish organizations.
Or perhaps they didn’t want to sit down with the man who organized the Iranian Holocaust Denial Conference, and who threatens the massacre of another six million Jews. Or maybe our rabbis were smarter than this woman:
“My heart was broken that there was so little support from other religions to be here,†said Mary Ellen McNish, general secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that helped sponsor the event. “If we don’t walk down this path of dialogue, we’re going to end up in conflagration.â€
You know when dialogue works? When you’re actually having one. Asking Ahmadinejad questions and getting the same evasions and non-answers and outright lies as everyone else has gotten isn’t a dialogue. It’s yet another photo op, yet another propaganda moment, and yet another publicity coup for the Iranian president.
Though Mr. Ahmadinejad’s answers differed little, the tone of the session was a marked contrast to the verbal pummeling he received at Columbia University on Monday, when the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, called the Iranian president either “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated†for his stance on the Holocaust.
At the clerics’ meeting, Albert Lobe, executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee, said pointedly, “We mean to extend to you the hospitality which a head of state deserves.â€
And it made such a difference, didn’t it?
Well, no, of course not. But Mad Mahmoud gets to go home with a full set of trophies: The UN, Academia, and now a group of Christian leaders. Watch for the Iranian spin to call American Jews Zionists for not sitting down with him. Of course, he already does that, but still—let’s see what IRNA has to say.
Meryl,
On behalf of the Christians in the world who are NOT liberal numskulls, I apologize for the participation of these leaders in this charade.
Ugh, a Jesuit should know better than this. Minor nitpick… Catholic clergy are not addressed as ‘Reverend’ although why am I not shocked the NYT can’t keep that straight.
Similar irresponsible naivite has been shown before by members of the clergy.
After reading this…
http://www.shiri.us/eng-main.html
I keep wondering at what point do we go Russian and put one through the back of the skull?
It’s naive to think that “dialogue” is always the answer. If it’s a question of two sides acting in good faith, but coming from different perspectives, interests, and misunderstandings, then dialogue is indeed what’s called for.
Or if it’s a case where an agreement is of utmost urgency to both sides, then even dialogue between enemies can work. Look at the SALT talks between the US and the USSR.
But Ahmadinejad is another case altogether. There is no misunderstanding here, there are no shared interests or solutions that we can uncover by talking. The man wants what the man wants. And it’s not negotiable. He wants a nuclear weapon. Period. He wants more influence for Iran in the Middle East and the world. Period.
So, what is anyone going to talk about with him? What “concessions” could anyone make that would deter him from his political preferences? The answers: Nothing and none.
So, aside from the weather and the mysterious absence of gays in Iran, the conversation would offer…what?
Well, he’d go through his shtick about US policies that we have already heard from him a million times, and we’d recount all the objections to his policies and abuse of human rights that he’s already heard from us a million times. Then what? I guess a photo opportunity.
The American Friends Service Committee and the World Council of Churches have long histories of apologetics for and enabling of totalitarians. During the Cold WAr they made propaganda for the Communists and the WCC financed Marxist guerillas. Their efforts for peace, so called, have always taken the form of opossing actions by free countries, especially the USA, in defense of freedom. Thus their attraction to the latest fashion in fascist tyranny is no surprise.
I’m surprised there were no Jewish religious leaders there. Usually you can count on at least somne Jews to buy the half-baked “peace” propaganda. Did all the Reconstructionist rabbis, like Michael Lerner, have previous engagements? And what about Netura Kartei? Surely they could have found some anti-Zionist maniacs to represent the original monotheistic faith, no matter how small their influence.
The Neturei Karta had their own meeting with Mad Mahmoud:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/906911.html
I had no objection to Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia, but this is different. What did the religious leaders hope to acheive with this meeting? Why ask him about the Holocaust yet again when there are more pressing issues?
Particularly crass was acceding to Ahmadinejad’s demand that no Bahais be present. Proceeding with the event anyway arguably legitimized religious discrimination. Had Ahmadinejad placed such a demand on Columbia University he’d have been told to take a hike. The religious leaders here should have done the same.
This is like being nice to Hitler. The same thing. The very same thing.
This is like being nice to Hitler. The same thing. The very same thing.
This was the error text I got when I clicked the first time. Hope it helps track down the problem.
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