It’s Good Cop time in Iran

Raise hands, anyone who thinks he truly means this:

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) – The Islamic world is fed up with violence and extremism in the name of religion and is ready for an era of progressive, democratic Muslim governments, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said Friday.

Khatami said current conflicts between the West and Islam have created a situation that “can only see ever-escalating violence, whether in the form of war and occupation and repression, or in the form of terror and destruction.”

“After about two centuries of dispute between tradition and modernity in the world of Islam (there is) a high level of mental preparation for the acceptance of a major transformation in the mind and lives of Muslims,” Khatami said in a speech at an international conference on Islam and the West.

If this is true, I’d like to see Khatami recant his insistence that he never shook hands with Moshe Katsav, the president of Israel he sat next to at Pope John Paul II’s funeral.

And there are also these veiled threats and lies:

Khatami also cautioned that imposing sanctions on his country because of its nuclear program would also hit the West hard by pushing oil prices higher.

“The first effect on sanctions against Iran is that this high price will go even higher … and the impact on the industrialized world will be very serious. I hope all sides of the issue will act prudently,” he said.

[…] Khatami said “Iran neither has nuclear weapons nor is developing weapons. Thus the pressure on Iran to relinquish its nuclear technology is unfair and unjust.”

He noted that a number of countries in Middle East and Asia have nuclear weapons.

“Israel has at least 200 nuclear war heads. It would have been very good if the international community especially Europe and the IAEA focused on creating a nuclear free region in the Middle East instead of focusing on their efforts on Iran.”

And I’m thinking that he’s not about to reverse his lies about Katsav. Nope. When in doubt, blame the Jews.

I wonder if he also is on the “wipe Israel off the map” bandwagon. I’m thinking yes. If you have any doubts, go read this transcript from a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour.

Obviously, Washington is the U.S. capital where policy decision on U.S. national interests must be made. However, the impression of the people of the Middle East and Muslims in general is that certain foreign policy decisions of the U.S. are in fact made in Tel Aviv and not in Washington. And I regret to say that the improper American policy of unbridled support for the aggressions of a racist terrorist regime does not serve U.S. interests, nor does it even serve that of the Jewish people. Zionists constitute a small portion of the Jewish people and have openly declared and proven in practice that they are expansionist.

Don’t ignore the date of this interview at the top of the page.

It’s from 1998.

An Iranian “moderate”?

Not so much.