mahmoud ahmadinejad

mahmoud ahmadinejad Natorei Karta spokesman Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss on Tuesday called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "an advocate of peace," prior to the group's meeting with the controversial leader in New York.


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, shakes hands with anti-Zionism Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, at the start of his meeting with participants of a conference on the Holocaust.
Photo: AP [file]
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Weiss said in a statement that "this will be the third time we're meeting with [Ahmadinejad]. … Every time, we stressed to the Iranian leadership that despite … the declarations by Jews who don't understand the essence of the matter, we have found the Iranian people and their leaders friendly and respectful."

He added that Natorei Karta members believed Ahmadinejad was a very religious man who was dedicated to world peace based on mutual respect and dialogue.

Regarding Israel's relations with Iran, Weiss said that "Judaism seeks peace. Unfortunately, many Jews who are influenced by Zionism - a philosophy less than 100 years old - feel that the proper response to their enemies, be they real or imagined, is aggression. They call for violence and, to our great misfortune, try to drag other nations into war."

Weiss expressed chagrin that few world officials had tried to talk with Ahmadinejad or to follow the real opinion of Iranian Jews, who, he said, live peacefully in the country.

"We want to meet with the man who has proven again and again that he is interested in the welfare of the Iranian Jewish community and that he has a deep respect for the Jewish world ... The Zionist attempt to isolate this man and his people is immoral and tragic," he said.

Ahmadinejad's visit to New York as part of the UN General Assembly has garnered harsh criticism from Jewish groups due to his frequent calls to "wipe Israel off the map
Now that everyone's finished live-blogging and hyperventilating over Iranian strongman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Columbia address, maybe New Yorkers can finally notice that a gen-yoo-wine, Pol-Pot-ain't-got-shit-on-me monster is walking the streets of our fair city.

Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, who has spearheaded a genocidal starvation campaign against his political opponents and murders tens of thousands of his own people every year, has arrived in the city and plans to address the United Nations General Assembly tomorrow. The aging, cynical despot, whose wife shopped for shoes in European capitals while his soldiers forced 1 million people to flee Harare and starve in the countryside, will reportedly argue that American and European sanctions are illegal and have―get this―caused terrible deprivation in Zimbabwe.

But so far, only the New Republic's James Kirchick has noticed that one of the worst human beings on the planet is browsing the aisles at Bloomingdales. "What's going on in Zimbabwe, in genocidal proportions, is worse than Darfur," says Kirchick. "It's unfortunate that people don't care about it. But that's the way it's always been."

In fact, New York has a sordid history of accommodating Mugabe, thanks to everyone's favorite race-baiter, City Councilman Charles Barron. Four years ago, Barron led a "fact-finding mission" to Zimbabwe and returned with a report that exonerated Mugabe as much as the English language will allow. ("Zimbabwe remains one of the most stable countries in Africa," read the report's conclusion.) Barron even invited Mugabe to speak at City Hall, where roughly a dozen councilmembers applauded and fawned over Africa's worst dictator.

Pundits around the country have filled their gullets with the easy satisfaction that comes with denouncing a Holocaust-denyin', terrorist-financin' demogogue like Ahmadinejad. But when it comes to confronting people who have refined the art of deliberate mass starvation, no one seems terribly interested. When Bill Bennett learned that President Bush planned to use his time at the General Assembly to denounce Myanmar―which rivals only Zimbabwe and North Korea as the worst place on Earth―he went on his radio show and sighed, "I'm for democracy in Burma, but do we have to talk about that today?" National Review Online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez echoed Bennett's sentiment, as if presiding over a regime of fifty million slaves was somehow less odious than a Persian nutjob trying to lay a wreath at Ground Zero.

Fortunately, Mugabe has finally done something every American pundit will find truly monstrous―he met with Ahmadinejad this morning.

HARDLINE Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was booed and laughed at a New York university yesterday as he insisted there were no homosexuals in his country.

And he suffered the rare humiliation of a public dressing-down when the university president introducing him called him a "petty and cruel dictator".

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country,," the President said at Columbia University during a controversial question-and-answer session.

"In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who has told you that we have it."

Amnesty International said figures suggest Iran has executed 200 people this year including many homosexuals.

Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer, in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, ridiculed the comments.

"Well, I think we just all know that's absurd," Mr Downer said.

Mr Ahmadinejad was due to address the United Nations General Assembly overnight, where he is expected to ask for an end to sanctions against his regime over his refusal to end nuclear enrichment.

Mr Downer said he did not believe the Security Council would contemplate scrapping sanctions, and "nor should it".

He also said he did not believe Australia and its allies were "inexorably slipping towards a military confrontation with Iran", but added "you couldn't rule that out".

Mr Ahmadinejad, the firebrand and hardline leader of Iran, has questioned the Holocaust and believes Israel should be wiped off the map.

Addressing Columbia University in a heated and tense session, he was greeted by thousands of irate protesters.

Uni president Lee Bollinger, who had been heavily criticised by Jewish groups and US politicians for inviting the Iranian leader, introduced him by saying he exhibited all the signs of a "petty and cruel dictator" who looked "simply ridiculous" when he denied the Holocaust.

"You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," he said. "Will you cease this outrage?"

But Mr Ahmadinejad, speaking through a translator, said Mr Bollinger had shown him "unfriendly treatment" and it was "an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here".

Security was tight for his address to about 700 people, mostly students.

Some wore T-shirts with the slogan "Stop Ahmadinejad's Evil".

Smiling and occasionally laughing as he talked of Iran's culture and outlook, he insisted the Islamic republic had the right to pursue a civilian nuclear program, and denied seeking nuclear weapons.

"We do not believe in nuclear weapons. Period. It goes against the whole grain of humanity," he said. "I think the politicians who are after atomic bombs or are testing them, making them, politically, they are backward, retarded," he said.

He also repeated his desire to visit the World Trade Centre site attacked on September 11, 2001 but appeared to question whether al-Qaida was behind the attack.

Police refused permission for his visit.

"If the root causes of 9/11 are examined properly - why it happened, what caused it, what were the conditions that led to it, who truly was involved, who was really involved - and put it all together to understand how to prevent the crisis in Iraq, fix the problem in Afghanistan and Iraq combined," he said.

He also denied that he was questioning the existence of the Holocaust.

"Granted this happened, what does it have to do with the Palestinian people?" he said.

He said there was a need for more research, adding "there's nothing known as absolute".

US President George W. Bush said he was "OK" with Mr Ahmadinejad's visit because it was an educational experience for students and "speaks volumes about, really, the greatness of America".