I met a group of anti Zionist Rabbi in Tehran , in 2005 on the sidelines of the International Conference on Environment , Peace and Dialogue Among Civilizations. As the Vice President of Iran I welcomed them and stressed upon the difference that we see between Judaism and Zionism and our common Abrahamic values. I also met some Rabbis from France in the sidelines of the Arctic Cruise I attended last year in Greenland. In reaction to a Russian Scientist who said in her speech that divine religions have nothing to say about the environment , I told them if leaders of Abrahamic Religions had worked together on the valuable themes projected in the Torah, the Bible or the Quran on nature and conservation , this Russian lady would have known better than to say such incorrect words. They were first taken aback, hearing this from me from Iran, but then they appreciated it and agreed that we need to work on some of the common themes that we have and to emphasize on the unity of the Abrahamic tradition.
Our President spoke at the UN General Assembly a couple days ago, I believe he stroke a more moderate and reasonable tone. Even though most of what he has to say has been the core themes in Iranian foreign policy for a long time now, I would not agree with the way he put his speech , as if it were a sermon, nor would I emphasize so much on the differences and disparities in today's world.
We are celebrating the Day of Quds today. What began in Iran as a proposal by Imam Khomeini to support the Palestinian cause is now an international campaign marked by worldwide rallies. In many international fora, I have said that the unresolved issue of Palestine, the historical facts and the conditions of Palestinian people today all point to the inability or the unwillingness of the international community, the Security Council and its apparatus to resolve the matter. Quds is a standing symbol of global mismanagement, a reminiscence of the double standards that govern today's world, a sign of continuing injustices that plague humanity . The plight of millions of displaced people , who are now living for more than 2 generations in refugee status in camps with very dire conditions is now easily dismissed in negotiations, the plight of millions living in siege in Gaza or the inhuman conditions of Apartheid in the West Bank are overlooked and forgotten.
I do not agree with the denial of the Holocaust, it occurred and it was a tragedy for humanity which will always be condemned . I do however agree with the question that why should the Muslim Palestinians who resided in Palestine for generations, why should they suffer for the crimes committed by the Germans in Europe?
The expansionist and racist stipulates of the Elders of Zion and the outrageous crimes committed in the name and by Zionist regimes are well known to the international community. More important today is the influence and dominion that Zionism has in American political and economic apparatus. I have spoken with many Americans who are now very fearful of the pivotal role that the Zionist lobby plays in American politics and the dreadful role that they play in manipulating American foreign and national security polity to serve the interests of the State of Israel first and above all. The American public have not realized that the prosperity and good life that they enjoy , is in part due to the sufferings that their government has inflicted upon nations in the world . They need to understand that if they believe in the democratic nature of their political system then they are accomplices in the actions of their politicians and will be held accountable for the policies of their government .
The understanding has grown, after 9-11, but more after the 33 day war in Southern Lebanon and the human tragedy Israel created by attacking civilian areas and targeting freedom fighters. The Palestinians have resisted occupation, terror and war for several decades now, their cause is a symbol of injustice and oppression in the world. For this reason it becomes a duty for every liberal, freedom seeking and enlightened fellow human being to stand up to this entity and to voice their protest and objection and to uphold the truth for the sake of their own dignity and future .
The Palestinians have the right to a State and the right to decide for their future. The question is where do we stand on this matter?
8 comments:
if you think THAT was a "moderate" tone, then oh my God, the gap of understanding between the two sides of this Israeli-Palestinian issue will never be bridged!!!!!!
that was NOT the way a president of a country should talk in front of the entire world, and if you (a moderate, liberal, reformist) don't see this, then how can we ever hope for having the West and the Muslim world see eye-to-eye on this matter one day????
scream such rhetoric on the streets as much as you want, it's good for raising awareness and showing solidarity with the plight of oppressed Palestinians, but then be sure that by sending such a BOMB to the UN, you are in fact undermining the cause of peace!
what happened right after this fiery sermon by your so-called "president"???? the very Zionist neocons (Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham, Sarah Palin, ...) supporters of John McCain got the upper hand in the discussions behind the scenes by the American political elites, that now you're going to see a sure defeat by Barack Obama whereas until a week ago, it was a sure victory!
Ahmadinejad is playing right into the hands of neocons and Zionists, and as i had warned before, by failing to stop him from coming to the UN, you just went from a "win-win" situation, to a "lose-lose" one!
if only you had a real diplomat for president rather than this extremist, dogmatic fundamentalist, he might have taken President Sarkozy's remarks into consideration, and might have had the capacity to distinguish between the "liberal West" and the ideologue "neocon West"!
your regime and your president alone, cost Barack Obama his chance to follow in the footsteps of Dr. King and try to bring peace and understanding to this world, b/c you failed to appreciate the zeal of Obama's enemies! you thought they're all the same, but that was your tragic mistake!!!!! they were going to change direction, if only you (i mean your president of course, not you personally) hadn't given the neocon enemies of Obama-Democrats the ammunition to go to war with the Muslim world!
now, mark my word, the same Barack Obama who was 100% on his way to the White House, is going to lose the elections, and it's ALL due to your country's inability to understand the dangers of sending Ahmadinejad to UN at this very crucial time!
this year, October Surprise came a bit early, and it happened in September!
i just checked out your IRIBNews website and saw the pictures and speeches! i thought Iran was supposed to be a non-monolithic society (according to what Madelaine Albright said last week), but if YOU (a reformist) stands shoulder-to-shoulder with people like Makkarem-Shirazi and condones these calls for confrontation (playing right into the hands of Israeli Zionists), then what does non-monolithic even mean????? then who's moderate????? if you wanna prove to the West that your entire country is united FOR a war with Israel, then a war is exactly what you shall get!!!! it's so sad to see 70 million people being played by the likes of Shimon Peres and Joe Lieberman, this is exactly what gives them reason to attack you, and you just gave it to them!
it's so sad! so tragic! so unbelievably depressing! 30 years ago it was your popular revolution that was taken hostage by Shimon Peres and Ronald Reagan's schemes, and now just when it looked like a follower of Jimmy Carter (Barack Obama) was coming to give your people some breathing space and provide the conditions on the ground for your reform movement to mature and correct the wrong course of that revolution, you allow your same old fundamentalist lackies of the world-wide neoconservative movement (i.e. your Makkarem-Shirazis and ...) to stop PEACE, reform, freedom, and HOPE right in its tracks! Bravo! once was not enough (falling for it 30 years ago wasn't enough), you have to repeat the same mistake all over again!!!!!
"az maast ke bar maast"!
read this:
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=2c12d0a5-7855-41ba-ba21-17fb3fb233bd
sorry Dr. Ebtekar, i know you were only a kid when you lived in the West, but i hope these reactions (such as the article above) will make you see why it is that Ahmadinejad, i.e., your "moderate" president's so-called speeches (aka nonsensical, extremist, intolerant, madman sermons) infuriate people in the West, no matter where they are with regard to their political views, or even no matter how sympathetic or unsympathetic they are to Palestinians versus the Israelis!!!! this sort of opening your mouth and saying whatever the HECK you wanna say in a civil gathering and in front of "polite company", is just NOT acceptable or even fathomable in Western culture!
those of us who felt rather proud of this guy's reaction to President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University last year, were just utterly ashamed of the crude, hysterical, and uncultured way he spoke at the UN this year!!!!
shame on ANYBODY who applauds him for his performance in NYC last week, and more shame on anybody in Iran who doesn't do everything possible to impeach him now b/c of this colossal dishonor he brought to his own people!!!!!
p.s. please don't censor me just b/c i'm disappointed in what you have written here in your recent post!!!! please post this comment!
Dr. Ebtekar, I just read your Persian blog http://www.greenebtekar.persianblog.ir/
and I liked your recent post very much! "ahssant"!
Now, considering the story you recounted about the extremist group called Davood who committed such atrocities in Iran, I just would like to ask you to think about this:
take the brilliant comments made earlier on this page by an anonymous reader who linked the dominance of worlwide far-right neoconservatism to the darkest, most extremist periods of Iran's rocky history over the past 30 years, and ask yourself:
Who gains and benefits the most by portraying Muslims as "terrorists"?
Whose interests were jeopardized by the inconvenient "Spring of Freedom" (1979) in Iran, and needed to stop the victory of Iran's Islamic Revolution through assassinations of its Founding Fathers?
Who was dancing with joy (years after crushing the 1979 promise of democracy in Iran) when HOPE turned into DESPAIR and the average Iranian started to REGRET ever having had a revolution?
Whose mission gets accomplished when the avergae Muslim in Iran increasingly turns away from Islam itself, after seeing the most twisted and inhumane acts being perpetrated in its name (such as the one you recounted about these Davood terrorists)?
Who do you think created and supported the terrorist group called Forghan (from 1979-1980), whose members looked and sounded eerily similar to these Davood terrorists?
Forghan? Davood? spy agents? chain murders? fans and backers of Ahmadinejad? ...?
the garden is full of weeds, but you need to first recognize a weed before you can pull it out and clean your garden, as you know Dandelion looks awfully similar to Lawn Daisy!!!
Down with "Islamic" Fundamentalism!
and
Long Live the REVIVAL of a lost promise called:
Islamic Democracy!
this is what i'm talking about!!!!
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/10/01/a_us_welcome_mat_for_ahmadinejad/
as you know Boston Globe is under the umbrella of New York Times, and New York Times is the most neoconservative newspaper in America! the fact that the writer of this article quotes John Bolton in order to trash Barack Obama's policies, makes it obvious that these newspapers are the foot soldiers for the cause of McCain's ultimate goal of military confrontation with Iran!
now, lets look at all the misinformation that Mr. Jacoby is willfully spreading about Obama's stance and how he's choosing to twist Senator Obama's words at the first presidential debate last Friday:
Barack Obama has never advocated to meet with Ahmadinejad, he specifically mentioned on Friday that "Ahmadinejad is not the most powerful man in Iran"! and when he says "I would" in response to some ordinary American on the Youtube debates last year, he's just stating the policy of engagement which has btw been agreed upon by all 5 former Secretaries of State (Democrat and Republican alike), but he's not announcing that he would sit down with that uncultured little man just for the sake of negotiating with Iran, b/c Mr. Obama knows very well that Ahmadinejad doesn't represent Iran!!!!!! Obama knows this, but the person on Youtube who asked him that question didn't, so when he said "would you meet with leaders of rogue nations such as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and South Korea), Obama was just being CLEAR in his "I would" response to the idea of meeting with leaders, but he did not have time at that debate in that crazy format, with 9 other candidates having to fit their responses within the short period of 2 minutes each, to come out and explain right there (as he did last Friday when answering John McCain's charge) that Iran's leader is NOT Ahmadinejad!
it's clear that Mr. Jacoby and his source of knowledge Mr. Bolton, i.e., the neocon White House insider and former American ambassador to the UN (at the time of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz's reign), who had said on the eve of Iraq's invasion:
"Everybody wants to go to Baghdad, but REAL men want to go to Tehran"
can't bare to see a President Obama in the White House, precisely b/c they know that such an outcome on November 4th would send a clear signal to the fundamentalist Ayatollahs of Iran that their era of extremist ideologies and their totalitarian reign is over, and they no longer have "backstage" support from their fellow neoconservatives who LOVE to embolden Islamic extremism in the Middle East, in the hopes of being able to scare the American people once more and rally the rest of the world behind their stated objective of "REAL men going to Tehran", i.e., cowboy neocons invading another Muslim country again and igniting their desired WW-III under the banner of "Clash of Civilizations"!
they know very well, that if Barack Obama becomes president of the United States, Iran will have no choice BUT to moderate and soften its stance, stop its unacceptable rhetoric, prepare for that "grand bargain" deal, and hence silence the voices of extremism and radicalism (coming out of the mouth of Ahmadinejad and his fundamentalist Ayatollah friends), and tell their public to vote for a more moderate, rational and pragmatic figure in June 2009 instead of Ahmadinejad!
what Mr. Jacoby and New York Times and neocon warmongers like John Bolton and John McCain NEED is Ahmadinejad to win a second term next year, and therefore his Ayatollah bosses to gain so much more power as to lock the IRI regime completely in their own hands, b/c then and only then can they scare the world of another staged terrorist attack, presumably by Iranian backed Shiite militias or Hezbollah, and restart the lost cause of a fake "War on Terror" to prevent another 9/11!
Dr. Ebtekar, you and your fellow reformists under the leadership of Iran's beloved former president the progressive and liberal Mr. Khatami, MUST come to the rescue of Barack Obama's foreign policy doctrine of "engagement", by showing and proving to the world that a whole new reality is possible in Iran! that it's quite possible that in less than 9 months, the world can witness a completely moderate and non-confrontational Iran! that peace CAN finally be achieved in the Middle East, and there's no need for an Armageddon in order to bring the Messiah back for the task of achieving a lasting peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict!
please STOP Ahmadinejad!
I usually agree with most of your posts and I admire your passion and knowledge on Iran history and politics. However, in you last post you called for "Islamic Democracy" which to me that is an oxymoron. How would you govern with the backward Quran and Sharia laws in a 21st century environment? Islam and its laws belong in mosques not in Parliaments.
wow! is any of this true?????
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24437864-7583,00.html
Dr. Ebtekar, you need to address these charges in your next blog post. either these quotes are mistranslations and misunderstandings, or they are true, and that means nobody can be trusted in IRI!
Q) have these words been uttered by these powerful fundamentalist clerics or not?!!
i quote from the above article:
1)
On December 14, 2001, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's second most powerful man and one often labelled a pragmatist by Western journalists, suggested that it may not be far-fetched to envision use of nuclear weapons against Israel.
Amid chants of "death to Israel", he declared: "The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything ... It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality."
2)
On February 14, 2005, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer Kharrazi, secretary-general of Iranian Hezbollah, declared: "We are able to produce atomic bombs and we will do that. We shouldn't be afraid of anyone. The US is no more than a barking dog."
3)
On May 29, 2005, Hojatolislam Gholam Reza Hasani, the Supreme Leader's personal representative to the province of West Azerbaijan, declared possession of nuclear weapons to be one of Iran's top goals. "An atom bomb ... must be produced," he said. "That is because the Koran has told Muslims to 'get strong and amass all the forces at your disposal'."
4)
The following February, Mohsen Gharavian, a Qom theologian close to Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, one of the Islamic Republic's staunchest ideologues, said it was natural for Iran to possess nuclear weapons.
if these words are accurate, and if Mr. Khatami (whose ideology and mentality is completely contrary to these views) is aware of the stances which these people have taken, then there NEEDS to be an internal revolution and a cleaning of the extremists from ALL positions of power, a cleaning process done by the peace loving true Muslims of Iran (led by Mr. Khatami) in order to save Iran from an Islamic Republic system gone wrong!
REAL REFORM is no longer an ideal or a hope, but it's a necessity, a matter of survival, it's the ONLY thing that can save Iran from misery, total humiliation, invasion and possibly even becoming the battle ground for the THIRD WORLD WAR!
p.s. please post this comment even if you are embarrassed by it! these quotes are out there, so there needs to be a response to them if they are accurate!
Dear Dr Ebtekar
Instead of worrying about flight of Palestinians, should not you worry about you fellow Azeri Turks struggling to free themselves from language oppression. Allow them to teach in their own language and in their own alphabet, what are you afraid of? Allow them to be proud of their Turkish blood!
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