Thread: Ahmadinejad travels to United Nations for last address as President of Iran Iranian P

Ahmadinejad travels to United Nations for last address as President of Iran

Iranian President will address UN General Assembly for final time as President of Iran, accompanied by a 100-person entourage


Faine Greenwood
September 22, 2012 17:46

Eternally controversial Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in New York City and will make his final address as president to the 67th session of the United Nations General Assembly—a visit that comes at a particularly tense time for US-Middle Eastern relations.

The Tehran Times reports that 100 people will accompany the Iranian president to New York City, and that many more were denied visas to join him.

Haaretz reports that 20 Iranian officials were denied visas to the United States, including ministers and top aides.
Ahmadinejad's second, final term as Iranian President is slated to end next year.

He claims that he will attempt to focus on the non-aligned movement in his assembly speech at a meeting focused on the rule of law, added the Tehran Times—though if history holds true, he may diverge somewhat from his planned message.

Read more from GlobalPost: Ahmadinejad's speech at U.N. prompts walkouts

Ahmadinejad has never been known for his tact at United Nations conclaves: in November of 2011, he prompted walkouts when he delivered a blistering speech criticizing Zionists and the veracity of both September 11 and the Holocaust.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, protesters are ready and waiting for Ahmadinejad's arrival in New York City, reports the Wall Street Journal, and will be attempting to infiltrate the posh Warwick Hotel where he usually stays while in the United States.

The Global Post

Another political mystery not solved?
Ahmadinejad - Hostage Taker?

by Daniel Pipes
Kommersant (Moscow daily)
November 13, 2006

Soon after his election as president of Iran, on June 25, 2005, pictures of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged showing him as a hostage-taker. An Associated Press photograph showed a man looking very much like a younger version of today's Ahmadinejad holding a blind-folded man, apparently five days after the U.S. embassy in Tehran was seized on November 4, 1979.

The AP photo of Iranian hostage-takers with American hostages.

Five former American hostages confirmed that Ahmadinejad as one of their captors. William J. Daugherty, a former intelligence officer, said he saw Ahmadinejad 8 to 10 times at the start of his captivity: "I recognized him right off. … I remember so much his hatred of Americans. It just emanated from every pore of his body."BBC correspondent John Simpsonrecalled seeing Ahmadinejad on the embassy grounds. Abholhassan Bani-Sadr, a former president of Iran long living in exile, asserted that Ahmadinejad "wasn't among the decision-makers but he was among those inside the Embassy."
But Ahmadinejad's office denied these allegations and other hostage-takers, some of them now political opponents of Ahmadinejad – including Mohsen Mirdamadi, Hamid Reza, Abbas Abdi, Mohammad-Reza Khatami, and Saeed Hajjarian Jalaiepour – confirmed his account. One former American hostage denied Ahmadinejad had been a captor. Amir Taheri, editor-in-chief of a Tehran newspaper in the shah's time, concluded that "it is almost certain Ahmadinejad was not directly involved in the US embassy episode."
Thus did the issue die inconclusively: Ahmadinejad was for sure a central committee member of the main student group behind the embassy takeover, the "Office for Consolidating Unity between Universities and Theological Seminaries," leaving his precise role in the hostage-taking murky.
A new picture located by Kommersant re-opens this issue, providing new evidence that Ahmadinejad was not some backroom political type but in fact was a automatic gun-wielding hostage-taker. The person pictured here differs from the one in the Associated Press photograph, but should Ahmadinejad's identity as hostage-taker be established and accepted, it has two implications at this particularly delicate moment in U.S.-Iranian relations.

Is that Ahmadinejad in Kommersant's newly-located picture on the left? A recent photograph is on the right.

First, it brings back, especially for Americans over forty years old, the powerful and enduring humiliation of the 1979-1981 embassy takeover, with the likely consequence of hardening U.S. attitudes toward an Ahmadinejad-led government building nuclear weapons. The present alarm over his intentions will be fueled by a renewed mistrust.
Second, although Ahmadinejad is a powerful and dynamic politician, he has many domestic opponents and this evidence provides them with new evidence of his extremism, rashness, and unsuitability to govern the country, which they may be able to exploit.
Given the tepid reception to the picture that surfaced in June 2005, however, I expect that the information in this photograph will also be finessed. The machinery of international politics will likely find it too inconvenient for this unsavory history to be assimilated.
Ahmadinejad - Hostage Taker? :: Daniel Pipes

I recall vividly back in the 70's when Iran was a great ally, and before the fall of the Shah or Iran. I used to speak with the Iranian F4 pilots and they were actually decent people. The major reason the Shah fell IMO was economic related, and not religious. The Shah controlled the distribution of wealth, and many Iranians didn't like how he controlled that distribution. The US completely bungled Middle Eastern diplomacy by equipping BOTH Iran and Iraq with mass weaponry. Much of that was manipulated by Saudi Arabia, and their interests largely shaped the outcome of our relations with both Iran and Iraq.