Questions, comments or a tip? Let us know.
Ahmadinejad Addresses United Nations
By Betsy Morais
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 26, 2007
A day after his appearance at Columbia, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blasted the United States and other Western powers in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly.
Seldom mentioning Western countries by name, he ticked off a litany of complaints against what he described as “bullying” and “arrogant” powers.
“The arrogant powers have repeatedly accused Iran and have even made military threats and imposed illegal sanctions against it,” he said.
He defended his country’s nuclear program, which is widely suspected to be aimed at producing nuclear weapons. “All our nuclear activities have been completely peaceful and transparent,” he said. “I officially announce that in our opinion the nuclear issue of Iran is now closed.”
The Iranian president accused the United States and its allies of hypocrisy in condemning his regime. “Human rights are being extensively violated by certain powers, especially those who pretend to be their exclusive advocates. Setting up secret prisons, abducting persons, trials and secret punishments without any regard to due process, extensive tapping of telephone conversations ... have become commonplace,” he said.
“They use various pretexts to occupy sovereign states and cause insecurity and division,” he added. “They do not even have the courage to declare their defeat and exit Iraq.”
Many global problems, he said, can be traced to the “rule of the incompetent.” “How can the incompetent, who cannot even manage and control themselves, rule humanity and arrange its affairs? Unfortunately they have put themselves in the position of God,” he continued.
Like his speech at Columbia, Ahmadinejad’s U.N. address drew hundreds of protesters who rallied for the expulsion of his regime and for the instatement of a new secular democratic government in Iran. The protesters outside the U.N. addressed some of the same points that President Lee Bollinger made in his cutting introduction of Ahmadinejad on Monday, including the Iranian’s crackdown on Iran’s university campuses and his treatment of women.
“I don’t see him as a human,” said Bita Badiee, 24, the daughter of Iranian immigrants. She and her family traveled to New York from their home in Miami to show their support for Ahmadinejad’s secular political opponents in Iran and to “expose the Iranian president of everything that he’s done.”
Protesters supported Maryam Rajavifor, the leader of the political movement that seeks to replace President Ahmadinejad’s government in Iran with a secular democracy.
Messages such as “Ahmadinejad—Terrorist, Out of U.N,” and images of public hangings in Iran surrounded the area outside the U.N. throughout the day, though the rally remained peaceful, police officers said.
Despite the crowd’s ardent anti-Ahmadinejad sentiment, protester Hadi Nikoonejae criticized Columbia’s treatment of the Iranian president.
Nikoonejae, who was born in Iran and now lives in Gainesville, Florida, felt that Bollinger went against Iranian custom in not respecting Ahmadinejad’s rights as a guest.
“Bollinger does not understand the Iranian people,” Nikoonejae said. “I’m against Mr. Ahmadinejad, but in my opinion, Mr. Bollinger insulted the Iranian people.”
Some of the featured speakers at yesterday’s event included Representative Ted Poe, R-Texas, a former Iraqi Governor, and a Fox News foreign affairs analyst. These and other speakers lashed out against the policies and practices of the Ahmadinejad government. Additional messages from both Democratic and Republican congressmen in support of an “Iranian revolution” were shown on a large projector screen facing the protestors. They were also read aloud to the crowd.
The majority of those at the protest were Iranian immigrants who traveled to New York from around the country to rally for their homeland. Many, such as the Badiee family and Hadi Nikoonejae, had fled to the United States from Iran after the fall of the Shah Reza Pahlavi and his replacement with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Hossein Panah, of the Committee of Iranian-Americans of Virginia, was helping out the cause by distributing free sandwiches and sodas to members of the rally who were hungry not only for Iranian freedom, but also for turkey subs.
Others stumbled upon the event for curiosity’s sake. Catherine Harnington, a graduate student in global affairs at New York University, was enjoying the lively scene as she lunched on a bench nearby. “I think it’s a really positive sign,” Harnington said. “I’m really uplifted by all of this. Any form of debate is a positive thing.”
Erin Durkin contributed to this article.
Betsy Morais can be reached at news@columbiaspectator.com.
Article Tools:
View Comments ( 7)
Post a Comment
An Open Letter to President Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University
I would like to express to you my absolute disgust at your abhorrent treatment of Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, earlier this week. You have done both your nation and the University you represent, a great disservice. Columbia University is one of the United States' premier centres of intellect, and your demeaning and insulting stance towards Dr Ahmadinejad, invited under the pretext of a scholarly discussion, was a disgrace, and flew in the face of scholorship by any definition. How utterly base of you to invite a foreign head of state to your institution so that you can publicly ridicule and humiliate him. Your shameful and tasteless actions not only reflect very poorly on your esteemed institiution, but also on the United States of America, and the American people in general. In fact, you epitomised the concept of The Ugly American. At a time where mutual respect, multilateral engagement and reconciliation are emerging as the only avenues through which we can solve the monumental political, economic and environmental problems we are presently confronted with, you have set a very, very poor example indeed. Shame on you. You are a descredit to your institution.
Rory E. Morty, Giessen, Germany
It is transparent that much of Bollinger’s unseemly and crude personal attack on President (not “dictator”) Ahmadnejad was motivated by his need to cover his posterior from the criticism of those who attacked him for extending the invitation to the Iranian president to speak at Columbia; and also from the Zionist that have browbeaten almost everyone to believing that the denial of Israel’s right to exists is an unforgivable and contemptable heresy.
In fact the right of a state to exist is not a concept that appears in international law, nor is it a concept that one hears applied to, say, Argentina, or Canada, or Great Britain. It is only applied to Israel and enforced by the Zionist thought police,
Those who believe Israel has a right to exists have ignored the displacement, in fact the ethnic cleansing, of the Palestinian population in 1948, who, or whose descendents, now number about 5 million and are obliged to live in squalid refugee camps in the surrounding Arab states. They deny as well that 3.5 million human beings, Palestinians specifically, have lived in a virtual prison for 40 years as their land and resources are constantly being stolen as they also face daily humiliation and economic deprivation.
The Zionist deny that Palestine is the home of the Palestinian people, and has been for the last 1300 years, yet that is the historical fact. The Zionist become irate if anyone is agnostic about the Holocaust ( I am not, but Ahmadnejad is), yet they themselves deny the “Nakbah”, the “catastrophe” in which three quarters of a million people were driven from their homes. Charges of anti-Semitism fly constantly from these people, yet they regard Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular, as subhuman not even deserving of the right of self defense..
In addition, Israel is a state based on racial exclusiveness in which citizenship is defined only in terms of Jewishness.
Israel is unstable as it is morally constituted and is unlikely to survive for several more decades for it is founded on ethnic cleansing and which must maintain 3.5 million people in bondage in order to maintain it racial purity. The world will not accept this racism and its associated brutality indefinitely.
William James Martin
Department of Mathematics
University of New Orleans
Columbia graduate , Class of ‘77
Umm, dude, when did this become a discussion about Israel?
We do not have this phenomenon in America. I do not know who told you that we have it.
OK let's all cool our jets for a bit here, ok? Iran has no monopoly on obnoxious presidents and creeping totalitarianism, and this has become a fearsome smokescreen for America's own dirty laundry.
American and Israeli Jews have got to stop letting the American war profiteers and their shadowy Saudi backers push their buttons. Neither of those entities care one bit if Iran and Israel bomb each other into oblivion so long as there's enough people on each side buying the bombs, guns and ammo. Wake up, people. Don't let the war profiteers push your buttons!
And I am sure a scholar at Bollinger's level could have found a better way to express his distaste for Ahmadinejad's more psychotic views without descending to the level he did. Inviting someone into a forum to slap them around - that's so "Bill O'Reilly". Pathetic, and cowardly. I really expected better of him.
“President Musharraf is a leader of global importance and his contribution to Pakistan’s economic turnaround and the international fight against terror remain remarkable - it is rare that we have a leader of his stature at campus,” said Lee C Bollinger, the President of Columbia University. (2005)
I would like to respond to the above letter from"chancellors and presidents of Iranian universities and research centers" and in particular their closing comment "You can be assured that Iranians are very polite and hospitable toward their guests." This assertion is quite ridiculous, given the well-known hostage crisis of 1979-1980, when United States diplomats and other personel of the the American Embassy were taken hostage by students in Iran and held hostage for 444 days. That several of the hostages vehemently assert that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself was one of their captors must also be considered. As a result of that crisis, the U.S. has not had officail diplomatic relations with Iran.
Indeed, for all your whining about the "insults" heaped upon your President Ahmadinejad, he was treated with more courtesy than our embassy personel have received at the hands of Iranians. I also draw your attention to the recent arrest and prolonged detention of U.S. citizen Haleh Esfandiari, who is a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. As scholars yourselves, you should be appalled at her treatment.
So the short answer to your laughable pose of righteous indignation is to simply to say to you and all Iranians, if you cannot stomach Americans who do not treat you with flowerly language and diplomatic courtesy, then you should strive to re-establish diplomatic relations with our country. If you are unable to do that, then perhaps you should grow thicker skin.
Post new comment