Dinner with Ahmadinejad

Yesterday evening I was one of about 250 participants in an interfaith iftar (fast-breaking dinner) and conversation hosted here in New York by the Iranian mission to the UN. The guest (and speaker) of honor was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Other speakers included a number of US religious leaders from different faiths, the President of the UN General Assembly, Nicaragua’s Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, and Norway’s former prime minister Kjell-Magne Bondevik. Both these latter spoke about the very deeply felt religious motivations for their engagement in public life.
I found Ahmadinejad much more impressive as an orator than I had expected. In t.v. clips he often looks a little ranty. But in life, it turned out he has a commanding rhetorical style. He has a much deeper voice than I’d expected, and used it with evident expertise regarding timing, modulation, and other aspects of oration. He spoke in Farsi, only occasionally looking down at notes. I suspect it was a speech he had delivered a number of times before in different settings?
Unfortunately the simultaneous interpretation was not great; but I imagine we non-Farsi speakers received a fair idea of the main points of what he said.
The format of the event was strange, and shifted a number of times as the evening progressed. The “main event” was set up as a panel discussion with five participants. The moderator said at the beginning that he would have a little bell he’d ring to keep each main speaker to seven minutes. And he promised there’d be time for questions from the floor afterwards.
So the first four speakers (and D’Escoto) all spoke their seven-minutes’ worth first. They made some very good points. Then Ahmadinejad spoke– for around 40 minutes.
But what, really, could one have expected? That he’d be “just another panelist”, speaking alongside the others? He is, after all, the President of a country…
And there was no time for questions.
Among the points raised by the four preceding panelists were their concerns about Iran’s human rights situation; about the non-transparency of Iran’s nuclear technology program; and about Ahmadinejad’s fierce opposition to Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state and his denials of the broadly accepted facts about Hitler’s Holocaust. These panelists all, also, issued impassioned pleas for the United States’ differences with Iran to be resolved through peaceful means.
In his speech, Ahmadinejad pushed back forcefully on all the points of criticism the earlier speakers had raised. He said that citizens from the country that had invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, had supported Israel’s attacks against Lebanon and the Palestinians, and had been responsible for so many rights abuses in Iraq, Aghanistan and Guantanamo were in a poor situation to speak about Iranian rights abuses. (But besides, there weren’t any.) He said that citizens of a country that has a huge nuclear arsenal, some of which is close to Iran and pointed at it, are in a poor situation to say anything about Iran’s nuclear program, which “as we all know” is for solely scientific and peaceful purposes. He did not mention the Holocaust directly. But he did say that during World War 2 some 60 million people lost their lives (or he might have said 20 million? Unclear.) … And that the perpetrators responsible for all that killing had been Europeans– yet it had been the Palestinians who were forced to pay the price.
On Palestine, he talked at some length about the “Zionist occupation” of Palestine as having lasted for more than 60 years, and inflicting terrible harm on the Palestinians. He argued that at and after the creation of Israel five million Palestinians were displaced (a huge exaggeration of their numbers then, but less than the number of Palestinian refugees today)– along with one million Jews, presumably those from the Arab countries.
While expressing strong support for Judaism as a faith, he said that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism and transgresses against it.
He spoke in a consistently religiously-based vein, lacing his speech with comments about “What would the Prophets have done if… ?” and expressing a lot of support for the world’s poor, hungry, and displaced. He also took the opportunity to accuse the US of being motivated by greed and indifference to the sufferings of others in Africa, the Middle East, or elsewhere. His religious views seemed to include considerable millennialism, but cast in a sort of interfaith vein: he seemed to be referring not only to the possibly imminent return of a Mahdi-like figure but also to that of a Christ-like figure. (I wish the interpretation had been clearer.)
At the end, there was no time for questions. Mary-Ellen McNish, the Executive Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, presented Ahmadinejad with a reproduction of a famous painting by a 19th century artist, Edward Hicks, representing “the lion lying down with the lamb” and a bunch of other peaceable animals lying around, too. Then he left to catch his plane back home.
While he’s been in New York for the General Assembly this year, he has met with large numbers of different groups of people, including an MSM journalists’ group, yesterday morning.
McNish and some other Quakers, including Joe Volk, the head of the Friends Committee for National Legislation, have been among the faith group leaders in this country who have been participating in interfaith dialogue with Ahmadinejad and other Iranian regime figures for two or three years now. I haven’t talked with any of them since last night’s event, but I imagine some of them may be feeling that it’s a pretty long, slow process to get beyond the “opening statements.” But still, having these dialogues, and hanging in with them, is so much better than not having them– especially given how loudly the drums of an anti-Iranian war continue to beat in this country. Also, many of the points Ahmadinejad made about US policies have considerable validity. No-one should judge a situation of gross double standards on issues like human rights or WMDs to be fair or acceptable.
I was interested, too, to see both the fact and the nature of the engagement in the event by D’Escoto and Bondevik. D’Escoto spoke with huge passion about the need for human equality and caring for all of God’s children in all countries, of all faiths. I think it’s great to have a person with such views and such commitment steering the work of the General Assembly. (Ah, but how about the much more elitist and powerful Security Council? That would be even better!)