US religious leaders and Ahmadinejad: nuclear issues, de-escalation, Holocaust, etc

While Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly last week, one of the groups he met with was a group of around 45 “religious leaders from Christian and Muslim faith backgrounds”. This group was convened by the Mennonite Central Committee, whose account of the meeting can be found here.
The Mennonite Chirch is one of the historic “peace churches” here in the US– that is, one of the churches that hews to the strong peace testimony within the New Testament rather than to the “Just War” theory, which was a much later accretion to the body of Christian belief and practice. The MCC has maintained an inter-faith dialogue with religious scholars in Teheran for several years now.
According to that report on the MCC website, the meeting in New York lasted about 70 minutes. After opening remarks from both Pres. Ahmadinejad and MCC Executive Director Robb Davis, Davis asked

a question about the language being used by the U.S. and Iran, such as President Bush referring to Iran as one of the “Axis of Evil” countries, while Iranian protesters march through the streets shouting “Death to America.”
Ahmadinejad responded by saying that “Death to America” does not mean death to the American people, but in fact Iranians love the American people. What it pointed to, he said, were problems with how U.S. government policy has negatively impacted the recent history of Iran from the Shah to the present crisis.
“There was no cause for anger as they are not addressed to the American nation but to the aggressive, unjust, warmongering and bullying U.S. policies,” he said. He later added that there are times when people need strong language to express themselves.

That last part strikes me as an unhelpful cop-out.
Asked about his views on the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad

made a direct connection between the current conflict between Israel and Palestine and the Holocaust in which he said the Palestinian people are being asked to pay the price of the Holocaust. In this context “the Holocaust is a European problem not a Palestinian one,” he said.
Acknowledging the millions of people who died in World War II, Ahmadinejad asked why so much attention was being paid to those who died in the Holocaust and very little to the millions of other civilians who also died.
Davis told Ahmadinejad that more dialogue was necessary on this issue.

Yes, indeed.
The group also discussed nuclear-weapons issues. The best account of this part of the discussion is this one from David Culp– also here. Culp heads the Nuclear Disarmament Program at our Quaker lobbying group, the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
Culp picked out this statement from Ahmadinejad as central: “We believe the production or use of nuclear weapons is immoral.”
Culp wrote:

I suspect that all of the people in this meeting had many areas where we probably disagree with the policies of the Iranian government. For instance, FCNL is concerned about political prisoners in Iran, religious tolerance, and Iran’s position on Israel. We also were aware that the Iranian president met with us as part of his effort to defuse the looming crisis between the Iranian government and the international community over Iran’s nuclear energy program.
But I’ve been a lobbyist working for the abolition of nuclear weapons for more than a decade, and I’ve talked about these issues with a lot of people. Ahmadinejad impressed me as someone who had thought about these issues a lot. He’s a former engineer, who is thinking through the arguments from a number of different perspectives.
For instance, although he starts any discussion by saying that nuclear weapons are immoral, Ahmadinejad also reminded us that the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, which didn’t prevent their government from collapsing. He added that, during Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s, Iraq’s alliance with a country with nuclear weapons (presumably he was referring to the United States) didn’t have any impact on the war. He convinced me that Iran is not interested in developing nuclear weapons.
Iran is interested in developing nuclear energy. As a former engineer, he believes that nuclear fuel is the cleanest fuel there is and he explained that this energy source is critical for the future development of his country. And Ahmadinejad bristles at suggestions that the United States or anyone else would try to dictate how his country pursued its energy needs.

He reported that Ahmadinejad suggested that the 27-year-old Conference on Disarmament in Geneva might be a good place to discuss these issues, and added:

He then offered a proposal: Iran will open all of its nuclear facilities to inspections, if the United States will also open its facilities to inspections. Neither Iran nor the U.S. have implemented the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that includes additional inspections, although we at FCNL believe both countries should do so. He added that the United States should refrain from building so-called second or third generation nuclear weapons.
Now, I’m not endorsing Iran’s proposals or even arguing this is the only path to peace. And, in our meeting in New York on Wednesday, the Iranian president made other comments that I found deeply troubling. In particular, I was struck by his comments about the Holocaust…
But when he spoke about issues that I cover, the nuclear weapons issues, what struck me is that the Iranian president was offering a reasonable basis for real negotiations. Since Ahmadinejad took office, Iran has been backing away from permitting full inspections of its nuclear program. But I think this is a bargaining stance to start negotiations. Iran wants to have full rights for civilian nuclear energy, including nuclear enrichment. Iranian leaders also want some kind of assurance that the United States will not bomb their country.

He added this little bit of further context:

The day I left Washington to go to New York for this meeting, I attended a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The contrast was striking. Nicholas Burns, the number three official at the State Department, spent most of that hearing lob[b]ing what I can only describe as rhetorical hand grenades at Iran. In his first State of the Union address, President Bush described Iran as part of the “axis of evil.” That’s still the approach of some in the U.S. government.
But what is even more striking is the pride U.S. officials take in insisting they will not even talk to Iran. Nicholas Burns, in his testimony this week to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made a point of saying he has never met with an Iranian government official. Now here is a man who has been part of the U.S. foreign service for decades, and he made a point of pride that he had never met with any Iranian official. If the U.S. continues to insist that no dialogue is possible with Iran, then war is the likely alternative.

These are great observations. Even more of a reason for folks to become big supporters (financial and otherwise) of FCNL’s truly constructive work there in Washington DC!