Robert Fisk | Chicago | September 4

The Independent - As the West's "war on terror" burns across the Muslim world, one of Islam's most principled leaders - the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami - issued a grave warning yesterday from the very heart of America, the country whose troops and allies are fighting Islamists across the Middle East in a war that is costing thousands of Muslim lives.

"The policies of the neo-conservatives have created a war that creates more extremists and radicals," he told The Independent in Chicago. "The events of 9/11 gave them this ability to create fear and anxiety ... and to create new policies of their own and now events are creating an expansion of extremists on both sides. A struggle is under way to dominate this world multilaterally ... We are a witness to war - with suppression from one side and extremist reaction in the form of terror from the other."

wow, I didn't see that one coming Jewish groups and others object to his visit.

Former Iranian President To Speak At National Cathedral

(September 3, 2006)--The Bush administration has decided to allow former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami into the United States later this week for a visit that will include a speech at Washington's National Cathedral.

Khatami plans to attend a UN conference to promote dialogue on Tuesday and Wednesday.

On Thursday, the former Iranian leader is to speak at Washington National Cathedral on the role of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in shaping peace.

He'll be the most senior Iranian official to visit Washington since Islamic fundamentalists seized the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held Americans there hostage for 444 days.

link

The Katami visit is simply the most important news story of the day. We are hearing from Katami the message Iran wants to give to the American people, which is not the same as the white hot rhetoric that the Iranian president is spewing out for the Iranian people.
The Neocon/Bush plan -- which I believe is in play based on evidence that keeps accumulating over the years -- has been to occupy and pacify Iraq as an "easy" first step and to use it as a base of operations for the pacification of the region, and in the meantime establishing a network of military bases to shift military operations from Germany. Well, oops, that didn't work very well. Afghanistan was then going to be much easier to occupy and manage, with the utlimate goal to be either engaging in a partnership with Iran or invading it. That seems to have been the three-step goal set for the Bush administration and a group of wealthy folks in the shadows who believe they have been called to the mission to advance the US according to their vision.
Such an attitude flows from groups in the US who began to become cohesive in the 1950s and were somewhat connected to the John Birch Society, somewhat connected to Barry Goldwater, and more rightly connected to Oliver North and the Iran-Contra episode that was sponsored by some very wealthy, ultra-conservative types who seem to believe that it America's destiny to take over and "own" the world.
I can't prove that I've got it right on all points and the folks involved are not marching down Main Street carrying signs announcing their intentions. But there is a bottom line to all of this which is that Bush is ramping up the rhetoric against Iran to show they are a renegade state and that they must "pay the price" for their actions. If the folks behind the plan are as single-minded as I believe they are -- as evidenced by their need to invade Iraq against the advice of all of the serious experts on the region -- then they will want to maintain their timetable regarding bringing relations with Iran to the crisis point. The depleated state of our armed forces -- Britain is in a worse situation with its forces -- will not matter to them. What will matter is engaging in warfare with Iran prior to Bush leaving office.
I believe that a number of world leaders are aware of the pattern that's in play and which will probably lose serious momentum if the Democrats win control of at least one chamber of Congress. Katami's visit is extremely important in regard to whatever hidden agendas are in play to diffuse the image of Iran as a loose nuclear cannon ready to explode. CNN has given him some coverage and we can hope he receives the attention that his visit deserves.

Channing
Ventura CA USA

Sep 6, 2006

COMMENT
Spreading the word in the US
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami's speaking tour in the United States, which granted him a visa as a gesture of goodwill toward Iran, has, as expected, occasioned renewed interest in Khatami's theme of dialogue among civilizations.

Initiated in 2000 as a discursive response to the siren voices of clashing civilizations, Khatami's "counter-paradigm" attracted

global attention after the United Nations' embrace of his suggestion to make 2001 the Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations. The UN and its Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) organized a plethora of events around this, sponsored under the leadership of veteran UN diplomat Giandomenico Picco, Kofi Annan's personal representative on "Dialogue Among Civilizations".

For more than two years, this author worked closely with Picco and others to promote the message of tolerance, understanding and reciprocity behind this UN-focused program. [1] In addition to countless conferences, seminars and inter-faith meetings, this involved organizing a world youth festival on "Dialogue Among Civilizations", which took place in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the summer of 2000, bringing hundreds of young people from some 60 countries for a week of learning and inter-cultural activities.

In an article I inked in 2001 titled "Khatami and the emancipatory project of dialogue among civilizations", I highlighted the more than one dozen motivational factors that operated behind Khatami's initiative, including a quest for identity, autonomy, interdependence, peace and non-violence. [2]

In retrospect, I would put non-violence on top, particularly since there is so much rather pathetic misunderstanding of Islam in general and Shi'ism in specific in the West, irrespective of all the media commentaries. Case in point, respected Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis opined an article titled "August 22" in the Wall Street Journal last month in which he lambasted Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic Mahdism as a violent discourse premised on the end of the world.

Lewis's diatribe, easily debunkable by showing the remarkable non-violent ethos of Mahdism, in essence as a doctrine of hope in close affinity with the Christian belief in resurrection, clearly shows that the malady of pseudo-understanding of Islam is not a monopoly of so-called yellow journalism and unfortunately runs deeper, infecting a significant aspect of the academic community in the United States. [3]

Thus the timely antidote of Khatami's trip and his message of Islamic humanism beamed at the US and global audience sets straight a sad spectacle of academic and scholarly miscognition on Islam.

In a speech in Chicago, Khatami responded to his Jewish and other critics by pointing out that he was the first Muslim leader to condemn the "barbaric" atrocities of September 11, 2001, and that he condemned the terrorists committing mass slaughter in New York in the strongest language possible in his speech before the UN General Assembly that year.

Khatami may be out of office and even out of favor in Tehran, yet his message of peace and dialogue is as important as ever, seeing how the nuclear row between Iran and the US has the potential of going down the slippery road to military confrontation.

A relatively neglected facet of Khatami's discourse deals with security. Until now, Khatami has not fully incorporated the security dialogue as an organic facet of his vision of dialogue among civilizations. Yet in light of the post-September 11 US intervention in the Middle East and the heightened insecurity of the Muslim Middle East regarding a "new crusade" led by an evangelical US president, it is essential that the discourse move on from mostly philosophical and theological levels or dimensions to the more concrete level of security dialogue.

Dialogue is, after all, a quest for understanding the "hostile other", and short of understanding the root causes of insecurity breeding paranoia in the West and Muslim East about each other, it is impossible to see a genuine way forward beyond the seemingly impregnable walls of clashing civilizations.

Of course, even then there is no guarantee that we could witness a qualitative breakthrough in the hot furnace of Islam versus West in the current milieu. As Samuel Huntington has aptly pointed out in his book on clashing civilizations, a great deal of this animosity is power-generated, by the vast accumulation of economic and political capital in the West headed by the United States, which, according to Huntington, manipulates the UN almost at will.

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Mass. Gov. calls planned Khatami talk 'propaganda'
06 Sep 2006 00:39:10 GMT
Source: Reuters
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(Updates with response from Harvard, paragraphs 7-9)

BOSTON, Sept 5 (Reuters) - Gov. Mitt Romney on Tuesday said Massachusetts would not provide any security support for former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami's weekend visit, calling his planned speech at Harvard "propaganda."

Khatami is due to speak on Sunday at Harvard University in Cambridge on the "Ethics of Tolerance in the Age of Violence."

Romney said Khatami will not receive a state police escort or any other state help. Federal officials will attend to his security.

Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said the state normally provides a police escort to visiting dignitaries. He said U.S. State Department officials had contacted the state police's tactical unit, which typically coordinates traffic-stopping escorts, prior to Romney's statement.

Romney, a 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, called the visit "a disgrace to the memory of all Americans who lost their lives at the hands of extremists, especially on the eve of the five-year anniversary of 9/11."

"The U.S. State Department listed Khatami's Iran as the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism," Romney said. "For him to lecture Americans about tolerance and violence is propaganda, pure and simple."

"We are surprised and disappointed by Governor Romney's position," on Khatami's visit, Harvard said in a statement.

"In keeping with its educational mission, Harvard University and the John F. Kennedy School of Government have a long tradition of providing an opportunity for leaders from around the world to speak to the community on public policy issues, and just as importantly, to give the audience the opportunity to ask challenging and unfiltered questions of these leaders."

"We are currently reviewing the security arrangements for this visit in light of the Governor's decision. We expect to go forward with the event and will work diligently with federal and local officials to ensure a safe environment for all."

The United States last week issued a visa for Khatami's visit. He was also scheduled to attend a United Nations conference in New York.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N05398876.htm

Tuesday, September 5, 2006

Worrisome words from seer of Iran

By ROBERT FISK
GUEST COLUMNIST

As the West's "war on terror" burns across the Muslim world, one of Islam's most principled leaders, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, issued a grave warning from the very heart of America, the country whose troops and allies are fighting Islamists across the Middle East in a war that is costing thousands of Muslim lives.

"The policies of the neo-conservatives have created a war that creates more extremists and radicals," he told The Independent in Chicago last weekend. "The events of 9/11 gave them this ability to create fear and anxiety ... and to create new policies of their own and now events are creating an expansion of extremists on both sides. A struggle is under way to dominate this world multilaterally ... We are a witness to war -- with suppression from one side and extremist reaction in the form of terror from the other."

Khatami might appear an improbable figure in the breakfast room of one of Chicago's smartest hotels, dressed in his black turban and long gown, his spectacles giving him the appearance of a university don -- which he once was -- rather than the seer of Iran, a man whose demands for a civil society and democracy at home were overwhelmed by the ascetic clerics who surround the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Yet he is enormously important in the Sunni as well as the Shia Muslim worlds as a philosopher-scholar, which is probably why the Bush administration gave him a visa, and his message was the sharpest he has ever delivered to the Muslim world and the secular West.

The former president said: "We have to find ways to confront these people on both sides. We need public opinion to be influenced ... And now the neo-conservative policies have created this sort of war."

But Khatami, who defended Iran's role in the nuclear crisis between the West and Tehran -- he asked why Israel was allowed nuclear weapons while refusing to sign the nuclear non-proliferation pact -- did not spare the perpetrators of what he called "the inhumane terrorist attacks" of Sept. 11, 2001. "I was one of the first officials to condemn this barbaric act ... this inferno would only intensify extremism and one-sidedness and would have no outcome except to retard justice and intellect and sacrifice righteousness and humanity," he said.

Addressing 15,000 American Muslims at the weekend, Khatami also made a clear assault on the influence of Israel's political lobby in the U.S. "We are unfortunately witnessing the emergence of policies that seek to confiscate public opinion in order to exploit all the grandeur of the nation and country of the United States ... policies that are the outcome of a point of view, that despite having no status in the U.S. public arena as far as numbers are concerned, uses decisive lobby groups and influential centers to utilize the entirety of America's power and wealth to promote its own interest and to implant policies outside U.S. borders that have no resemblance to the spirit of Anglo-American civilization and the aspirations of its Founding Fathers or its constitution, causing crisis after crisis in our world."

When he spoke of "the vast and all-encompassing presence of powers who express concern for the world but implement policies aimed at devouring the world," there was a sense of shock among his audience. They had not expected such an epic denunciation of U.S. hegemony from a divine known for his compassion rather than his anger.

"Any popular or democratic change or transformation that is outside the realm of their influence is not acceptable," he said, "for they find it far more convenient to deal with non-nationalistic and non-popular trends and regimes rather than popular ones, who naturally tend to care about the welfare and the physical interests of their people."

Thus did Khatami dispose of America's cry for "democracy" in the "new" Middle East.

Needless to say, his words were given scarcely a few seconds on America's major news channels. Khatami's wisdom is not wanted in Washington.

Robert Fisk writes for The Independent in Britain.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/283814_columntwo05.html

with more articles

Sept 11
By KEN MAGUIRE
Associated Press Writer

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) -- Former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, in a speech at Harvard University, condemned Osama bin Laden for committing crimes in the name of Islam and said Jews have the right to live peacefully, but he skirted the issue of whether they have the right to do so in their state of Israel.

Speaking on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khatami said he had two problems with the al-Qaida leader behind the attacks.

"First, because of the crimes he conducts," he said, "and second because he conducts them in the name of Islam, the religion which is a harbinger of peace and justice."

Khatami, whose speech in Farsi was relayed through a translator, said he was one of the first world leaders to condemn "the barbarous acts" of Sept. 11.

In response to a question about the notion of suicide bombers gaining entry to heaven as reward for their martyrdom, Khatami said, "Those who put others through hell will never go to heaven."

Khatami took a softer tone on Israel than current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when asked whether he favored the elimination of the state of Israel. He said he opposes the systematic elimination of any people. "The Jews have a right to live in peace and control their destinies," he said, but he didn't say whether they have a right to do so in an Israeli state in the Middle East.

Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, is widely believed to have received weapons and other support from its backers Syria and Iran. Khatami denied that Iran helps fund the group and defended the organization's right to exist.

"Hezbollah today is a symbol of Lebanese resistance," he said during his 30-minute speech given under tight security at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Khatami repeatedly praised the concept of democracy but said American politicians, since World War II, have been infatuated with "world domination."

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