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Speaking before an audience of Hamas, al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Lebanese Hezbollah, and PFLP militants at the first "Support for the Palestinian Intifada" Conference in April 2001, Khatami called upon "holy martyrs" to follow the Hezbollah model to "open a clear future of struggle and victory for the Palestinian people" [4] and later, on February 1, 2004, he stated on the Iranian Broadcasting Network that Israel was both immoral and illegitimate - all in sharp contrast, it should be noted, to his recent remarks to TIME magazine to the effect that he favors a "two-state solution." In Khatami’s universe, it is standard operating procedure to say in English for Western consumption what he would never say to his Islamic audiences back home.
While the Western press and many academics continue to label Khatami a reformist and willingly follow him around our country, press freedom was under constant attack during his administration. Khatami was president during the biggest crackdown on the Iranian media since the beginning of the Iranian revolution. Hundreds of newspapers were shut down and many writers and journalists punished, some even killed, for their views. During his tenure as President, the Iranian government ruled against prominent Majlis member and owner Mohsen Mirdamadi of the reformist paper Norouz (shut down July 2002); dissolved the Freedom Movement (Nehzat-e Azadi) and imposed prison sentences up to twenty years against dozens of its members – many of whom remain imprisoned; and arrested world-renown Iranian writer Siamak Pourzand for supporting the U.S and attacking the Iranian theocracy. Abdollah Nouri, one of the leading reformers in Iran was sentenced by a religious court to five years in prison for publishing "sacrilegious articles" in his reformist newspaper.
As an example of how the media was repressed during that period, Michael Ledeen notes that, in preparing for the 25th-anniversary celebrations starting in February 2004, Mohammad-Hossein Khoshvaght, head of Iran's international press bureau, reminded Iranian interpreters who were assigned to foreign journalists that lying or mistranslating Iranians' words was mandatory if the truth would give a bad image of the country. "If any foreign journalist tries to cover politically sensitive matters (like student protests) or if they ask to work on their own, the interpreters should immediately report them to the regime. Furthermore, foreign journalists are not to enter Iranians' homes, and the interpreters should remember that the journalists' phone calls will be monitored by security officers." [5]
Nor was Khatami's government content with press restrictions alone. Rather than legalize satellite dishes, his government banned and confiscated them. The Iranian government even banned private Internet service providers.
Khatami's human rights record was equally appalling. In April 2000, Iranian journalists speculated on the reason for the government ban on the daily Arya and hinted that the severity of the penalty was due to the paper's mention of a series of hangings of political dissidents in 1988, a time when Khatami was the armed forces' Deputy Director of Ideological Affairs.
Iranian intellectuals and writers were murdered in Tehran just as Muslim reformers were ruthlessly repressed. In 1998, four dissident writers were mysteriously killed in two months, as were the leader of an opposition party and his wife. The most-revered religious figure in Iran, the Ayatollah Montazeri, once the number-two man in the Islamic Republic, recently published his memoirs. In them, he stated that in 1988, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini ordered a purge of political prisoners. More than 3,000 dissidents were killed in the space of a week. As a member of the ruling council, Khatami had advance knowledge of these executions, yet did nothing to counter the slaughter. Tellingly, Montazeri's memoirs are not available in Iran. [6]
But the worst aspect of the Khatami regime showed itself in its religious intolerance. During his presidency, the Anglican Church and its leadership in Iran all but disappeared. Khatami's Iran was designated by the United States government as a "Country of Particular Concern" under the International Religious Freedom Act and as one of the world's worst religious persecutors. Nina Shea, Director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House, writing in National Review Online recalls that all of Iran's religious minorities (Bahais, Assyrian Christians, Catholics, Anglicans, Armenians, Evangelicals, Mandeans, Jews, and Zoroastrians) have been condemned as "heretics" and their numbers have been steadily dwindling. Over two hundred Bahai leaders have been killed by the government while some ten thousand have been purged from government employment and schools. They have no rights to property, and cannot officially marry or be buried according to the traditions of their faith. Islamic law provides that their blood can be spilled with impunity and no one can be punished for murdering them.
According to Shea: "The other Abrahamic faiths, officially "protected" by the state, are forced to abide by Islamic rules and live in great insecurity. Christian and Jewish grocery shop owners have been required to post their religion on their store fronts. Jews, whose numbers have been reduced to about a third of their pre-1979 population, have faced relentless state-sponsored anti-Semitism. Some were arrested and put on trial for spying for Israel under Khatami, until being later freed after international protest. Christians have been vulnerable to apostasy charges, with some imprisoned and others killed by government-linked death squads." [7] Nor did women fare any better. Shiite women have been harshly restricted and treated as inferiors under state-enforced religious law. Cases of women stoned for adultery occurred during Khatami's tenure.
This is the man who has been granted the privilege of speaking at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the Washington National Cathedral. If there is some strange, perverted logic attached to his having received a visa to speak in this country especially at this time, I fail to see it. If, by any stretch of the imagination, the CIA intends to install Mohammed Khatami as part of a future regime change in Iran, they would be making a dreadful miscalculation. Khatami is not a moderate. He remains wedded to the concept of a state subject to shari’a (Islamic law) and even if he was prepared to entertain serious social and religious reforms, he has demonstrated, time and again, that he lacks the courage to carry them out. In a worst case scenario, Mohammed Khatami is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Not only is his appearance in America an affront to the memory of the victims of the 9/11 tragedies, but it is a travesty to our soldiers in Iraq who are dying at the hands of his Iranian surrogates. The ultimate irony is that we have allowed a senior member of an enemy nation free access to our country and our media while he, himself, during his time as Iranian President, repressed the very freedoms that he now enjoys.
He is to visit a memorial to one of the great Founding Fathers of our country, and when he does, it will be more than an insult to the memory of Thomas Jefferson. For such a person to speak of tolerance and ethics from an American podium to an American audience at this time or any time is the ultimate in hypocrisy and nothing less than an insult to our nation.
ENDNOTES
Mark Silverberg is a former member of the Canadian Justice Department, a past Director of the Canadian Jewish Congress (Western Office) based in Vancouver, and served as a Consultant to the Secretary General of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem during the first Palestinian intifada.
On December 3rd, and in direct opposition to the conclusions drawn from Israeli intelligence sources, a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 with no evidence to suggest it had re-started it. "Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons," says the summary's second sentence while expressing only "moderate confidence" that Tehran has not re-started the military program. The report says "with high confidence" that Iran did have a secret nuclear weapons program and that it stopped only after it got caught and was threatened with international punishment. On the face of it, the NIE Report appears to be a betrayal of Israel and a humiliation for the U.S. that has maintained for years that Iran is continuing its quest for nuclear weapons. Reviewing the evidence that has been acculmulated against Iran, however, raises questions as to whether the NIE Report is genuine, or part of an elaborate covert plan of deception designed to mislead the mullahs. Only time will tell."
The CIA still doesn't quite get it. During most of the 1980's, it secretly sent billions of dollars in military assistance to Afghanistan to support the Islamic mujahedeen against the Russian occupation of that country. It provided cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, funded propaganda and manipulated politics to ensure the success of their jihad. It was in the midst of this struggle that bin Laden conceived and built his global Islamic terror organization. The CIA thought that it's sole purpose for being in the region was to expel the Russians from Afghanistan. But it failed to understand the religious nature of the struggle in which the mujahedeen were involved so it never stopped to consider the consequences for America of a successful jihad against the godless Russian infidels. That close-minded approach led to the rise of the Taliban and later the birth of al Qaeda. For the CIA, the mujahedeen were freedom fighters involved a war against Communist occupation. To the mujahedeen, the war against the Russians was just the opening salvo in a global jihad against the infidels. Their attention would soon shift to America.
Like the ebb and flow of the oceans’ tides, the field of foreign intelligence is an ever-changing one. Last month, two little known events occurred in Israel, both of which reflect the new realities of international terrorism. The first was the initial shipment of eight F-16I long-range strategic jet fighters from the U.S. and the second were the recommendations from a secret intelligence report known as “Project Daniel.”
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