.bmp)
.bmp)
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech before the United Nations General Assembly this week is all part of a sophisticated propaganda campaign to counter American and European pressure for stronger Security Council sanctions against Iran and to build support in the General Assembly for Iran’s campaign to win a Security Council seat of its own.Ahmadinejad may be crazy, but he is no fool. While his thugs back home are busy sending arms to kill our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, sentencing political prisoners to long jail terms or worse, and imposing strict censorship at Iran’s universities, he knows exactly what buttons to press to maximize the propaganda value of his visit here. He will use his speech to burnish his country’s image as the leader of the anti-American majority that dominates the General Assembly today and rally opposition to the United States’ ‘bullying’ influence in the Security Council. This builds on his longstanding theme that the Security Council today “has no legitimacy among the peoples of the world."[1]Columbia University and CBS’ “60 Minutes” are giving Ahmadinejad added propaganda platforms. If either of these self-proclaimed bastions of free speech were truly interested in stimulating a debate on controversial issues, they would have invited a top Israeli leader, a Holocaust survivor and an Iranian dissident to debate Ahmadinejad face-to-face with no conditions. Instead, this wretched terrorist sponsor, human rights abuser and Holocaust denier will go largely unchallenged while he tries to portray himself as a reasonable leader open to peaceful dialogue.As ‘evidence’ of how much Iran desires peace, Ahmadinejad has even more propaganda points to score, thanks to Mohammad ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. ElBaradei worked out a phony deal in which Iran agreed to answer a bunch of meaningless questions about its past uranium enrichment activities. Nothing was agreed regarding the status of Iran’s current activities. Nevertheless, the appearance of progress in negotiations was enough to turn ElBaradei against the United States’ current push for tough new Security Council sanctions despite Iran’s continued refusal to suspend its nuclear program. For its part, China is now calling on the Security Council to drop Iran's nuclear case altogether and refer it back to the International Atomic Energy Agency.Iran is playing out the clock to delay any further Security Council sanctions while actively seeking to become one of the ten non-permanent members elected by the General Assembly to the Security Council on a regional basis for a two-year term. The election for the seat that Iran is seeking - which is reserved for a member of the Asia Group of member states to which Iran belongs - will be held during the 63rd Session of the UN General Assembly in 2008, but Iran is not wasting any time. That is because a candidate for the seat has to be approved by two-thirds of the UN member states.Senior Iranian officials have reportedly been working through back channels to promote Iran's candidacy. Although Japan has also put forward itself for the Security Council seat, Iran is far ahead. Most importantly so far, the powerful fifty-seven member Organization of Islamic Conference – which has super-sized sway over the General Assembly - has already nominated Iran for the seat. Moreover, China can be expected to put its weight behind Iran rather than its long-time nemesis, Japan....
To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah...
