[Grovenet] Ahmadinejad Meets Clerics, and Decibels Drop a Notch

[Ed Davie]

Ahmadinejad Meets Clerics, and Decibels Drop a 
Notch


By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: September 27, 2007
After two days of prickly confrontations with 
critics at Columbia University and the United 
Nations, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran 
held a friendly, even warm, exchange yesterday 
with Christian leaders from the United States and 
Canada convinced that dialogue is the only way to 
prevent war.

Melissa Engle/Mennonite Central Committee
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, center, 
speaking during a panel discussion with religious 
representatives at the Church Center for the 
United Nations in New York on Wednesday.

The session, held under tight security at a chapel 
across the street from the United Nations, was a 
reminder that Mr. Ahmadinejad is a religious 
president of a religious nation who relishes 
speaking on a religious plane. He spent his 20 
allotted minutes at the start of the two-hour 
meeting recounting the chain of prophets central 
to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the 
commonality of their messages.

He took questions from a panel that included a 
Quaker, a Catholic, an Anglican, a Baptist and a 
representative of the interfaith World Council of 
Churches, some of whom separately said they had 
been criticized by other religious leaders for 
sitting down with the Iranian president. Given the 
furor over Mr. Ahmadinejad's earlier appearances, 
there was no advance publicity.

The gathering, which included an audience of about 
140 other religious leaders, was organized by the 
Mennonites and Quakers, churches known for their 
commitment to pacifism.

The organizers said that they had pressed hard to 
find a Jewish leader to join the panel of 
questioners, but that those invited declined 
because they could not win support from Jewish 
organizations.

"My heart was broken that there was so little 
support from other religions to be here," said 
Mary Ellen McNish, general secretary of the 
American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group 
that helped sponsor the event. "If we don't walk 
down this path of dialogue, we're going to end up 
in conflagration."

Mr. Ahmadinejad's smile at times turned to a 
grimace as the panelists prodded him, politely, 
about his record on the Holocaust, human rights 
abuses, Israel and nuclear weapons development. 
Also politely, he conceded nothing, and often 
deflected the inquiries by turning the spotlight 
on the policies of the United States and Israel.

"Who are the ones that are filling their arsenals 
with nuclear weapons?" he said. "In the United 
States they have tested the fifth generation of 
atomic bunker bombs, missiles that go as far as 
12,000 kilometers. Who is the real danger here?"

Though Mr. Ahmadinejad's answers differed little, 
the tone of the session was a marked contrast to 
the verbal pummeling he received at Columbia 
University on Monday, when the university's 
president, Lee C. Bollinger, called the Iranian 
president either "brazenly provocative or 
astonishingly uneducated" for his stance on the 
Holocaust.

At the clerics' meeting, Albert Lobe, executive 
director of the Mennonite Central Committee, said 
pointedly, "We mean to extend to you the 
hospitality which a head of state deserves."

The session was part of a concerted push by these 
religious leaders to increase political support in 
the United States for talks with Iran. Some of 
these religious leaders also met with Mr. 
Ahmadinejad last year in New York and in February 
on a trip to Iran.

One critic said that these religious leaders were 
well intentioned, but naïve.

Malcolm I. Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of 
the Conference of Presidents of Major American 
Jewish Organizations, said in a telephone 
interview: "They're not going to convince him. 
Their very presence there gives him 
respectability."

Ms. McNish, of the American Friends Service 
Committee, said the reverse was true: "The more we 
isolate him, the more support he gets at home."

But even the Bahais, a minority religious group 
that has suffered persecution in Iran, said they 
supported these efforts at dialogue with the 
Iranian government. They had been invited to the 
prior meetings, but the Iranian side refused to 
come if Bahais were there, said Kit Bigelow, 
director of external affairs, National Spiritual 
Assembly of the Bahais of the United States.

The panelists on Wednesday included the Rev. Drew 
Christiansen, a Roman Catholic who is editor in 
chief of America, a Jesuit weekly; Karen A. 
Hamilton, a Canadian Anglican who is general 
secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches; the 
Rev. Chris Ferguson, also a Canadian, who 
represents the World Council of Churches at the 
United Nations; and Glen Stassen, a professor of 
Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, 
an evangelical institution.

Mr. Stassen, who has helped to prod American 
evangelicals to take on issues including global 
warming and torture, said he and other 
evangelicals would soon circulate a document 
intended to broaden support for dialogue with 
Iran, based on the model of dialogue with North 
Korea.

Mr. Stassen asked President Ahmadinejad, if the 
United States could guarantee no aggression 
against Iran, "could there be an Iranian guarantee 
of no violence against Israel?"

Mr. Ahmadinejad responded by asking for a 
three-minute break "for the interpreter." After 
the break, he said that it was the United States 
and "the Zionist regime" that had nuclear weapons, 
while Iran was seeking to enrich uranium only for 
"fuel purposes."

The impetus for these talks came not from the 
Americans, but from the Iranians, said Ed Martin, 
Iran consultant for the Mennonite Central 
Committee, a group that has done aid work in Iran.
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