Tag Archives: Non-Aligned Movement

Clarity At The United Nations

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The contrast was obvious. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at the United Nations this week. Part of his speech was to encourage the growth of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which recently met in Tehran.

Here is part of President Ahmadinejad’s speech at the UN:

Unilateralism, application of double standards, and imposition of wars, instability and occupations to ensure economic interests, and expand dominance over sensitive centers of the world have turned to be the order of the day.

Arms race and intimidation by nuclear weapons and weapons of mass-destruction by the hegemonic powers have become prevalent: Testing new generations of ultra-modern weaponry and the pledge to disclose these armaments on due time is now being used as a new language of threat against nations to coerce them into accepting a new era of hegemony. Continued threat by the uncivilized Zionists to resort to military action against our great nation is a clear example of this bitter reality.

-A state of mistrust has cast its shadow on the international relations, whilst there is no trusted or just authority to help resolve world conflicts.

Just for the record, those ‘uncivilized Zionists’ have attempted to live in peace with their neighbors for more than fifty years. It’s the neighbors that have been uncivilized. They have also won more Nobel prizes per capita than any other nation in the world.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also spoke at the UN last week. His remarks had a very different perspective.

Breitbart.com posted the entire speech, but they also posted sections of the speech that contain truth the world needs to hear:

Israel wants to see a Middle East of progress and peace. We want to see the three great religions that sprang forth from our region, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, coexist in peace and in mutual respect. Yet the medieval forces of radical Islam whom you just saw storming the American embassies throughout the Middle East, well, they oppose this. They seek supremacy over all Muslims. They’re bent on world conquest. They want to destroy Israel, Europe, America. They want to extinguish freedom. They want to end the modern world.

Now, militant Islam has many branches, from the rulers of Iran with their Revolutionary Guards to al-Qaida terrorists to the radical cells lurking in every part of the globe.

But despite their differences, they are all rooted in the same bitter soil of intolerance. That intolerance is directed first to their fellow Muslims and then to Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, secular people, anyone who doesn’t submit to their unforgiving creed. They want to drag humanity back to an age of unquestioning dogma, unrelenting conflict.

I’m sure of one thing. Ultimately, they will fail. Ultimately, light will penetrate the darkness.

Prime Minister Netanyahu used a very simple drawing to show the danger the world now faces regarding the Iranian nuclear program. We can choose to listen now or we can regret later that we closed our ears.

Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke the truth–the question is whether or not anyone heard.

 

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We Don’t Have A Solution, But We Need To Acknowledge That There Is A Problem

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Yesterday the Christian Science Monitor posted an article about the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) held in Tehran, Iran, which ended Friday. The summit was attended by 120 countries.

The Obama Administration has consistently claimed that the sanctions the United States has placed on Iran have isolated the country and will slow down the Iranian quest for a nuclear weapon. I don’t think a country that has been successfully isolated could host a conference of 120 nations. It is also disturbing to me that that conference included both Afghanistan and Egypt.

The article reported the positives and the negatives of the summit:

The US pressured NAM members not to go to Tehran, but many countries nevertheless “sent their highest delegates – their head of state, kings, prime ministers,” noted Mr. Zibakalam (Sadegh Zibakalam of Tehran University). “So I think…Iran can justifiably say, ‘I have scored some points against the United States and Israel.”

That view was countered by Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“What Iran does not want to admit [is] that many of these countries that participated in this summit, they are not non-aligned anymore, they have close relationships with the United States, countries like Saudi [Arabia]…like Bahrain, they do not have good relations with Iran,” Mr. Khalaji told AJE.

“The fact that many countries participated in this summit doesn’t mean that Iran can make up [for] its political isolation,” said Khalaji. “Iran has to look for [a] real solution for its problem, instead of focusing on propaganda and public diplomacy.”

Both were on display in Tehran during the two-day summit meeting.

“They put the cars of the murdered scientists in front of the venue, then they had a special press briefing from the families of the murdered scientists,” says the European diplomat. “They were feeding the media all these stories, ‘We are the victims here, and we are getting killed,’ which done with a slightly lighter touch may have worked. But they’ve just overdone it.”

“Instead, coming out of Iran were stories that this was not a successful conference for the Iranians, because the two issues they didn’t want to talk about were talked about from the very beginning, right at the top: the nuclear dossier and Syria.“

The longer the Iranian nuclear program goes unchecked, the more dangerous the world becomes. I have no idea what the solution is to the Iranian nuclear threat, but I suspect that killing their scientists and introducing computer viruses into their software is more effective than the current sanctions. I don’t want to see a war in the Middle East, but unless Iran is stopped, we are going to have one.

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