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Obama Blows Up Iran Talks Over 35 Year Old Petty Issue
The U.S. denies a visa to the new Iranian ambassador to the United Nations Hamid Aboutalebi. Mr. Aboutalebi was ambassador to several European countries and to the EU and he had on earlier occasions received U.S. visa and visited the United states:
The Obama administration had previously said only that it opposed the nomination of Hamid Aboutalebi, who was a member of the group responsible for the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
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Aboutalebi is alleged to have participated in a Muslim student group that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days during the takeover.
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Aboutalebi has insisted his involvement in the group involved in the embassy takeover, Muslim Students Following the Imam's Line, was limited to translation and negotiation.
The U.S. is not allowed to decide who UN members nominate and send as UN ambassadors. This visa rejection is clearly illegal under the Headquarter Agreement between the UN and the United States:
[T]he U.N. would be well within its rights to claim a violation of the Headquarters Agreement and to demand an arbitration that it would have a good chance of winning.
No other country in the UN can agree to this U.S. behavior. All would risk to have their next ambassador to the UN rejected for some petty game issue some U.S. politicians want to play. The UN will have to fight this case.
So far the talks about nuclear issues between Iran and the U.S. had gone well. There is now even a sensible solution for the heavy water reactor in Arak which was one of the more problematic items. Iran's president Rouhani has to defend his policies against hardliners in his country. They will use the issue of the ambassador to pressure him to reject any agreement with the U.S. Rouhani can not take back the nomination without receiving serious political damage. As the U.S. rejects the ambassador its also denies Rouhani to have a trusted person in the United States who could help should the negotiations stumble.
This whole issue seems to have been created out of thin air to blow up the talks between the U.S. and Iran. If Obama keeps ups his stance and continues to reject a visa to Hamid Aboutalebi over a 35 year old issue Obama will be guilty for ending the negotiations and the consequences falling from it. But failing negotiations may well have been his plan all along.
ToivoS @53 & Massinissa @48,
I have a bit of a different notion here, being of a “Free Speech Absolutist” turn of mind. I don’t favor the banning of posters for the tenor of their comments, but rather for persistently insulting demeanor toward other posters (all of us being guests in b’s house), or toward the host of the blog himself. These are rules that I have seen enforced with firmness, but fairness over at Col. Patrick Lang’s blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis. On occasion, a poster will get dismissive, not merely of the ideas expressed by another poster, but of the other poster personally for having the temerity to have and to express those ideas. Characteristically, this doesn’t result in the aggressive poster being permanently banned, but they may get a trip to the penalty box for a while. When this sort of personalized aggression is directed toward the host himself, they may get a warning, or they may get booted immediately, depending upon the severity and/or intentionality of the offense, the penalty box not usually being an option.
There are certain posters here for whose ideas I have little respect, but with whom – to me – there appears to be little value to be gained by my engaging them; they come to troll, quite obviously, and not to discuss or to contest. With these posters, I have learned to employ the scroll wheel. But I would not think to advocate for their temporary or permanent banning unless they are personally insulting to other posters or to the host. If others wish to engage with these folks, well, have at it if you think it will do any good. If someone is inclined to troll, if you don’t engage, they don’t get their ego boost, and they tend to fall away.
As to others, so long as they don’t resort to ad hominems and insults, I say let them talk. If you find their doctrines risible, then challenge them to defend them, or present your alternatives without starting a pissing contest yourself by exhibiting a lack of decorum. Otherwise, there’s that scroll wheel ready to hand.
I do not like the practice of banning posters for their ideological point of view. It goes against my grain, and I consider it an unhealthy practice. I have similar views concerning laws against “hate speech”, rather prevalent in Europe, and unfortunately gaining traction in the US, too. The best measure against views that your consider ignorant or narrow-minded is to attempt to challenge their adherents to adduce facts in support of their views. It may work to persuade, it may not, but at minimum you have come away more mindful of the existence and roots of these viewpoints, and the onlookers may have benefited from the crossing of swords.
And now I’ll stop being polite to you two, and come right out and say that I think that your open advocacy for banning others in this forum for ideological reasons is itself grounds for consideration of a trip to the penalty box – for you. If you feel that strongly about your ideological antagonists’ views, then put up your dukes. Banning them absolves you of taking on the responsibility yourself, and frankly I consider it cowardly to hide behind the host’s skirt. It is very passive aggressive, something that goes up my back.
P.S.: Massinissa, I saw you apologize for posts that you wrote after having skimmed and not carefully read another’s post here. That was big of you, and I was quite impressed. That set a serious good example for all and sundry. Good on ya.
Posted by: JerseyJeffersonian | Apr 12 2014 0:42 utc | 64
Three or four shocked bien pensants: bevin (of course, the man’s a tape recording); toivos, fernando, and the usual complete unknown who drops in just to say, no platform for fascists (unless they are judeofascists, I assume, in which case you have to do an awkward change of gear and accuse them of something else). Bevin’s main scorn is reserved for my claim that ‘the Jews’ wanted WW1, which he has never even seen suggested before and therefore assumes is wrong.
I would say that once you know what you’re looking for, you can see that from the end of the second Boer-War in 1902 (when the British handed them ownership of the bulk of SA gold & diamonds) to the beginning of WW1, the core ruling elite of the Jewish ruling class, who were in the process of moving from London to NY at the time, decided that destroying mainland Europe would be a good move for their wealth. It’s all quite consistent, the way they leapfrog from old empire to new empire, but it’s messy. Albert Ballin, the top Jewish tycoon in Germany, killed himself in 1918 when he realised the Jewish elite, now ensconsed in UKUSA, was going to throw the German Jews to the, ahem, dogs. Even in 1918, the French Jewish elite (that is, rich men who own mainstream politicians) were necessary to screw the Versailles negotiations into an expression of genocidal frenzy. But you wouldn’t read that kind of history (‘anti-Semitic’ history, largely the memoirs of discontented aristocrats in Britain, France, etc), because you have a barrier of prejudice that tells you:
All those people were Nazis! Quite frankly, even if they were right about ‘the Jews’, I wouldn’t want to know! And they were certainly wrong about economics!” (actually, as far as they go, their economic ideas make more sense than the bankers would wish you to know). “Well, anyway , they would put me in the camps for the duration, and indeed they would put me under punitive conditions, or just shoot me, cos I’m a Marxist” (which they did not do to eg Rabbi Leo Baeck, the ‘leader of German Reform’, whom they looked after under almost hotel conditions in Theresienstadt throughout the war, and who lived to a ripe old age, continuing to talk pretentious nonsense, guard his institutional turf, and preen himself on his extreme closeness to whatever it was he was close to, probably the Rothschilds, the Montefiores, the Sassoons, etc)…
The above stream of consciousness is not really intended to be ‘Logical’. It’s the expression of a state of mind in which the pre-ideological observer lives on, albeit with a mental age of 4 or so, for want of development.
Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Apr 12 2014 4:49 utc | 85
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