The gathering of world leaders at the United Nations every September turns the city into the landscape of a cheap thriller. The streets are lousy with ministers, tyrants, and potentates and you can’t cross Third Avenue without fear of death by motorcade.
On Monday morning, as in recent years, the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, invited a few dozen journalists to the Warwick Hotel, on Fifty-fourth Street, for what his representatives bill as “an exchange of ideas” but what turns out to be a group interview. With the carriage, dress, and manner of a cocksure regional politician, Ahmadinejad strolled into the conference room just after 8am and got down to business. He does not much conceal his pleasure in provoking his earnest questioners.
When asked about the Israeli leadership’s threats to carry out an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, Ahmadinejad said that he viewed them as a kind of desperate diversion. “Fundamentally, we do not take seriously the threats of the Zionists,” he said. “We do believe that they have found themselves at a dead end and they are seeking new adventures in order to escape this dead end.… I don’t think it is anything of utmost importance. But if such an event were to happen, all equations in the region would see a deep change.”
Ahmadinejad will address the General Assembly on Wednesday, which is Yom Kippur, and no Israeli delegation will be present. (Today, when Ahmadinejad arrived at a U.N. discussion on law, the Israeli envoy Ron Prosor walked out of the hall.)
At the Warwick, the Iranian President said that he found the whole nuclear issue “a very tiresome subject.”
“At the end of the day, everyone knows that Iran is not seeking a nuclear bomb. The scene resembles one of a comedy show. Those who accuse us are those whose warehouses have nuclear stockpiles. They talk of security. If you are so preoccupied with this, why not do away with your own nuclear stockpiles?”
When he was asked about his hostility toward, and threats directed at, Israel, he said, “We say occupation must be done away with. We say war-seeking and war-mongering must be eliminated…. Has the Zionist regime conducted itself in any other way in the last sixty years? If they don’t change, what will become of them? Assume that one day the rights of the Palestinians will be legitimated… Will anything known as Zionism remain?”
The Israeli state, he said, was a rootless “fabrication” and not “born out of historical events or hopes,” while the Israelis “believe they find themselves at a dead end and they are seeking new adventures in order to escape this dead end.” He made it clear that he sees Israel as a kind of temporary phenomenon, a historical aberration not long for the world. The Israelis “do not even enter the equation,” he said. “During a historical phase, they present minimal disturbances that come into the picture and are then eliminated.”
Ahmadinejad was also intent on doing what he could to further aggravate the troubled relations between President Obama and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been demanding that the U.S. declare its “red lines” on the Iranian nuclear issue. “At the end of the day, who determines what the U.S. government should do?” he said. “Is it the Zionists who tell the U.S. what to do and about red lines?… Who are these Zionists to dictate and tell the United States what to do?”
After Ahmadinejad assured everyone that, despite economic sanctions, Iran was in better economic shape than the European Union and that it was not defending the Assad regime in Syria but, rather, doing its solemn best to help find a peace settlement, I asked him a question about blasphemy and free speech. What did he have to say about both Salman Rushdie (who, despite the lifting of the 1989 fatwa, has been threatened yet again by an Iranian cultural foundation, which raised its bounty on his head last week) and the violence surrounding an anti-Islam video on the Internet?
“If someone insults you when you are walking down the street, would you not react or file grievances?” he said. “Is insult not a form of crime? It certainly would be. Insulting divine figures is not a crime? Of course it is.” The video, in his eyes, was also the doing of Zionists. “If you are talking about the most recent events,” he said, “some of these Zionists are seeking adventurous games as a way to find a salvation for their dead end. In a place where under the guise of freedom sanctities can be insulted.”
And what of Rushdie?
Ahmadinejad smiled, ominously. “Salman Rushdie, where is he now?” he said. “There is no news of him. Is he in the United States? If he is in the U.S., you shouldn’t broadcast that, for his own safety.”
Culled from The New Yorker
