Mohammad Khatami was the president of Iran when that country was identified by President Bush as one of the three in the “Axis of Evil.” Have the secretary of State and the president been advised of a miraculous conversion by Khatami that has earned him a visa to travel and speak throughout the United States? There were only superficial changes during the years of the Smiling Mullah’s presidency; he was no less entrenched in the insidious fascist system of the Islamic Republic than the other ruling members of the religious establishment. Khatami ruled over the largest repression of the media and the student democratic movement in the Iranian Islamic Republic’s history. The administration is preparing a back-up plan in the event that China and Russia do not accept sanctions on Iran in response to the repudiation of the U.N. Security Council deadline for Iran to end its nuclear program. That plan calls for the restriction of travel for the Iranian regime. One would imagine that an emissary, such as the former president Khatami, would be included in such a policy. If the right hand is planning to restrict travel, why is the left hand offering a visa and the opportunity for the Iranians to capitalize on the propaganda and to create confusion by promoting its former president? This is the same president, by the way, who is in lock-step with Iran’s present government in promoting its nuclear program. One can see where Iran has something to gain, but what is the benefit for the U.S.? As an Episcopal/Anglican clergyman, I am appalled, but not surprised, by the National Cathedral’s invitation for Khatami to participate in a “dialogue” on the role of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims to achieve peace. The forum is destined to be only monologue. Dialogue takes two. Where are the voices of the others, the victims who suffered under the presidency of Mohammad Khatami? During his presidency, the Anglican Church and its leadership in Iran all but disappeared. What is the logic of celebrating the person, ideals, and regime that have been so responsible for the destruction of the Cathedral’s co-religionists in Iran? – The Rev. Keith Roderick is Christian Solidarity International’s Washington Representative, secretary general for the Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights, and Episcopal Canon for Persecuted Christians. James S. Robbins It would be a brilliant move if President Bush or one of his chief foreign-affairs officials took the opportunity to really challenge Khatami in a public setting, something along the lines of the 1959 Nixon-Khruschev “kitchen debate” but better managed. And the emphasis should not be on the nuclear issue alone, but also, even primarily, on the aspirations of the Iranian people to be free, and the fear of the regime to allow the Iranians to experience true political freedom. Take Khatami on a tour of the Washington Post and ask him why the regime is shutting down independent media in Iran, that kind of thing. Put him on the spot in a dramatic way. But I fear if there is any criticism of Iran offered it will be limited to the technicalities of the nuclear issue, and presented in the same old stilted fashion. So the Iranian people will think we don’t care about their liberties, and the regime will know it for sure. – James S. Robbins is author of Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point. Robbins is also an NRO contributor. Michael Rubin By granting a visa to Mohammad Khatami, the Bush administration handed the Islamic Republic a propaganda coup. Journalists will fawn and diplomats celebrate Khatami’s talk of tolerance. They will be complicit in projecting a false image of the regime Khatami still represents. Khatami’s reality is the inverse of his image. To Western audiences, he speaks of tolerance; in Persian, he urges Iranians to mobilize for war. While he maximized the diplomatic gains by calling for dialogue, he channeled the fruits of engagement to different aims. He constrains dialogue. While the State Department issued 22,000 visas for Iranians in 1997, the year of the call to dialogue, Khatami reciprocated with only 880 tourist visas for Americans. He showed less tolerance for dialogue among his own constituents. In April 2000, Iranian journalists, speculating on the reason for the government ban on the daily Arya, hinted that the penalty was due to the paper’s mention of a series of hangings of political prisoners in 1988, a time when Khatami was the armed forces’ deputy director of ideological affairs. Perhaps, the Bush administration felt constrained by international opinion. But why concede? What better time to fight back and remind Europeans that, when dealing with Iran, it is important to focus on deeds rather than words. – Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is co-author (with Patrick Clawson) of Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos. Rick Santorum This seems at best foolish and at worst misguided. Mohammed Khatami is one of the chief propagandists of the Islamic Fascist regime. We are offering free speech to a man whose government was called “the greatest predator of free press in the Middle East” by Reporters Without Frontiers. We are welcoming a man who presided over many brutal murders and mass incarceration of people whose only crime was calling for greater freedom. He has deceived many naïve people into believing that he stands for genuine reform, and that he is a reasonable intellectual with whom productive dialogue is possible. The Iranian people know better. I recently met with a brave student movement leader, Amir Abbas Fakhravar, who had escaped from the Iranian dungeons. His profound wish is that the United States Government be strong, consistent and outspoken about our support of freedom for the Iranian people. Unhappily, this action moves in the opposite direction. I am opposed to granting a visa to such a man so that he can travel around the United States and mislead the American people. We should insist, at a minimum, that the Iranian people can hear free American voices. Iran is frightened of freedom. They are jamming our radio and television broadcasts, and tearing down television satellite dishes in all the major cities of the country. It seems only fair that we be able to speak to the Iranians suffering under a regime of which Mohammed Khatami is an integral part. – Rick Santorum is a United States senator from Pennsylvania. Nina Shea President Mohammad Khatami is best remembered in U.N. circles, not for human-rights conditions in Iran during his tenure, which were so abominable they were repeatedly condemned by the international body, but for a speech calling for a dialogue among the world’s civilizations and cultures. Thanks to Khatami, who proposed it, at the U.N. the year 2001 is known by the Orwellian designation, “The Year of Dialogue among Civilizations.” This week, Khatami will be back at the U.N. to expound on this theme of dialogue. He will also embark on a propaganda tour of American campuses and be the honored guest speaker at the National Episcopal Cathedral in Washington. He will use these events to try to mobilize American support for holding a dialogue with Iran — dialogue without conditions of course, just as the current president of Iran favors in the current nuclear crisis. Iran’s reform movement, which at first counted Khatami among their own, ended up bitterly denouncing him for not merely being ineffective as president of Iran, but for willingly serving as a democratic façade for its oppressive system. He will now be shilling for Iran’s hardline rulers directly with the American public. Khatami’s American travel beyond the diplomatic radius of the U.N. is made possible by a special U.S. visa, the first ever issued to someone of his rank from revolutionary Iran. It is worth remembering that, Khatami’s insistence on dialogue between cultures notwithstanding, there has been none of it in revolutionary Iran. In addition to being listed as a terrorist state, and one of the triumvirates of the “axis of evil,” Khatami’s Iran was designated by the United States government as a “Country of Particular Concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act — that is, one of the world’s worst religious persecutors. All of Iran’s religious minorities — Bahaiis, Assyrian Christians, Catholics, Anglicans, Armenians, Evangelicals, Mandeans, Jews, and Zoroastrians — have suffered. Their numbers have steadily dwindled as they have fled religious oppression in their homeland; the presence of the ancient Assyrians and Mandeans is approaching statistical insignificance. The Bahai, who started as a reformist movement within Shiite Islam in Iran in the early 19th century, are seen as heretics. Over 200 of their leaders have been killed by the government, while some ten thousand have been purged from government employment and schools. They have had no rights to property, and can’t officially marry or be buried in their religion. According to law, their blood is “Mobah” — it can be spilled with impunity and no one can be punished for murdering them. The other Abrahamic faiths, officially “protected” by the state, are forced to abide by Islamic rules and live in great insecurity. Christian and Jewish grocery shop owners have been required to post their religion on their store fronts. Jews, whose numbers have been reduced to about a third of their pre-1979 population, have faced relentless state-sponsored anti-Semitism. Some were arrested and put on trial for spying for Israel under Khatami, until being later freed after international protest. Christians have been vulnerable to apostasy charges, with some imprisoned and others killed by government-linked death squads. But the persecution that is the hallmark of Iran’s theocratic regime affects not only non-Muslim minorities. Muslims who do not subscribe to Iran’s state doctrine of Jafari (Twelver) Shiism have also been subject to bigotry and persecution. Sunnis and Sufis have regularly been discriminated against and banned from teaching their religion, as well as, on occasion, detained and tortured for their religious beliefs. Those Shiites who dare to dissent from state orthodoxy, too, have been arrested and tried for the capital offense of blasphemy, for the “crime of thinking,” as one Iranian Shiite reformist teacher said at his 2004 trial. Hundreds of newspapers have been shut down and many writers and journalists punished, with some even killed, for their views under Khatami. Shiite women have been harshly restricted and treated as inferiors under state-enforced religious law. Cases of women stoned for adultery surfaced during Khatami’s tenure. When Khatami speaks next week at the National Cathedral, do not expect tough questions to be put to him about the lack of dialogue among cultures or religious freedom within Iran. It will be a tightly controlled affair to provide a platform for this “man of peace and moderation,” as Khatami was referred to by an organizer for the Cathedral. It will not be open to protestors and concerned citizens. The State Department has advised the National Cathedral to make the event exclusive, “invitation only.” – Nina Shea is director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House. Amir Taheri We should not allow the Khatami visa issue to sideline us from the real issue, which is the Islamic Republic’s strategy to terrorize the Iranian people, defy the international community, and spread its Islamofascist ideology to other Muslim countries. There is no harm in letting Khatami come to Washington to be exposed to pubic scrutiny. This may well provide an opportunity for the U.S. media to ask Khatami about the atrocities committed by his administration, including the assassination of dissidents, the arrest and torture of thousands of people, including trade unionists and student leaders, the closing of over 150 newspapers and magazines, the banning of hundreds of books and dozens of films, the arming of the Hezbollah in Lebanon, shipping weapons to Yasser Arafat’s terror units and Islamic Jihad, and providing the Jaish al-Mahdi in Iraq with money and arms. Let us not forget that it was during Khatami’s administration that the Islamic Republic speeded up its nuclear program to acquire the so-called “surge capacity” needed for manufacturing atomic warheads. Khatami would also have to explain whether or not he still regards Hassan Nasrallah, leader of he Lebanese branch of Hezbollah, as “The Sun of Islam shining over the world,” as he put it in a message on July 15. What is important is to make sure that the U.S. media have the courage to raise those questions. It seems that some American political figures, including former President Jimmy Carter, are queuing up to meet Khatami. That is no bad thing, either. All politics is about choice. By begging to meet the head of one of the most repressive regimes in the world, Carter would simply show whose side he is on. Having refused to meet Iranian dissidents, and rejected repeated calls for statements in support of Iranian trade unionists, student leaders, persecuted minorities, and political prisoners, Carter is precisely the person who should hang around with people like Khatami. – Iranian-born Amir Taheri is editor of Politique Internationale, France’s leading foreign-policy journal.