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ROMNEY DENOUNCES KHATAMI VISIT TO HARVARD
www.Mass gov ^ | September 5, 2006

Posted on 09/05/2006 5:22:12 PM PDT by nuconvert

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Executive Department
State House Boston, MA 02133
(617) 725-4000

MITT ROMNEY
GOVERNOR

KERRY HEALEY
LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
September 5, 2006

CONTACT:
Eric Fehrnstrom
(617) 725-4025

ROMNEY DENOUNCES KHATAMI VISIT TO HARVARD
Declines to provide escort, or offer state support for trip

Governor Mitt Romney today ordered all Massachusetts state government agencies to decline support, if asked, for former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami’s September 10 visit to the Boston area, where he is scheduled to speak at Harvard University.

“State taxpayers should not be providing special treatment to an individual who supports violent jihad and the destruction of Israel,” said Romney.

Romney’s action means that Khatami will be denied an official police escort and other VIP treatment when he is in town.  The federal government provides security through the U.S. State Department.

Romney criticized Harvard for honoring Khatami by inviting him to speak, calling it “a disgrace to the memory of all Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of extremists, especially on the eve of the five-year anniversary of 9/11.”

Said Romney: “The U.S. State Department listed Khatami’s Iran as the number one state sponsor of terrorism.  Within his own country, Khatami oversaw the torture and murder of dissidents who spoke out for freedom and democracy.  For him to lecture Americans about tolerance and violence is propaganda, pure and simple.”

Romney cited a litany of hateful actions by Khatami, including his support for violent jihadist activities:

  • During the period of time he was in office, from 1997 to 2005, Khatami presided over Iran’s secret nuclear program.  Currently, the Iranian Government under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is snubbing the international community’s request to cease nuclear weapons production.
  • In the recent conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border, Khatami described the terrorist group Hezbollah as a “shining sun that illuminates and warms the hearts of all Muslims and supporters of freedom in the world.”
  • Khatami has endorsed Ahmadinejad’s call for the annihilation of Israel.
  • During Khatami’s presidency, Iran refused to hand over the Iranian intelligence officials who were responsible for the attack on the Khobar Towers that killed 19 U.S. military personnel.
  • In his own country, Khatami oversaw the torture and murder of Iranian students, journalists, and others who spoke out for freedom and democracy.  Khatami relaxed freedom of speech laws giving democracy reformers a false sense of security only to engage in one of the largest crackdowns in the country’s history.
  • In Khatami’s Iran, there was no religious tolerance.  According to the U.S. Office of International Religious Freedom, Iran was one of the worst offenders of religious persecutions.  Minorities, such as Evangelicals, Jews, Catholics and others, have suffered.

“Khatami pretends to be a moderate, but he is not.  My hope is that the United States will find and work with real voices of moderation inside Iran.  But we will never make progress in the region if we deal with wolves in sheep’s clothing,” said Romney.



TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: harvard; iran; khatami; khatamivisit; ma; mass; romney; us
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To: nuconvert

Thanks -

found this, which states the info nicely....he is definately a bastid.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24047

Just Say No to Khatami
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 24, 2006

Talk is cheap. At least, that’s what we are taught to believe in a society built not just on action, but on a respect for political minorities. But in a society where political minorities are considered enemies of the state, and where political discourse is tightly controlled, talk carries a far greater weight than it does here.

The disgraced former president of Iran, Hojjat-ol eslam Mohammad Khatami, wants to speak in Washington, D.C., next month, and the State Department has already indicated it will welcome his visit.

This is pure foolishness of the type Lenin described when he famously noted that the capitalists would sell the rope with which the Communists would hang them.

Although Khatami has not yet formally applied for a visa, his talk at the Washington National Cathedral next month was approved by the office of Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, according to the Washington Post.

This is the same Nicholas Burns who said last Friday that the United States would push for United Nations sanctions on Iran if Tehran does not accept a U.S.-backed package of incentives aimed at halting its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities.

Okay, so this is Washington, where talking out of both sides of the mouth is taken as a career-enhancing fashion statement. Still, it doesn’t require an exceptionally brilliant mind to understand that the terror masters in Tehran plan to use Khatami’s visit to further their goals, not undermine them.

Former president Khatami is not a private individual, as we understand the term. As a senior member of the ruling clerical elite, he can only get an exit permit if the regime determines that his trip suits their needs. (I personally know other senior members of this regime who have had their foreign travel plans cancelled by the regime for various reasons).

So for starters, we need to understand that Khatami is coming to Washington as a standard-bearer for this regime. He is the smiley-face, the beaming turban so beloved by Christian Amanpour and former Los Angeles Times reporter Robin Wright (now a Washington Postie, but still as wrong as ever).

Indeed, it was Robin Wrong who used these breathless tones to break the news of Khatami’s upcoming visit:


Khatami, a former minister of culture once purged by hard-liners, was a dark-horse presidential candidate in 1997 who led a sweeping upset that began a period of freer press, talk of political reform, cultural openings and encouragement of exchanges with the outside world. American tourists even returned to Iran.
She forgot a few key events of Khatami’s presidency.

Just one year into his term, his intelligence service murdered in horribly brutal fashion Darioush and Parvaneh Forouhar, leaders of the Iran Nation’s Party, then the best-organized opposition in Iran. The following year, Khatami quashed the student rebellion that began at Tehran University among INP members and sympathizers including Marzeporgohar (Iranians for a Secular Republic) and quickly spread to 18 other cities across Iran.

That was just the beginning of a crackdown on domestic dissent that occurred on Khatami’s watch and on his orders.

Ever since Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in a putsch on the night of Feb. 11-12, 1979, the State Department has been seeking “reformers” and “moderates” in Tehran.

Volumes have been written about these efforts. Some of them were contained in classified cables, shredded when the U.S. embassy was taken over by pro-Khomeini “students” in November 1979, and pieced together later on from the shredder sacks by Persian-carpet weavers.

In the beginning, some “moderates” truly opposed Khomeini’s Islamofascist system. Most of them were executed, wound up in jail, or have spent the rest of lives under house arrest.

But Khatami was never one of them. In 1984, as minister of culture and Islamic propagation, he presided over the creation of Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy army of terrorists in Lebanon and elsewhere. He thought that was exactly what the Islamic Republic of Iran needed to do to expand its influence around the world.

As president, Khatami never opposed Iran’s development of nuclear weapons technology, or long-range ballistic missiles to deliver them. On the contrary, it was on Khatami’s watch that Iran accelerated its once-secret nuclear weapons development, and flouted its success to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Khatami’s top nuclear expert, Hossein Mussavian, explained the ruse in an August 12, 2005, interview with Iranian state television, just days after Ahmadinejad took over as president. Ahmadinejad supporters were arguing that Khatami had made unacceptable concessions by negotiating with the European Union over Iran’s nuclear program. But those critics did “not know that at that stage – that is, in August 2003 – we needed another year to complete the Esfahan (UCF) project so it could be operational,” Musavian reminded his viewers. (The Uranium Conversion Facility in Esfahan is where Iran today has processed more than 120 tons of enrichment feedstock, enough to manufacture between 10 to 20 nuclear weapons.)

“[T] thanks to the negotiations with Europe we gained another year, in which we completed (the UCF) in Esfahan,” Mussavian said.

Khatami is being sent to Washington by the regime with a similar purpose: use happy talk to distract the United States from crafting serious international sanctions that would inflict real pain on this regime and possibly help spark a home-grown rebellion.

Would Washington have welcomed Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels to address the German Bund in 1940?

I don’t think so.

All the more reason why George W. Bush should step up to the plate and Just Say No, because Khatami’is purpose is similar to that of Joseph Goebbels in spreading Nazi propaganda.

If the State Department allows Khatami to visit Washington, they will create a new “paradigm,” a thought-shift in the way the Muslim “street” looks at the United States, Israel, and the West.

“Peace in our time” – that phrase identified with the appeasers of Munich who in 1938 negotiated away the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia and paved the autobahn to Poland. – will from now on be associated in the minds of the Islamofacists with Washington, DC and the State Department of Condoleeza Rice.

What can they possibly be smoking at Foggy Bottom to come up with a decision as contrary to the U.S. national interest as this one clearly is? Or perhaps, they are so cynically short-sighted they figure that during the dog days of August, with Congress in pre-election recess, no one will notice.

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile,” Winston Churchill said famously, “hoping it will eat him last.”

We cannot afford the luxury of appeasement, when this crocodile’s teeth are nuclear.


21 posted on 09/05/2006 5:47:27 PM PDT by bitt ("And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.")
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To: nuconvert

I hope this POS meets with a good ol American sniper
sic semper tyranus!


22 posted on 09/05/2006 5:49:51 PM PDT by LeoWindhorse
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To: popdonnelly
"Very cool, Governor Romney. Now please stick to your guns."

I don't think he should be allowed in the US.
Send the evil one home.
Governor Romney just got some support for his Presidential run.
And he most likely upset a lot of liberals.

Maybe T. Kennedy will escort him around town.
23 posted on 09/05/2006 5:50:52 PM PDT by fabriclady
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To: nuconvert

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/6198.htm


24 posted on 09/05/2006 5:51:19 PM PDT by LeoWindhorse
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To: bitt

Thanks bitt, good for Romney!!


25 posted on 09/05/2006 5:53:39 PM PDT by potlatch (Does a clean house indicate that there is a broken computer in it?)
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To: nuconvert

Already posted.
Of course you knew that.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1695958/posts


26 posted on 09/05/2006 5:54:11 PM PDT by JRochelle (You can believe what you want, but you can't have your own facts!)
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To: JRochelle

Yes, I did. See my post in #2.
But thanks for the bump. ;~ )


27 posted on 09/05/2006 5:56:52 PM PDT by nuconvert ([there's a lot of bad people in the pistachio business])
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To: Gabz

And which DC idiot had approved his visa??


28 posted on 09/05/2006 6:04:19 PM PDT by GSlob
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To: nuconvert

Yes, thanks for posting it. The original is perfect. I am so relieved SOMEONE spoke out, bluntly, about this travesty of justice. Just amazing.


29 posted on 09/05/2006 6:23:22 PM PDT by bboop (Stealth Tutor)
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To: nuconvert

Excellent, Mitt. Proud of my governor.


30 posted on 09/05/2006 6:23:37 PM PDT by NutCrackerBoy
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To: EagleUSA

I think it was the usual scumbags in the State Department who let this jerk in. They are still fighting against the Administration and America as far as I'm concerned.


31 posted on 09/05/2006 6:25:28 PM PDT by Parley Baer
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To: nuconvert
Yeah well Romney will scream his disgust for that muslime animal out of one side of his mouth ...

... but from the other side he will scream out his Anti-Second Amendment credentials.

Romney ... just another useless RINO, and a very dangerous one at that.
32 posted on 09/05/2006 6:26:29 PM PDT by MaDeuce (Do it to them, before they do it to you! (MaDuce = M2HB .50 BMG))
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To: MaDuce
Once he leaves his post as warden of the insane asylum known as Massachussets, you will see his Second Amendment credentials burnished and on display.

You have nothing to fear from him in this respect, on a national level.

33 posted on 09/05/2006 6:30:24 PM PDT by JCEccles
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To: nuconvert

Mitt is seriously running. We could do worse.


34 posted on 09/05/2006 6:32:54 PM PDT by RobbyS ( CHIRHO)
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To: EagleUSA
RE: "Yes, it is too bad the Administration does not have a set as well --- this terrorist maggot should never have been allowed inside of our borders..."

...BUMP!


35 posted on 09/05/2006 7:29:10 PM PDT by Seadog Bytes (OPM - The Liberal 'solution' to every societal problem. (Other People's Money))
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To: nuconvert

Let Khatami take a cab to Harvard. Maybe it will be driven by an Iranian who escaped the regime.


36 posted on 09/05/2006 7:33:58 PM PDT by SamAdams76 (The Program is Morally Good)
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Comment #37 Removed by Moderator

To: nuconvert

Mitt is looking better all of the time, especially with McCain stabbing the party in the back, Allen making bonehead mistakes, and Giuliani's potential to get (unjustly) swiftboated by the Democrats on the 911 competency issue.

One thing's for sure, it will be a fun campaign season. May the best Republican win.


38 posted on 09/05/2006 8:26:59 PM PDT by JHBowden (Speaking truth to moonbat.)
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To: LeoWindhorse

Thanks for the link. Is this a*hole the prototype of a career State Dept. civil servant/East Coast insider or what? Degrees from Boston and Paris, the Woodrow Wilson award, his wife even has her own last name.


39 posted on 09/05/2006 9:36:58 PM PDT by nwrep
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To: bitt

Thanks for the ping!


40 posted on 09/05/2006 10:14:37 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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