Rooyesh

Robert Tait of Guardian reports from Tehran. Iran’s reformist former president, Mohammad Khatami, has suffered a blow to his political standing by being pictured apparently shaking hands with women in breach of Islamic convention. The image, taken during a visit to the Italian city of Udine in May, triggered outrage among fundamentalists after being posted on conservative websites and YouTube.

It showed Mr Khatami being greeted by a small group of women, none of whom wore Islamic head-covering, and appearing to shake the hand of one. Mr Khatami, a mid-ranking cleric, dismissed the photo as a fake and insisted he had not shaken hands with any of the women who had approached him after he made a speech. However, allies say he has been deeply wounded by the criticism, which they say has been calculated to damage his image as the reformist standard-bearer. His sensitivity has prompted some commentators to question his appetite to head the reformists’ attempt to make an electoral comeback in next year’s parliamentary election. The former president has attempted to deflect the attacks by announcing that he will not stand in the 2009 presidential election, despite his popularity among liberal-minded voters.

“That was a message to the right wing, the government and the regime saying, please don’t try to destroy me - I don’t want to disturb you any more,” said Saeed Leylaz, a pro-reformist analyst. However, that has failed to pacify his critics. Last month, radical clerics in the holy city of Qom started a petition calling for Mr Khatami to be defrocked. The petition was launched to coincide with the eighth anniversary of the brutal suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations by students at Tehran University in 1999, an event seen as one of Mr Khatami’s biggest setbacks. In a letter to the Qom seminarians’ society, the clerics described another picture from Mr Khatami’s Udine visit, where he sat next to “the uncovered body of a female reporter in a very obscene way”.

Flyers condemning Mr Khatami have been circulated in the shrine city of Mashhad, while posters of him were defaced in Kashan before he spoke there. Although Islam generally forbids handshakes between men and women who are not close family relatives, some Shia clerics say it is permitted in certain cases to avoid embarrassment. In Iran, handshakes between men and women have become more common in recent years despite the country’s Islamic laws.

Iran, the United States and Iraq will on Monday discuss details of a committee they agreed to set up in July to help restore security in Iraq, a senior Iranian official was quoted as saying on Saturday. Arch foes Tehran and Washington, which cut diplomatic relations shortly after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution,

held two rounds of rare talks in Baghdad in May and July to find ways to improve security in Iraq. In the second round of talks on July 24 in Baghdad, representatives from the United States, Iran and Iraq agreed to establish a trilateral committee to investigate issues such as support for militias and al Qaeda in Iraq. Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, said officials would on Monday exchange views about the joint body. “In the coming meeting, it is expected that representatives of Iran, America and Iraq would hold expertise debates about the form and the agenda of the security committee,” he told Iran’s official IRNA news agency. Kazemi-Qomi, who on Friday told another Iranian news agency expert levels talks defining the work of the security committee would be held early next week, did not say who would attend Monday’s meeting. Washington accuses Shi’ite Muslim Iran of stirring up violence in Iraq. Iran denies the charge and blames the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 for the bloodshed between Iraq’s majority Shi’ite and minority Sunni Arabs. The two rounds of Baghdad talks, which only dealt with the situation in Iraq, were the highest profile face-to-face dialogue between Iran and the United States since 1979. Tehran and Washington are also at loggerheads over Iran’s disputed nuclear work.

Source: Reuters

Iran’s outspoken President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on Israel to “go find somewhere else” for its state and leave its territory for the creation of a Palestinian state, according to an interview published Saturday. “Our support (for the Palestinian people) is unconditional.

As for the Israelis, let them go find somewhere else,” Ahmadinejad told several Algerian newspapers ahead of an visit to Algiers that starts Monday. Iran consistently refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist in the Middle East, and Ahmadinejad sparked outrage abroad by stating after coming to power in 2005 that Israel should be “wiped from the map.” He also provoked a storm in June by saying a “countdown” had begun that would end with Lebanese and Palestinian militants destroying Israel, and his government last year hosted a conference on the Holocaust questioning the German Nazis genocide of the Jews during World War II. In his latest diatribe, the Iranian leader accused Israel of commiting “butchery” in the Palestinian territories. Ahmadinejad said, too, that Iran wanted to cooperate with Algeria against terrorism. “Islam bans the assassination of innocent people wherever they are,” he said. “We reject all methods of terrorism, whatever the denomination or motive,” Ahmadinejad declared. He criticised what he called the “partial” view of human rights in Western countries. He said there were “secret prisons” in Europe. “In the United States people’s telephone conversations are listened to. In Britain, people are spied on using television cameras. In Palestine, Israel commits butchery. But no-one causes a scandal.” Ahmadinejad’s visit to Algeria has not been officially confirmed by the authorities.

Source: AFP