The Jerusalem Post is reporting that Iran’s delegation staged a walkout this morning during Israeli President Shimon Peres’ keynote address to the Congress of World and Traditional Religions in Astana, Kazakhstan. One delegation member gave an explanation straight from the Ahmadinejad playbook, telling the paper: “Your president is a stealer of lands and a conqueror, and we’re not willing to hear him. Peres represents an abominable Zionist conspiracy, and his place is not here.”

Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad himself decided to skip today’s African Union summit in Libya. The BBC reports that some African Union officials had expressed fears that the Iranian leader’s presence would be a lightning rod that would distract from issues on the agenda, including a request from Somalia’s government for military help against Islamist insurgents, but Ahmadinejad himself—a consummate diva—declined to explain his last-minute decision. “All we know is he isn’t coming,” one Libyan official said. Maybe he was afraid of getting hit with more clown noses?

Iranians Walk Out On Peres in Astana [J'Post]
Iran Leader Cancels Africa Visit [BBC]
Ahmadinejad Pulls Out of African Summit [J'Post]

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Guardian Council, which oversees elections, reiterated his earlier assertions that the violently contested results of the June 12 presidential election contained “no major violations” despite initial admissions of discrepancies in as many as three million ballots—which means Ahmadinejad is expected to be formally certified the winner on Monday, after which he will be free to continue questioning the Holocaust, comparing Israel to a cesspool, and dodging airborne clown noses at big international summits.

Reuters is reporting that hardline cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami told worshipers at Friday services that “leading rioters” should face execution. The AP reports that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who remains out of sight and possibly under house arrest, has agreed to request permits for any future demonstrations; Mousavi’s Web site, the main tool for communicating with his supporters, has been hacked and wiped clean. The Guardian reports that 25 journalists who worked at Mousavi’s newspaper, Kalemeh Sabz, remain under arrest, along with another 15 reporters for other agencies.

Outside Iran’s borders, world leaders gathered at the G8 summit in Italy issued a statement “deploring” the deaths of civilians, but failed to outright condemn the religious leadership of the Islamic Republic for the violent crackdowns of the past two weeks; this following a statement from Russia—which earlier this week endorsed Ahmadinejad’s re-election, a possible indication the country, a member of the United Nations Security Council, will not support new sanctions to deter Iran from building nuclear weapons—defending the Iranian “exercise in democracy.” (Iran had initially been invited to Trieste to participate in discussions about stabilizing Afghanistan, but withdrew as the violence escalated.)

But the most telling diplomatic fallout may be in the Muslim world. Reuters reports that in Lebanon, U.S.-backed politician Saad al-Hariri (son of Rafik Hariri, whose 2005 assassination triggered the Cedar Revolution), is set to be nominated as prime minister, and is rejecting demands from Iranian-backed Hezbollah for a parliamentary veto. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Lebanese Shiites are among many across the Muslim world suddenly seeing cracks in the absolute moral authority of the Iranian ayatollahs. “The infallible leader is all of a sudden making a lot of mistakes, and this creates a lot of doubt,” Ghazi Youssef, a Shiite member of parliament in Lebanon, told the paper.

(If you’d like to review the developments of the past two weeks, The New York Times has posted an exceptionally useful timeline.)

Into the vacuum rushes the noise of international diplomacy. Iran’s current leaders, the Ayatollah Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been blunt about blaming outside forces—particularly Americans and Israelis—for the chaos, and the British are “making inquiries” into claims that their citizens are among those who have been arrested in Tehran this week. A senior diplomatic adviser to the ayatollah, Ali-Akbar Velayati, blamed Britain for inhibiting the human rights of the Iranian people by freezing Iranian assets—behavior that Time’s Adam Smith reads as evidence that Iran is reluctant to confront the United States head-on, though that didn’t stop Ahmadinejad from telling Obama to mind his own business, according to The New York Times.

While nothing appears to have come so far of a request from the son of the former shah, Reza Pahlavi, for Israel to get involved in supporting the Green Revolutionaries, the Obama administration has been cagey about how far its previous willingness to engage with the Iranians over key issues—namely the country’s nuclear ambitions, along with its support for Hezbollah and, by extension, the threat to Israel—still extends. (Though it has made clear that Iran’s Fourth of July invitations are now withdrawn.) Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution argues that engagement remains the only way forward, particularly given that the regime is likely to grow “increasingly paranoid and dogmatic,” but that could turn out to be a politically infeasible strategy in the wake of Neda—which may mean that Israel, in the end, may get its way after all.

Bush spoke on May 15, 2008. He began by quoting Ben Gurion’s proclamation, declaring that Israel possessed a “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate.” The president of the United States called it “the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David—a homeland for the chosen people: Eretz Yisrael.” He recalled how America recognized the Jewish state 11 minutes after the declaration. He characterized the “alliance between our governments” as “unbreakable” but he asserted that the “source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty.” He spoke of the “bonds of the Book” and the “ties of the soul.”

The president recalled that when William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower, he quoted the words of Jeremiah: “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God.” He spoke of how the founders of America “saw a new promised land” and gave their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan. His words were those of a man who has read and thought about how the idea of Israel was intertwined with the idea of America going back to James Madison, say, or Samuel Adams and of why, as he put it to the Knesset, “many Americans became passionate advocates for a Jewish state.”

Bush also spoke of the “suffering and sacrifice [that] would pass before the dream was fulfilled.” He spoke of the “soulless men” who perpetrated the Holocaust, and he quoted Elie Wiesel. He described the joyous tears of a “fearless woman raised in Wisconsin,” Golda Meir, when the dream of a state was fulfilled. He spoke of touching the Western Wall, seeing the sun reflected in the Sea of Galilee, of praying at Yad Vashem and visiting Masada and he swore the oath that Israeli soldiers swear: “Masada shall never fall again.”

Then the president turned to the principles that guide American policy—“shared convictions,” he called them, “rooted in moral clarity and un-swayed by popularity polls or the shifting opinions of international elites.” That led to an articulation of democracy as “the only way to ensure human rights,” and he spoke of how the United Nations has singled out Israel as a target of its human rights resolutions and declared that Americans consider it “a source of shame.”

He expressed the belief that George Washington had spoken of more than two centuries previously—that, as Mr. Bush put it, “religious liberty is fundamental to a civilized society.” He declared that Americans “condemn anti-Semitism in all forms—whether by those who openly question Israel’s right to exist, or by others who quietly excuse them.” He disputed that terrorists acting in the name of religion are religious men. “No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers,” he said. “They accept no God before themselves.”

He spoke specifically of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iranians and of calls for Israel to be wiped off the map. “There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words.” He called such reactions “natural” but “deadly wrong.” He remarked on how “[s]ome seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Then he quoted the American senator who, in 1939, declared, “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”

This is where he warned of the “false comfort of appeasement.” He rejected the suggestions of some that “if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away.” He argued that permitting “the world’s leading sponsor of terror to possess the world’s deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal for future generations.” Then he marked the point that was so prescient in respect of what is happening on the streets of Tehran today.

“Leaders who are accountable to their people will not pursue endless confrontation and bloodshed,” he said. “Young people with a place in their society and a voice in their future are less likely to search for meaning in radicalism. Societies where citizens can express their conscience and worship their God will not export violence; they will be partners in peace. The fundamental insight, that freedom yields peace, is the great lesson of the 20th century. Now our task is to apply it to the 21st.”

So the president declared that America “must stand with the reformers working to break the old patterns of tyranny and despair” and “give voice to millions of ordinary people who dream for a better life in a free society.” He warned of “violent resistance.” But said with faith in our ideals he could imagine “Israel celebrating the 120th anniversary as one of the world’s great democracies, a secure and flourishing homeland for the Jewish people.” And he foresaw the rest of the Middle East as having been transformed, the terrorists defeated, and the region entering “a new period of tolerance and integration.”

Bush’s remarks were greeted by derision and controversy in the Arab press. One website that tracks foreign press reports ran a headline calling the speech an “act of lunacy” and quoted the chairman of Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper as complaining that the president’s remarks “appeared to have been lifted almost word-for-word from the Torah.” When reporters asked Senator Joseph Biden about Mr. Bush’s speech, the then-Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee reacted by swearing, according to the New York Times. The Democrats were apparently under the impression that Bush was talking about President-to-be Obama. But now blood is running in the streets of Tehran and a new American president is debating whether to speak in a way that might be construed as meddling. One way to judge whatever he says would be to compare it to the standard President Bush set a year ago in Jerusalem.

But cell networks have apparently been shut down in the area, which means hard information from the street is hard to come by (beware videos that are cropping up on blogs today without date stamps, The New York Times warns), though the AP is reporting that helicopters were spotted hovering over the square. The wire adds that Zahra Rahnavard, the wife of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, posted an item on one of his Web sites beseeching the regime to stop treating people “as if martial law has been imposed in the streets.”

Ayatollah Khamenei—still the Leader of the Islamic Revolution—apparently told parliamentarians that “for sure, neither the system nor the people will give in to pressure at any price,” according to Iran’s state-run, English-language Press TV. He insisted on “implementation of the law”—but it wasn’t immediately clear how that squared with statements from a militia member who told the Farsi newspaper Roozonline that he was paid about $200 to “beat the revolutionaries so hard they won’t be able to stand up.” According to a translated synopsis in the Guardian, the young man, who had never been to Tehran before he was bused in to join the militia, said he hoped to use the cash to pay a dowry or two.

The Guardian Council extended today’s election-certification deadline until Monday, perhaps on the hope that the violence will abate before then. State-run television is broadcasting a documentary about the accomplishments of the Revolutionary Guard, the Los Angeles Times is reporting, and news announcers have scoffed on-air at President Obama’s statements last night siding with opposition protesters. “Of course, the president of America says that these remarks are not tantamount to meddling in internal Iranian affairs,” an announcer apparently said. He added: “But in conjunction with the Americans, the Israelis are also pursuing the objective of agitation too.” (Al Jazeera adds that Iran’s interior minister thinks the CIA has something to do with it, too.)

On a side note: The BBC is reporting that the British housewares chain Habitat is also guilty of spreading agitation after an overzealous member of its social-media PR team starting posting discount specials on Twitter coupled with the keywords “Iran” and “Mousavi” to draw in people looking for news. “This was absolutely not authorised by Habitat,” the company said in a statement. “We were shocked when we discovered what happened and are very sorry for the offence that has been caused.”

Roya Hakakian is unhappy with American news coverage of Iran. Instead of treating Iranian civil society as a subject worthy of regular attention, the Iranian Jewish writer argues, U.S. media outlets focus obsessively on the smokescreen of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Ignoring the complex relationship between the country’s citizens and rulers, journalists are left ill-prepared to interpret news like the last two weeks’. Hakakian’s own writing may prove an antidote—a journalist for CBS, a memoirist, and a poet, she has written searingly but lovingly about her homeland since she left Tehran for the United States in 1985. Hakakian spoke with Tablet from her home in California about the future of the Ahmadinejad regime, the reaction of Iran’s 30,000-strong Jewish community, and how the whole thing reminds her of 1979.

Are you in close contact with friends in Iran these days?

I am, primarily through Facebook. It’s much faster, many more people can weigh in. It’s a lot less intrusive, no one has to wake up anyone in the middle of the night, no one has to worry about a bad connection. And it lends itself to the kind of visuals that letters or phone or even emails wouldn’t.

And are you hearing anything that hasn’t been reported?

There’s certainly a lag between what I hear and what airs. For instance, protesters were going up to the rooftops to chant “Alu Akbar.” For the first few days, I heard the host of a CNN program say, “Because Facebook is down, people have to go up to the rooftops to communicate.” Well, that’s not it at all. It’s because people are trying to go back to the roots of the revolution in ’79, to say that this is the same face-off. What the opposition is really doing is appropriating all the revolutionary 1979 slogans and images that Ahmadinejad feels are his legacy. But it took four or five days before they brought people on the air who said that.

An article on the Israeli news site Ynet said last week that the Jewish community of Iran had “denounced the riots” and expressed its “aversion to any kind of undignified behavior.” What do you make of that?

That’s the stuff they have to say. No member of a religious minority, if he is good at what he does and is responsibly representing his community, would talk to you at this moment. It would jeopardize the security of people in his community. People in religious minorities in Iran have historically not taken a stance. They wait to see who wins and then they issue a statement of support.

How deeply rooted is Iran’s animosity toward Israel?

There are two lines of rhetoric going on. One is the Ahmadinejad, Holocaust-denying, pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah line. That will be gone completely. One of the things coming out of these protests is people saying, “We don’t want the bomb.” There’s also this historical anti-Semitism that’s existed as long as there have been Jews on earth, although the excuse that people in Iran have is limited access to correct information. But whoever comes to power has to break with the past.

This is where a healthy relationship between the Muslim Middle East and Israel can begin. Israel has never intervened or meddled in the lives of Iranians themselves. If anything, because Iran and Iraq had such a lasting and damaging war, Iranians were very happy to see Israel bomb Iraq in the early ’90s. Israel has never conducted a coup in Iran; the only legitimate grievance is the Palestinian issue. And now people are saying, “Whenever we see Palestinians bleed on the streets we are asked to take to the streets and protest for them. Now we are bleeding on the streets, where are they now?”

You sound optimistic.

Regardless of what happens, this regime has lost moral credibility among the public, including its own supporters. The fact that they were shooting bullets at protesters chanting “God is Great”—it’s all extremely reminiscent of the revolution in ’79. People were waiting for something else to happen all these years, they were thinking there might be a military invasion by the U.S., or that Israel might strike, and none of those things happened, so they’ve taken to the streets. In some sense the regime change has already happened. It’s a question of how long it will actually take for the infrastructure to change, for the leaders to step down.

And the protests you’re going to here in the States—what’s the religious makeup?

Everybody’s in. I heard of a protest in front of the U.N. yesterday, and there were a few women who had the Islamic dress code, and a couple characters among the protesters said they shouldn’t be there. Immediately the crowd began to chant, “We are all together, we are all together.” What’s really inspiring about this moment is it’s not about Jew vs. Muslim, black vs. white, man vs. woman, it’s about a movement of national unity.

Russia—which is helping build a nuclear power plant in Iran, and whose president, Dmitry Medvedev, welcomed Ahmadinejad last week—joined Syria in moving to back the regime, posting a statement on its Foreign Ministry web site Tuesday calling for any electoral disputes to be settled “in strict compliance with Iran’s Constitution and law.” Russia added the election was “exclusively an internal matter”—possibly a swipe at U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who issued a statement Monday calling for “an immediate stop to the arrests, threats, and use of force, and urging the government and the opposition to resolve their differences peacefully through “dialogue and legal means.”

Nonetheless, al Jazeera reports supporters of opposition leader Mir Houssein Mousavi are calling for a general strike ahead of the council’s final vote certification, due on Wednesday, despite threats from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard that it will crush any further protests. As authorities reportedly ordered the family of Neda Soltani, the woman whose shooting death was captured on a cellphone video camera and posted on YouTube over the weekend, to take down mourning posters, Al Jazeera also contributed to her growing martyrology with an audio interview with her fiance; meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s Farnaz Fassihi reports the family of another young man killed during protests over the weekend was assessed a $3,000 “bullet fee” to retrieve his body from the morgue.

And, while the State Department is relying on Twitter and Facebook for information—they’re just like us!—Iranians themselves are apparently relying on Israeli shortwave radio broadcasts for information: 69-year-old Menashe Amir, a native Iranian who has hosted an 85-minute show in Farsi daily from Jerusalem for the past five decades, told the Wall Street Journal his call-in lines (routed via Germany) are flooded with requests for assistance from the outside world. “Iranians are thirsty for any information,” Amir said.

This may sound like head-of-state boilerplate, and it’s true that nothing earth-shattering is disclosed in wishing a brutalized population the very best. (Israeli President Shimon Peres is generally much more ebullient about the massive protests engulfing Iran and being met with murderous, theocratic reaction.) However, compare Netanyahu’s mild encouragement to what Mossad head Meir Dagan said to a Knesset committee last week:

The reality in Iran is not going to change because of the elections. The world and we already know Ahmadinejad. If the reformist candidate Mousavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat, since Mousavi is perceived internationally arena as a moderate element. … It is important to remember that he is the one who began Iran’s nuclear program when he was prime minister.

Mousavi has been held under a microscope since becoming the public face of Iranian revolt, and Dagan did little more than express one conventional view among stateside Jewish organizations and Israel hawks that a flamboyant nasty like Ahmadinejad is better PR for preemption. But there’s not even a whiff of optimism in Dagan’s view, nothing that hints that the people of Iran genuinely want a different form of government and would happily vote away Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khameini if given a true and proper chance. But Netanyahu, typically the hawk’s hawk, is sounding softer than his chief of intelligence. If he’s moving toward the center—however conditionally—on Palestinian statehood, then Obama’s strategy of pressuring his administration would seem to be working.

[Netanyahu: Change in Iran Could Bring Peaceful Israel Ties [Haaretz]
[Mossad Head: Iran Riots Won’t Escalate Into Revolution [Haaretz]

One reason Joseph Stalin felt the need to liquidate all of the Old Bolsheviks in the mid-1930s was that he knew that so many of them were his intellectual—and revolutionary—superiors. His usefulness to Lenin before 1917 was as a murderer and bank robber, not as a Marxist, and certainly not as a war strategist. There are myriad ways in which Stalin’s enemies might have bucked his consolidation of power had they been as opportunistic and merciless as he. Resentment and inadequacy have long shelf lives in dictatorships, and so a minor biographical detail about the man now unleashing hell in Tehran helps explain why presumptions of Khamenei’s core “rationality”—presumptions now being scuttled by formerly gullible observers such as Ezra Klein and Roger Cohen—were so misguided to begin with.

In Iran, an Iron Cleric, Now Blinking [NYT]