Iran ready for talks at highest level: Ahmadinejad
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iran is still ready to hold talks with the West over its nuclear program.
“We are in favor of talks at the highest level, but talks which are based on justice and mutual respect,” Ahmadinejad said during a conference of Iranian expatriates held in Tehran on Monday.
He also challenged U.S. President Barack Obama to a televised one-on-one debate to see who has the best solutions for the world’s problems.
“We will be ready for talks with Mr. Obama in front of the media when we go to New York to attend the UN General Assembly at the end of the (Iranian calendar) month of Shahrivar (mid to late September),” he stated.
He said Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, had declined similar invitations by Iran because he was “scared”.
“If you want to speak of justice, we will accept it since the Iranian nation has always sought justice and history has shown that the Iranian nation has never been opposed to the word justice,” he stated.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Ahmadinejad said the Zionists are just a political faction that has control over money and the media and advised the United States to dump them and pay more attention to other nations.
The U.S. government must say whether it is under the influence of Israel or not, he stated.
On the crises in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said the Westerners have released some documents that allegedly show Iran is responsible for their failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they do not know that “we are sad to see people, including the NATO troops and Afghan and Iraqi people, being killed.”
Is there a greater barbarity than the fact that soldiers, who joined the military to earn a living, were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to kill people, he asked.
The theory of “kill or be killed” is a clear example of modern barbarism, he said.
Ahmadinejad also called the concept of a clash of civilizations a historical lie, saying that “If a civilization is a civilization, it should not fight the other (civilizations). Civilizations do not have any problems with each other and they are friends. For example, the people of Iran and the people of the U.S. do not have any problems with each other.”
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki also spoke at the conference, saying that the major powers are now facing a serious crisis.
“Up until yesterday, they thought they could make decisions behind closed doors and implement them through threats and coercion in a clandestine way. In other words, they themselves are the defendants and the plaintiffs, the judges and the lawyers, they issue rulings and they implement them so this situation can continue, but today they have problems,” Mottaki added.
The root cause of the West’s problem is not lack of weapons or money but lack of logic, he noted.
Certain Western countries decide to wage war at a certain place in the world based on false information and impose their hegemonistic policies on that place, but their egoism prevents them from acknowledging that their actions are wrong, he observed.
Nowadays, the world cannot tolerate leaders who are not answerable for their actions, Mottaki stated.
Source: tehrantimes.com
Other Links:
UNESCO wants Iran to complete modification of Jahan-Nama Tower
Two more Iranian sites added to UNESCO World Heritage List
