Christiane Amanpour retails the idea that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei does not see the US as an enemy but rather sees Iran and the US as “natural allies” who must work together to end their “vicious cycle”:

As I sat down recently with a senior Iranian government official, he urgently waved a column by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times in my face, one about how the United States and Iran need to engage each other.

”Natural allies,” this official said. It was a surprising choice of words considering the barbs Washington and Tehran have been trading of late.

“We are not after conflict. We are not after crisis. We are not after war,” said this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But we don’t know whether the same is true in the U.S. or not. If the same is true on the U.S. side, the first step must be to end this vicious cycle that can lead to dangerous action — war.”…

he insisted he was describing the thinking at the highest levels of the religious leadership — the center of decision-making power in Iran. I asked whether he meant Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself. “Yes,” he said….

[Q: "so you do want the bomb?"] The official replied: “No, our nuclear program is not about the bomb it’s about power. We want to say — that without the UK, U.S., France, Russia, Germany — we have done this ourselves [set up a peaceful nuclear program].That is our strength.”

Amanpour concluded her piece with a sermonette aimed at the administration:

Everything with Iranian engagement. Everything with U.S. engagement,” he said. In other words, instead of the United States saying, ”Iran out of the Persian Gulf, Iran out of Lebanon, Iran out of Iraq,” the United States should welcome Iran’s presence and work with Iran to help keep the region stable, he said.

The question now is which country will take the first step and show they’re not being weak by putting diplomacy back on track. History awaits the answer.

It might have been helpful, and, indeed, appropriate to the role of the journalist, to dig a little deeper into the content of the Grand Ayatollah’s good intentions towards his “natural ally,” the United States. Since “everything” is apparently on the table as long as there is “engagement” by both sides, she might have inquired about the status of these comments of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his spokesmen. Reuters:

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called on Friday for the destruction of Israel, describing it as a “cancerous tumor” in the Middle East.

“Iran’s stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon (Israel). We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region…”Palestinian refugees should return and Muslims, Christians and Jews could choose a government for themselves, excluding immigrant Jews.

“No one will allow a bunch of thugs, lechers and outcasts from London, America and Moscow to rule over the Palestinians”…

[And also] consider the proclamation made by Mohammad Hassan Rahimian, representative of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who stands even higher in the Iranian hierarchy than Ahmadinejad. A few months ago, on November 16, 2006, Rahimian explained: “The Jew” — not the Zionist, note, but the Jew — “is the most obstinate enemy of the devout. And the main war will determine the destiny of mankind…The reappearance of the Twelfth Imam will lead to a war between Israel and the Shia.”

We’re all for “engagement” where “everything” is truly on the table. It would have been good if Amanpour scratched the surface of such comments, however, to determine if there was any content to the profferings of the “senior Iranian official” or whether she was just being looked upon as another Western MSM dupe getting her daily dose of propaganda and Taqiyya.

UPDATE

More Taqiyya can be seen in the Karen Armstrong review of Robert Spencer’s recent biography of Mohammed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 7:33 am and is filed under General, MSM, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.