The Trump administration barred Iranian diplomats in New York for the United Nations General Assembly from shopping at Costco and buying luxury items without permission, ending their annual celebration of consumerism that their long-suffering people fund.
But President Masoud Pezeshkian scored something even better last week — the kind of global publicity you can’t buy.
Far finer souvenirs of his trip to “the Great Satan” than pallets of food or Louis Vuitton bags are priceless photographs with more respectable world leaders.
Pictures of Pezeshkian with a smiling UN Secretary-General António Guterres and a genial French President Emmanuel Macron made their way around the globe.
Even better, he got a platform on the world stage to deliver his flagrantly false propaganda.
“Iran has never sought and will never seek to build a nuclear bomb,” he declared on the main stage.
America, Israel and Iranian dissidents have for years published evidence putting paid to this lie.
Until America’s June strike on its nuclear facilities, Tehran was increasing uranium enrichment to levels needed not for civilian power but for weapons.
Satellite-imagery analysis released just this week shows it’s stepped up work at one underground site.
And Friday the regime announced it’s signed a $25 billion deal with Russia to build four nuclear plants in Iran.
His most outrageous deceit, though, was claiming Iran is committed to ending “slaughter and bloodshed.”
Never mind how many people — including Americans — Tehran and its proxies have murdered around the world. Iran’s worst butchery happens at home.
That was reiterated just a day before Pezeshkian’s Wednesday speech.
Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) reported Tehran has executed at least 1,000 people so far this year — the highest number in more than 30 years.
IHRNGO “verified and recorded” 64 in “the last week alone,” “an average of more than nine hangings per day!” The real number is likely much higher, with officials announcing only 11% of the 1,000.
Pictures of Pezeshkian during his talk displaying a book titled “Killed by Israel,” with profiles and photos, filled the wire services.
He wouldn’t have the arm strength to hold up a book with his own victims.
“In recent months the Islamic Republic has begun a mass killing campaign in Iran’s prisons, the dimensions of which, in the absence of serious international reactions, are expanding every day,” said IHRNGO director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam.
The United Nations officials who gave one of the world’s leading executioners the stage know this.
So do the “leaders” who mugged with him for the cameras.
So do the UN News “journalists” who published a puff piece on the speech.
So should the American journalists who, like those at the New York Times, call this killer a “moderate politician.” (They said the same thing of President Hassan Rouhani, who executed more people than the infamous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.)
And Iran has broadcast its intention to kill at a much higher pace.
“Why the 1988 Executions Should Be Repeated” headlined a July editorial from Fars News Agency, a state outlet affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Iran murdered 30,000 political prisoners that summer, most supporters of the opposition group People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI).
It’s been killing them ever since.
Amnesty International decried the July executions of PMOI backers Behrouz Ehsani, 69, and Mehdi Hassani, 48, “on overly broad and vaguely defined charges of ‘armed rebellion against the state’ (baghi), ‘enmity against God’ (moharebeh) and ‘corruption on earth’ (efsad-e fel-arz).”
Of the 18 political prisoners most at imminent risk of execution, 15 are PMOI supporters.
They include management graduate Vahid Bani Amerian, 33, electrical engineer Pouya Ghobadi Basetouni, also 33, law graduate Babak Alipour, 34, and 59-year-old Seyed Mohammad Taghavi Sangdehi, who’s been a political prisoner going back to the 1980s.
“Under this murderous regime, executions are not a means of delivering justice, but a calculated and brutal political tool wielded to instill fear, suppress dissent and preempt any potential uprising,” Hanif Jazayeri, director of Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Massacre, told me. “And there’s virtually no due process in Iranian courts.”
The indefatigable Londoner was in town last week for countless meetings with various delegations as nongovernmental organizations call on the co-sponsors of the UNGA Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural)’s Iran resolution “to include an explicit reference to Iran’s threats of repeating the 1988 massacre.”
That resolution is usually discussed in October and voted on in November.
Thousands of diaspora Iranians flocked to New York to rally for two days outside the United Nations, protesting Pezeshkian’s appearance.
“He’s killing Iranian people. He’s not our representative,” said Berkeley, Calif., resident Peymaneh Shafi.
President Trump asked a basic question in a barn-burning Tuesday UN speech.
“What is the purpose of the United Nations? The UN has such tremendous potential,” he queried its members. “All they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter, and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words.”
The elites were shocked he’d criticize the body in its own headquarters.
What should shock them is the truth he spoke.
That the United Nations would give one of the world’s worst hangmen a platform, complete with sunny photo ops, proves how feckless — even pernicious — the institution is.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
