Iran's former "moderate" president, Mohammad Khatami, has been invited by the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University to deliver a speech on the "Ethics of Tolerance in the Age of Violence." He was issued a visa by the State Department, which is reportedly also providing him with security services. At the same time Governor Mitt Romney has ordered all Massachusetts state agencies to decline such support if asked. (Thanks LGF for the link.) Luboš Motl, a physics professor at Harvard provides a good background for the event.

The whole circus is a shame for KSG, Harvard University, and the State Department. Khatami was not and is still not a "moderate" in the sense people in the West would wishfully like to think. If anybody still thinks of him in such terms, he must have been in a very deep sleep in the past 6 years. Here is what he realy is and how he should be treated:

Khatami was elected in a landslide vote in 1997 largely by the youth, women, and other sections of the Iranian society who had been marginalized by the Islamic republic during the Iran-Iraq war and the following eight years. He did talk about tolerance, the rule of law, and democracy in his campaign, and most of the people who elected him thought he meant those in their plain meaning that everybody understands without much philosophizing. This is when he was named a "moderate" and his supporters, "reformist." But when the time eventually came to face the violent, but honest opponents of such concepts (in their true "Western" meaning), he chose to act differently. "The preservation of the system" was his most-frequently expressed concern throughout all the suffering endured by the students, ordinary men and women, and even his own friends and close staff, who had elected him as a "moderate" and given him the mandate of "reform." He did bemoan often that he had no real power to achieve his "reformist" objectives, but are we to believe that he did not even have the power to resign from that "care-taker" position, as he dubbed his presidency of the Islamic republic? This is what he promised to do four years ago, and then still managed not to do, because he felt it would weaken "the system."

So, the logical conclusion is that Khatami, in his own words, is not a moderate reformist, but a "care-taker preserver of the system." As such, he is also a culprit in the brutal attacks of the paramilitary vigilantes to the student dorms in July 1999, whose victims were later tried and sentenced to long terms in jail, where one recently died under duress. Khatami's "tolerance" was for murderers, his "rule of law" was of the law of Sharia, and his "democracy" was conditioned to be Islamic and non-secular. And now he is coming to the US to propogate those same discredited ideas that serve no purpose but to "preserve the system" of the Islamic republic and its crimes.

For all this, he must be denied such an opportunity. If KSG and Harvard cannot see into that and if the State Department is not up to that task, then those who understand his true nature must deny him the chance by asking him to answer for all his hollow words and non-existent actions.

P.S. Praise goes to the New York Sun editorial for their clarity.