Snubs await Ahmadinejad in U.S.

It’s an invitation even some committed pacifists are loath to accept: an evening with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Even the Quakers say they won’t meet with Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is expected to face large protests outside the United Nations and his hotel, the Barclay.

“We decided this year, we are not going engage with him in a big public meeting in New York as we have in the past,” Joe Volk, executive secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, told The Washington Times. “Right now, Americans meddling in the postelection situation will not be helpful. And so it is best for Americans to let the dust settle on the elections before we engage.”

Although Mr. Ahmadinejad has faced protests since he first came to New York for the U.N. General Assembly in 2005, the opposition to his scheduled visit next week is expected to be particularly fierce in light of Iran’s disputed June 12 presidential election.

With hundreds of Iranians still in jail, at least 36 dead in clashes with security forces and the nation’s political elite bitterly divided, even Americans who have long favored engagement with Iran are feeling queasy about greeting its president.

Earlier this month, a counselor at the Iranian mission to the United Nations, Vahid Karimi, sent an e-mail to a number of academics and other Iran specialists inviting them to a dinner with the Iranian leader on Sept. 24. The e-mail was shared with The Times.

Some of those invited are refusing to attend, including Robert Litwak, director of international security studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In 2007, one of his colleagues - Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Wilson Center - was jailed for four months in Iran on suspicion of trying to overturn the government through a “velvet revolution” - the same charges raised against Iranian dissidents now.

“It’s a very personal decision” as to whether academics should go to dinner with Mr. Ahmadinejad, said Ms. Esfandiari, author of a new book about her ordeal, “My Prison, My Home.” She said she received an invitation to such a gathering in 2008 but did not go.

This time, she said, the decision was easy because “luckily, I wasn’t invited.”

Others say they will attend if only to press Mr. Ahmadinejad about human rights.

Jim Walsh, a nonproliferation specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he will raise questions about Iran’s treatment of fellow scholars with whom he has met over the years.

Mr. Ahmadinejad “will probably come out and say the same thing he always does,” denying any Iranian wrongdoing, Mr. Walsh said. Still, he said, he plans to ask the Iranian leader why he has encouraged Americans to engage in dialogue with Iranians and then “we do that and our colleagues get arrested. Does this follow logic and justice [two buzzwords frequently employed by Iranian officials]?”

Geneive Abdo, an Iran analyst at the Century Foundation, said that meeting with the Iranian president does not mean legitimizing him or accepting his disputed re-election.

“For people in academia and think tanks, it’s not an issue of expressing support for Ahmadinejad by going; it’s that people want to go to hear what he has to say,” she said. “The politics should not play into this.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad is to address the General Assembly on the same day as President Obama, but has not been invited to the annual U.S. reception for heads of state - even though the U.S. and Iran have agreed to participate in formal talks beginning Oct. 1.

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