Free Republic

Outspokenness has always been former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s signature move. Despite having fallen from grace in Iranian political circles he’s still using it, but this time directed against the regime itself. His new status as a de-facto opposition figure has been a long time coming. He began falling out of favour with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei towards the end of his second term as President, over a series of disputes about his cabinet. In 2009, shortly after Ahmadinejad’s election, his Vice President of choice and close friend, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, was forced to resign on Khamenei’s order. Mashei is a curious...

Iran’s former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s quest to return to the spotlight now includes weighing in on a spat between US President Donald Trump and basketball star LeBron James. Ahmadinejad used Twitter — which is banned in Iran — to write Sunday: “In my opinion everyone especially a President should love all, and not differentiate between them.” He added that he loved NBA greats James and Michael Jordan, as well as former Denver Nuggets player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Trump wrote a tweet Friday night questioning James’ intelligence after he gave an interview to CNN and criticized the American president....

Iran's former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday stunned the country by unexpectedly filing to run in the May presidential election, contradicting a recommendation from the supreme leader to stay out of the race. Ahmadinejad's decision could upend an election many believed would be won by moderate President Hassan Rouhani, who negotiated the nuclear deal with world powers. Though Rouhani has yet to formally register, many viewed him as a shoe-in following Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's recommendation in September for Ahmadinejad to stand down and conservatives' inability to coalesce around a single candidate. Ahmadinejad's firebrand style could prove appealing for...

The oil embargo against Iran has worked, assuming one defines "work" as a destruction of the Iranian riall which has fallen 33% in a week, 57% in three months and 75% in a year vs. the US dollar. On Wednesday, the Tehran bazaar closed in turmoil and police used teargas and batons on demonstrators protesting the currency crisis. Please consider Iran currency crisis sparks Tehran street clashes Hundreds of demonstrators in the Iranian capital clashed with riot police on Wednesday, during protests against the crisis over the country's currency. Police used batons and teargas to try to disperse the crowds....

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday said that Israel would "soon go to hell" and called on the West to drop support for the Jewish state. "Grounds are being prepared for the Zionist regime [Israel] to go to hell soon and any country supporting this regime will join it on its trip to hell as well," Ahmadinejad said in a speech in Ardebil in north-western Iran, carried live by the news network Khabar. The comments Sunday fall in line with a series of provocative statements by the Iranian leader about Israel several times in recent years, sparking international anger. Among...

Hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Friday that the people of the Middle East are "capable of removing the Zionist regime from the world scene" in an annual Palestinian solidarity day address in Tehran. "If the leaders of the region do not have the guts, then the people of the region are capable of removing the Zionist regime from the world scene," he said as the crowd chanted "Death to America! Death to Israel!" Ahmadinejad said that direct peace talks, which Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas relaunched with Israel in Washington on Thursday after a 20-month hiatus, were "doomed" to...

Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSEVA14340720090612?sp=true

Iran's president on Tuesday blamed the U.S. and other "big powers" for global ills such as nuclear proliferation and AIDS, and accused them of exploiting the U.N. for their own gain and the developing world's loss. But, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, time was on the poor countries' side.

Tehran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that Israel would "be soon swept away" from the Palestinian Territories by the Palestinians. It is the second time within less than three years that the Iranian president predicted the eradication of the Jewish state. The first time was in 2005 when Ahmadinejad hoped that Israel would be eradicated from the Middle East map. "This terrorist and criminal state is backed by foreign powers, but this regime would soon be swept away by the Palestinians," Ahmadinejad said in a press conference in Tehran. Referring to worldwide celebrations for the 60th anniversary of...

A senior member of Iran's negotiating team with the United States on Iraqi security demanded a halt to US attacks in Iraq before any new round of talks with Washington, the Fars news agency reported on Saturday. "If US savage attacks against the Iraqi people are stopped, we will examine the US request for a fourth round of talks," the unnamed official said, quoted by Fars. Iran and the United States held three rounds of talks on Iraq last year despite mounting tensions over Tehran's nuclear programme. The talks have been stalled amid controversy over Iran's role in its conflict-torn...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on Thursday that Iran was the world's "number one" power, as he launched a bitter new assault on domestic critics he accused of siding with the enemy. "Everybody has understood that Iran is the number one power in the world," Ahmadinejad said in a speech to families who lost loved ones in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. "Today the name of Iran means a firm punch in the teeth of the powerful and it puts them in their place," he added in the address broadcast live on state television. Ahmadinejad's comments come amid renewed Western efforts on...

A top Iranian cleric made a rare criticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's verbal attacks on Israel on Wednesday, saying a foreign policy of "coarse slogans" was not in the national interest. Hassan Rowhani, a former top nuclear negotiator who still holds several influential positions, said that Iran needed to show more flexibility and desire for dialogue in its dealings with the international community. "Does foreign policy mean expressing coarse slogans and grandstanding?" Rowhani asked in a speech to a foreign policy conference in Tehran. "This is not a foreign policy. We need to find an accommodating way to decrease the...

In yet another verbal attack against Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Jewish state a "filthy bacteria" whose sole purpose was to oppress the other nations of the region. "The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast," the Iranian president told supporters at a rally in southern Iran. "[Israel] won support [from the other nations] which created it as a scarecrow, so as to keep the people of this area under control," Ahmadinejad said. Referring to the assassination of Hizbullah terror chief Imad...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on the West Wednesday to acknowledge Israel's "imminent collapse." Speaking to a crowd on a visit to the southern port of Bushehr, where Iran's first light-water nuclear power plant is being built by Russia, Ahmadinejad further incited his listeners to "stop supporting the Zionists, as [their] regime reached its final stage." "Accept that the life of Zionists will sooner or later come to an end," the Iranian president said in a televised speech. He added, "What we have right now is the last chapter [of Israeli atrocities] which the Palestinians and regional nations will confront...

Resistance by partisan ”shadow warriors” at the Department of State has limited the president’s options and is bringing us dangerously close to a military showdown with Iran, former Bush administration official John Bolton told Newsmax in an exclusive interview. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice initially had planned to provide significant aid to the pro-democracy movement in Iran, as a means of giving the president more policy options, Bolton said. But resistance by the State Department bureaucracy crippled the programs and rendered them ineffective. “[T]he outcome has been no overt program of support for democracy and no clandestine program to overthrow...

Diplomacy is doing nothing to stop the Iranian nuclear threat; a show of force is the only answer. WE MUST bomb Iran. It has been four years since that country's secret nuclear program was brought to light, and the path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere. First, we agreed to our allies' requests that we offer Tehran a string of concessions, which it spurned. Then, Britain, France and Germany wanted to impose a batch of extremely weak sanctions. For instance, Iranians known to be involved in nuclear activities would have been barred from foreign travel — except for humanitarian...

COLUMBIA University Presi dent Lee Bollinger yester day made some cutting crit icisms while introducing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - but that doesn't make the school's decision to offer a platform to the head of a violent terrorist state any less abject, squalid or shameless. "Abject, squalid, shameless" is how Winston Churchill described the resolution passed by Oxford University's prestigious Debating Union in 1933 - the year Adolf Hitler came to power - that "this House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country." And Columbia's event, like the 1933 Oxford resolution, sent (to quote Churchill again) a "very...

Organized protests against the appearance of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the U.N. began even before he arrived in New York City. A group of about 40 elected officials and civic leaders gathered Sunday outside Columbia University, where Ahmadinejad is scheduled to speak on Monday. Some carried placards with slogans such as "Don't give a platform to hate," and "Go to hell," while denouncing Ahmadinejad as a "Hitler wannabe" and a Holocaust denier. Said New York state Assemblyman Dov Hikind: "There is no excuse to invite this madman, this little Hitler. "This is immoral. This is outrageous. This is sick....

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The White House said Thursday it is taking seriously the allegations by former hostages that Iran's hardline president-elect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was one of their captors at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran a quarter century ago. President Bush told foreign reporters he has "no information, but obviously his involvement raises many questions." "As soon as I saw the face, it rang a lot of bells to me," Don Sharer, who served as the embassy's naval attache at the time, told CNN. "...Take 20 years off of him. He was there. He was there in the background, more...