File photo of the UN headquarters in New York taken in September 2013, ahead of the 68th General Assembly. (AFP PHOTO/Emmanuel Dunand)[/caption]
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. That seems to be the case with Senator Ted Cruz, the firebrand Tea Party senator from Texas, who earlier this week proposed a bill to the Senate that would prohibit Iran’s new UN ambassador from entering the United States. Having since cleared both the deeply divided Senate and the Congress, the bill now awaits President Barack Obama’s signature to become law. If passed into law the bill, which would bar UN delegates from entering the country if they have conducted espionage or terrorist activities against the US, would prompt a rare ban on a UN ambassador entering US territory.
Responsibility for this decision belongs to the Iranian government, particularly President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who insisted on their choice for the UN ambassador, Hamid Aboutalebi, despite numerous objections by the US Department of State.
Iran’s new ambassador to the UN is a well-known diplomat inside and outside Iran. He has served the Iranian government in several high-profile diplomatic posts, including variously as Iran’s ambassador to the European Union, Italy and Australia. But it is not his impeccable record of service to the Islamic Republic that has angered American lawmakers. Prompting the dispute is Aboutalebi’s affiliation with a student organization involved in the 1979 hostage crisis in which American diplomats were held hostage in the US embassy in Tehran for 444 days.
As a young student, Aboutalebi was a member of the Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam, a radical student group that led the charge to storm the US embassy. Prominent members of the group went on to take key posts in the Iranian government during the 1980s, when Iran was plagued by revolutionary Islam and radicalism—and again, ironically as reformists, in the era spanning from 1997 to 2005.
Very few members of the organization condemned their actions, and those who did were purged from the Islamic Republic. Aboutalebi has played down his involvement in the hostage crisis, describing his role as an occasional “translator” for the group when such services were needed. He has never publicly condemned the occupation of the US embassy, nor has he publicly denounced the Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam.
To be fair, one cannot expect Aboutalebi to condemn the attack on the US embassy, out of fear of being sent to Iran’s notorious Evin prison—let alone continuing to serve the Islamic Republic as a top diplomat. But the world expects more from the Iranian president and his foreign minister: choosing this particular diplomat as Iran’s ambassador to the UN was either a willful and provocative move designed to aggravate the United States and appease the hardliners in Iran, or it was just another uncalculated, amateurish decision made in Iran’s corrupt and nepotistic system.
To make matters worse, Zarif has doubled down on his new UN ambassador—probably to save face abroad and score points with hardliners at home—demanding the US issue Aboutalebi a visa and calling those opposed to Aboutalebi’s appointment “extremists.”
It is up to President Obama to set the record straight, and a bill with broad and bipartisan support that can do just that now sits on his desk. The president has an opportunity to send a clear signal to the world, and particularly to the Iranian government, that those who violate the most basic norms of international law will be denied entry into the United States, even if they are UN ambassadors. By signing this bill into law, the president would also be showing that, even while the United States is negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, it is not willing to cave in to Iran’s most ridiculous demands and merely rubber-stamp Iran’s violations of basic international norms.
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
