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2008-09-16 issue:

Mennos in the News: Guess who shouldn't come for dinner?

by Allison Hoffman, Jerusalem Post correspondent

Print Article

The head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has issued a statement criticizing Mennonite and Quaker leaders for hosting a dinner reception for Iran's president in New York later this month.

The dinner, scheduled for Sept. 25, is touted as a dialogue by the pacifist religious groups, which advocate diplomatic engagement with Iran's political leadership.

It follows a similar meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held at a chapel last year during his annual visit for the opening of the United Nations' General Assembly.

"Ahmadinejad represents a rejection of everything these religious groups stand for," Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, said in a statement on Sept. 10. "His speech at Columbia University a year ago showed the futility of attempting to dialogue with a dictator who makes crystal clear his antipathy toward the West, who denies the Holocaust, and who defends the Iranian regime's willful neglect of basic human rights."

Foxman said the dinner "tarnished" the reputations of the participating religious groups as peace-seekers.

A spokesman for the Akron, Pennsylvania-based Mennonite Central Committee, which is organizing the dinner, said no one was immediately available for comment.

Other groups involved in hosting the dinner—including the World Council of Churches, Religions for Peace and the Quaker group American Friends Service Committee—either did not immediately return messages left seeking comment or referred questions to the Mennonite organization.

Representatives from a broad range of Christian ecumenical organizations, including the Episcopal Church, plan to attend the dinner.

"Meeting with people does not mean you agree with them," said Maureen Shea, director of the Episcopal Church's Office of Government Relations in Washington. "The more there is inflammatory language going back and forth, the more we feel there needs to be a way for our two countries to communicate."

Shea, whose group joined a delegation of Christian religious leaders to Iran in 2007, joined the head of the American Friends Service Committee and the international director of the Mennonite Central Committee in sending a letter last month to the Bush administration, encouraging the State Department to open a U.S. office in Teheran, similar to the one in Havana, Cuba. She said she had not received a response.

She said Foxman did not speak for all of American Jewry on Iran, noting that other Jewish groups support diplomatic engagement.

Yet even the most pro-diplomacy Jewish groups aren't planning to attend the dinner reception for Ahmedinejad.

"We are not going to sit with him, no," said Ori Nir, a spokesman for Americans for Peace Now. "Our position does not endorse unconditional contact and engagement."

Ahmadinejad is scheduled to speak at the UN on Sept. 23.

UN Ambassador Gabriela Shalev, who sharply rebuked Iran's UN ambassador for accusing Israel of making threats on Iran and Ahmedinejad's safety, declined to comment on the dinner plan.

Read on the Jerusalem Post ...


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