When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran described the Holocaust as a “myth” and hosted a Holocaust revisionist conference in Tehran in December 2006, he was warmly cheered in the Third World and severely castigated in the United States and Europe. Yet most Western pundits largely failed to grasp the significance of the assault. They limited themselves to outrage and righteous indignation. Ahmadinejad’s fulminations were, on the one hand, jeered as “paranoid” and, on the other, described as on par with his other threats to destroy Israel — pardon, “the Zionist entity.” In other words, Western commentators dismissed the Iranian President [...]
At the end of August, Iranian presidential spokesman Ali Akbar Javanfekr threatened to turn to “other candidates” to complete the country’s long-delayed nuclear power plant at Bushehr if “problems arise again” between Tehran and Moscow over the project. The previous month, European officials related that the Russian government had informed Iran in July that Moscow would refuse to supply nuclear fuel for the Russian-built nuclear reactor until Tehran provides more details about its past nuclear activities to the international community. These reports might indicate that the Russian government has finally decided to suspend cooperation with Iran’s nuclear program until Tehran [...]
For several years, Iranian officials have sought to strengthen their ties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Iran became a formal observer nation at the July 2005 SCO summit, but the country’s leaders have continued to pursue full membership. In April 2007, the Iranian Foreign Ministry submitted an official application to this effect. Even before the seventh annual SCO summit convened in Bishkek on Aug. 16, however, the existing SCO full members announced that they would indefinitely postpone accepting new members. In the case of the SCO, a primary Iranian objective has been to keep other Eurasian countries from aligning [...]
