Back to Brief on Iran
TEHRAN - Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Tuesday that the Islamic republic was seeking improved ties internationally, but not with the United States and Israel.
Khamenei, who has the final word on all matters of state, made his comments at a meeting in Tehran of Iran's diplomats abroad, the official IRNA news agency reported late on Monday.
"Détente is one of the declared policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran but not with the Zionist regime (Israel) which we do not recognize as an entity," Khamenei said.
"Our problem with the United States is not a question of détente," he said.
Iranian conservatives have rejected U.S. overtures to improve relations and Khamenei, who outranks Khatami, had previously ruled out restoring ties with Washington.
Khamenei has blamed the "hidden
hands" of the United States for pro-democracy unrest last month.
MPs Worried About the Reaction By the People to Riot Report, Agence France Presse, August 17
TEHRAN - Iran's security council report on last month's police attack at Tehran university that sparked six days of bloody riots was incomplete and evasive, MPs and school officials charged Tuesday.
"One feels they are veiling many of the realities," MP Hamid-Reza Taraqi told a newspaper after the Supreme National Security Council charged seven police officers with the "blunder" in its report on Saturday.
"Such statements only heighten the ambiguity and make people more pessimistic and less likely to trust what they have to say," he told the Sobh-e-Emrouz daily.
MP Bagher Mussavi Jahan-Abad told the paper that the publication of the report was a "positive act" but added that "many of the issues have not been addressed."
Tehran university's board of directors published a statement charging there was insufficient information on those who had carried out the "merciless beating" of the students.
"The Council presented it
as if the security forces were polite and correct and the students did
not respond properly," it said.
Mullahs' Fund Hamas Terror Group to Sabotage Peace Process, The Sunday Telegraph, 15 August
Iran has dramatically increased its funding of a radical Palestinian Islamic group in an attempt to sabotage the resumption of Middle East peace talks.
In the past few weeks Iranian intelligence has given an estimated £3,000,000 to the militant Palestinian group Hamas to fund terrorist attacks on Israeli targets. The money, which was transferred into the bank accounts of Hamas officials based in Damascus at the end of July, was the first in a series of monthly payments the Iranians have agreed to make to Hamas in return for a marked increase in terrorist activity against Israel....
Previous attempts by the Israelis and Palestinians to reach agreement were undermined by a series of devastating suicide bomb attacks by Hamas ... in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv ...
A series of meetings in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, resulted in Iranian intelligence officers and Hamas representatives from Syria and Lebanon agreeing ... to launch a series of terrorist attacks designed to try to prevent a successful conclusion to the peace process.
Supporting terrorist attacks against Israel would be a welcome - and popular - diversion for the Iranian leadership, which is reeling from the aftermath of last month's student riots in Teheran. Although the disturbances have been curtailed, officials are anticipating further outbreaks of violence when students return to campus next month.
The Iranian economy has been
hit hard by the student riots, with speculators smuggling large sums of
foreign currency out of Iran to offshore banks in the Gulf states as a
precautionary measure ....
Mullahs to Put Iranian Jews on Trial, Associated Press, August 17
WASHINGTON - Iranian authorities have decided to proceed with trial of 13 Jews on charges of spying for Israel, an official of a leading American Jewish organization said Tuesday.
Iran has executed 17 Jews on espionage charges in the past two decades, including two in 1997.
About 200,000 were living in the country when Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the Peacock throne in 1979. All but about 25,000 Jews fled. Those who remained were allowed to practice aspects of their religion but are forbidden to teach Hebrew and they face restrictions on emigration.
On Monday, a former member of the Jewish community of Mashad who now lives in Israel reported that bulldozers had uprooted the headstones at the Jewish cemetery in the Iranian city, 450 miles east of Tehran.