Who’s got faith in Iran and US relations?
Just recently the first U.S. religious group to meet with an Iranian president in Iran since the revolution in 1979 returned with assurances from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iran “does not intend to develop nuclear weapons” and that he is willing “to enter into direct, face-to-face talks with the United States government.”
Read the FPL press release. And here’s the main website for the Iran delegation.
“Even with this tragic history we have visited upon Iran for the past 55 years, there is an amazing depth of appreciation and love for the U.S. people,” said Jim Winkler, top executive of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, the denomination’s social action agency. “There have been lots of contacts between Muslim religious leaders and Christian leaders from around the world–and with American Christians–over the years, but this was considered to be significant because it was attached to meetings with government leaders,” Winkler said.
The Weekly Standard writes: The delegation was organized by the Washington, D.C. lobby offices of the Quakers and the Mennonites and is a follow up of sorts to a meeting that several dozen religious officials, including Winkler, had with Ahmadinejad in New York last October. This time, the group will also meet with former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, who spoke at the Episcopal Church’s National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. in September.
Besides Winkler, the Quakers, and the Mennonites, the delegation to Iran includes representatives from the National Council of Churches, Sojourners (Jim Wallis’ evangelical-left group), and Pax Christi, a liberal Catholic group.
“We are making this trip hoping it will encourage both governments to step back from a course that will lead to conflict and suffering,” explained a Quaker official, Mary Ellen McNish, general secretary of the American Friends Service Committee. But the delegation acknowledges that Ahmadinejad’s unsavory positions may have to be confronted.
Over at beliefnet, Sojourners COO Jeff Carr went on the trip and blogged on the journey. Reflecting on the Iranian Hostage Crises, he writes:
“I don’t think I have ever realized how traumatizing those events were for me, and how seared into my memory and psyche they are. How they serve as a filter, even today, 28 years later, to the way I (and I surmise many other Americans) see Iran. It is the narrative that informs my thinking about Iran today and the relationship between our nations.”
Iranian born Reza Aslan speaks about the future of U.S./Iran Relations. At the World Affairs Council, Reza notes:
The strategy of the United States over the past two and half decades to contain Iran has only strengthened the hand of the country’s clerical regime and made full democracy a more distant prospect. It is time for a new approach, one that could curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and force Iran out of its economic isolation, leading to the regime change that the U.S. has been striving for since 1979.