Word: ghotbzadeh
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...says something about the conference of Islamic Foreign Ministers in Islamabad last week that one of the more moderate voices heard there was that of Iran's Sadegh Ghotbzadeh. "When we condemn the U.S. for supporting Israel in Palestine and for intervening in Viet Nam," said Ghotbzadeh, who was clearly the star of the six-day meeting, "we should not hesitate for one minute to condemn the Soviet Union for intervening in Afghanistan." Trailed by reporters wherever he went, the tall, dark-haired Iranian Foreign Minister went well beyond rhetorical denunciation of Moscow's "adventurism" in Afghanistan...
...unmoved. Khomeini, who had previously blamed the London embassy seizure on the CIA, said nothing at all. Banisadr, who had been willing to accept "the martyrdom of our children in England," now declared merely that "the brave resistance of our children" had brought "its sweet fruit." Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh insisted, as before, that the London incident was a "terrorist act," while the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran was "a legitimate outcry against 25 years of oppression." Even more bluntly, one of the Revolutionary Council's leading zealots, Ayatullah Seyyed Mohammed Beheshti, told a journalist who asked...
...Iranian militants to hold the American hostages for the past six months. The irony could hardly have been lost on the Iranians, who went to embarrassing lengths in an effort to establish a difference between the two embassy seizures. Touring the Persian Gulf, Iran's Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh said that the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran was "a reaction to 25 years of oppressive plunder," whereas the London incident was "a terrorist act" perpetrated by "a few mercenaries who are being employed by another government." Whom was he talking about? Tehran's favorite enemies...
...seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran declared with equal bravado: "We do not trade plotters, saboteurs and domestic mercenaries for the subversive misdeeds of hirelings outside our borders." Their advice to the Iranian hostages in London: "Do not fear martyrdom. Resist, and victory will be yours." Similarly, Foreign Minister Ghotbzadeh observed that "anyone who has died for Islam goes directly to heaven." After talking to the London gunmen by telephone, Ghotbzadeh rejected their ransom demand and threatened to have one of their imprisoned comrades executed for every member of the London embassy staff who was harmed...
...Their anger has been ripened by the long spectacle of their nation's ineffectuality and the humiliation of the failed rescue raid, by the nightly TV pageant of Iranian mobs pumping their fists in the air and screaming death threats in Farsi, and by the image of Sadegh Ghotbzadeh's cretinous smirk. Dark impulses that normally stay below, like Ahab's harpooners, begin to straggle up on deck...