Davos, the Iranian Chutzpah Festival
Perhaps it’s the altitude. Maybe it's the rich food -- or the rich people. Or maybe the word for chutzpah in Farsi is “Davos.”
For whatever reason, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, have been putting on a brass-neck display this week in Switzerland -- and Rouhani's speech today at the World Economic Forum was no exception.
Rouhani and Zarif are busy trying, with intermittent success, to beguile the West into submission. (They’ve left the executions of Kurdish activists, the suppression of the Baha’i and the imprisonment of Christian pastors for the to-do lists of other senior Iranian officials.) In the course of the latest iteration of their charm offensive, they’ve made some inadvertently hilarious statements.
My favorite might be this tweet yesterday that came from Rouhani’s account (which is apparently managed by aides): “Terrorism will come back to haunt those who sponsor it.If a govt thinks it can topple another govt by supporting terrorists, it's 100% wrong.”
This is from the president of a country that sits on the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, and that supplies skilled terrorists, financing and arms to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has turned Syria into hell itself. Iran also funds and supplies a Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, that murders its political rivals and is responsible for terrorist acts around the globe.
more...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-23/hassan-rouhani-s-davos-comedy-routine.html
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