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Iran’s President Cancels UN Trip Amid Lawsuit Demanding Arrest Over ‘Crimes Against Humanity’
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi speaks during the official farewell ceremony for his trip to New York, at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, Iran, September 17, 2023. Photo: Iran’s Presidency/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi has canceled a planned trip to Geneva, Switzerland to attend the United Nations Global Refugee Forum amid international outcry over the participation of the Iranian leader, who faced a fresh legal complaint this week demanding Swiss authorities arrest him for “crimes against humanity.”
Raisi, long accused of major human rights abuses, was set to participate in the UN event and address the forum on Wednesday. However, the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that Raisi had canceled his trip.
UN officials told French and Swiss media that Iran’s delegation would be led by Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
News of the nixed Raisi trip came after three alleged victims of the Iranian regime’s violent crackdown on dissidents in the 1980s filed a legal complaint on Monday asking Swiss authorities to arrest the Iranian president when he landed in Switzerland. The complaint also asked for Raisi’s prosecution “over his participation in acts of genocide, torture, extrajudicial executions, and other crimes against humanity.”
The UN, the US government, and human rights groups have documented and condemned how Iran notoriously executed thousands of political prisoners in 1988, when Raisi was deputy prosecutor of Tehran and part of a so-called “death committee” that ordered several of the killings.
Raisi was asked about his alleged involvement in the 1988 mass killings at a news conference in June 2021.
“If a judge, a prosecutor has defended the security of the people, he should be praised,” he said. “I am proud to have defended human rights in every position I have held so far.”
Two years earlier, an audiotape was released of the late Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the one-time designated successor to former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, lashing out in 1988 at Raisi and others alleged to be complicit in facilitating the mass killings, declaring, “You all will be judged as the biggest criminals in history.”
Raisi hasn’t just been tied to human rights abuses in 1988. In December 2019, the US government confirmed that the Iranian regime killed about 1,500 anti-government protesters as part of a crackdown by security forces on demonstrations the prior month.
The Treasury Department sanctioned Raisi, who was judiciary chief at the time and had a direct role in the suppression effort, for “advancing” the regime’s “domestic and foreign oppression.”
More recently, Raisi has been assailed by Western leaders for overseeing Tehran’s crackdown on the wave of nationwide demonstrations that erupted in Sept. 2022 with the killing of Jina “Mahsa” Amini, the young Kurdish woman whose death at the hands of Iran’s morality police sparked protests against the ruling Islamist regime on an unprecedented scale.
During the latest protests, it is estimated that hundreds of Iranians have been killed and tens of thousands arrested.
“We firmly believe that the United Nations, as a bastion of human rights and justice, should not compromise its reputation by extending an invitation to an individual accused of grave human rights violations,” the complaint said of Raisi attending the Global Refugee Forum.
The UN came under heavy fire for allowing Raisi to attend the event in Geneva alongside personnel from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a US-designated terrorist organization.
Over 300 former UN officials, politicians, Nobel Prize winners, academics, and other influential leaders signed a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, president of the Swiss Confederation, and top European leaders expressing “deep concern regarding the planned participation of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi the upcoming 2023 Global Refugee Forum.”
The letter pointed to Raisi’s role in the 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners in Iran. It also stated that, in the past two months alone, Iranian authorities have executed at least 212 prisoners, “including seven political prisoners, three women, one juvenile offender, and a 17-year-old boy. At least three of those executions took place in public.”
The secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a coalition of Iranian opposition groups seeking to topple the regime, said in a statement that Raisi’s visit would be “an insult to human rights, the sacred right of asylum, and a stain on the history of the United Nations. It simply emboldens this regime in the killing of the people of Iran, the export of terrorism, and warmongering. He must be tried and punished for four decades of crimes against humanity and genocide.”
Members of Raisi’s planned entourage from the IRGC included Brig. Gen. Abdullah Mobini Dehkhodaee, who according to the NCRI was traveling to Geneva under the title of “deputy minister of interior and head of the Immigration Organization.”
A spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN’s refugee agency, defended the decision to allow Raisi to attend this week’s forum.
“Iran is a member state of the United Nations and therefore invited to the Global Refugee Forum,” the spokesperson told The Algemeiner. “Iran has also been one of the largest refugee hosting countries for over 40 years.”
The post Iran’s President Cancels UN Trip Amid Lawsuit Demanding Arrest Over ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Shifts One of Two Aircraft Carriers Away From Middle East
The world’s largest aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford steams alongside USNS Laramie (T-AO-203) during a fueling-at-sea in the eastern Mediterranean Sea in this photo taken on Oct. 11, 2023 and released by the US Navy on Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: US Naval Forces Central Command / US 6th Fleet / Handout via REUTERS
One of two US aircraft carrier strike groups deployed to the Middle East in part to deter Iran from carrying out a threatened attack against Israel has departed the region, the Pentagon said on Thursday.
The decision to end the dual-carrier presence came nearly three weeks after US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group to remain in the Middle East, even after the arrival of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to replace it.
The Roosevelt has now departed the Middle East and is headed to the Asia-Pacific region, Major General Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesperson, told a news briefing.
Austin’s order for the Roosevelt to stay in place came on Aug. 25, as Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel and Israel‘s military said it struck Lebanon with around 100 jets to thwart a larger attack, in one of the biggest clashes in more than 10 months of border warfare.
Officials have been concerned that Iran might make also good on its threats to carry out an attack against Israel over the killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran in July.
Ryder played down the idea that the United States was no longer concerned about potential Iranian action and said the decision was based on the Navy’s fleet management.
“Iran has indicated that they want to retaliate against Israel. And so we’re going to continue to take that threat very seriously,” Ryder told reporters at the Pentagon.
Iran has vowed a severe response to the July killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which took place as he visited Tehran and which it blamed on Israel. Israel has neither confirmed or denied its involvement.
US President Joe Biden’s administration has been seeking to limit the fallout from the war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel, now approaching its one-year anniversary. The conflict has leveled huge swathes of Gaza, triggered border clashes between Israel and Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror group and drawn in Yemen’s Houthis.
“We remain intensely focused on working with regional partners to de-escalate tensions and deterring a wider regional conflict,” Ryder said.
The post US Shifts One of Two Aircraft Carriers Away From Middle East first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Toronto police charge three people at UJA event protest—while more cops find themselves assaulted
Protests also occurred at multiple screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The post Toronto police charge three people at UJA event protest—while more cops find themselves assaulted appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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SUNY Purchase President Steps Down Amid Backlash Over Handling of Anti-Israel Protests, Campus Antisemitism
SUNY Purchase College President Milagros Peña attends the 52nd annual commencement at Westchester County Center in White Plains, New York, May 17, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
State University of New York (SUNY) Purchase president Milagros Peña will leave office at the end of this academic year, ending a four-year tenure that was derailed by pro-Hamas demonstrations on the campus.
According to The Journal News, Peña announced her “retirement” in a letter to the campus community and further discussed the decision at a convocation event held earlier this month.
“After considerable reflection and discussion about what is best for me and my family, I informed Chancellor [John B. King, Jr.] over the summer that this 2024-2025 academic year will be my last year as president,” Peña wrote, according to excerpts of the letter shared by the local news outlet. “I have mixed emotions about my decision to retire as president after the spring semester, because, though we still face challenges as a community, we have accomplished a great deal together and our shared mission of providing access to a high quality, transformative public education is as important as ever.”
Appointed to office 2020, Peña became a target of far-left faculty last academic year when she authorized the clearing of an illegal “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” which, the school’s newspaper reported at the time, led to clashes between law enforcement and pro-Hamas students who refused to obey orders to leave the area. An estimated 70 students were arrested, The Phoenix Purchase has said, and at least one professor was detained for obstructing justice.
However, Peña was inconsistent as a policy maker. In an account of her responses to campus antisemitism published by The Algemeiner on Wednesday, SUNY Purchase alumna Esti Heller said the president ignored numerous supplications for increased security for Jewish life on campus after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Peña was unresponsive, even after someone vandalized an Israeli flag and desecrated a sukkah, a hut built for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. Later, Peña reversed course in her handling of the pro-Hamas protesters, Heller said, acceding to their demands for “ethical investing,” amnesty for students charged with violating the code of conduct, and public disclosure of the school’s financial decisions.
Ultimately, Peña lost a no-confidence vote on June 3 in which 87 percent of the voting faculty called for her to leave office.
“While disappointed by the resolution, I am committed to continuing to take part in conversations with stakeholders on and off campus about many of the issues raised and look forward to engaging with the faculty, staff, and students about our shared goals and the best way of moving forward as a community,” Peña told the Purchase following the vote.
Now, three months later, Peña has granted faculty their wish, becoming the third university president in New York State this year to leave office after being criticized for mismanaging a series of crises, antisemitic incidents, and riotous demonstrations. Last month, Minouche Shafik resigned as president of Columbia University after her administration’s credibility crumbled amid revelations of antisemitic conversations between administrators and a partisan investigation of a pro-Israel professor. In May, Cornell University president Martha Pollack resigned after weeks of convulsive protests and disruptions on campus caused by mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty.
In Wednesday’s announcement, Peña pledged to make her final months in office productive.
“We still have a lot to do before I step away, and I look forward to working together to ensure that Purchase College continues to thrive,” she said. “While there are challenges ahead, I feel confident that we have the flexibility, the skills, and the determination to continue to provide an excellent education for our students and to make progress as an institution that is continually evolving, while safeguarding our community and living up to our values during this extraordinary time.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post SUNY Purchase President Steps Down Amid Backlash Over Handling of Anti-Israel Protests, Campus Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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