By Wikipedia Iran’s opposition leaders remained defiant Wednesday despite calls from hard-liners for them to be brought to trial and put to death. One reform…
Seyyed Ahmad Khatami is an Iranian politician. Despite having the same last name as Mohammad Khatami, the reformist former president of Iran, the two men are unrelated and in fact have strongly differing points of view on many issues, such as democracy in Iran. He has strong ties with the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei. In December 2005, he met with the Ali Khamenei to be appointed as Tehran’s substitute Friday prayer leader. "The spirit of Iran's response is 'yes' to logical dialogue without precondition. No one can talk to Iran with the language of threats," Khatami said during his Friday sermon broadcast on Iran's state radio. After Friday prayer services on June 22, 2007 Hojatoleslam Ahmad Khatami spoke to worshipers through a state radio broadcast from Tehran about the Knighthood of Salman Rushdie. He addressed the death sentence issued by Imam Khomeini against Rushdie, saying "In the Islamic Iran that revolutionary fatwa of Imam [Khomeini] is still alive and cannot be changed. " During the Pope Benedict XVI Islam controversy, he asked the Pope to "fall on his knees in front of a senior Muslim cleric and try to understand Islam. " In regard to the 2009 Iranian election protests, Khatami has denounced demonstrators as rioters who wage war against God ("mohareb"), (a capital crime in Islamic law). After the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, Khatami claimed that Agha-Soltan was killed by protesters rather than by plainclothes Basiji, contradicting reports of eyewitnesses. In an interview with an Iranian newspaper in July 2009, Khatami revealed that he is in the process of writing his second book, due to be released in 2011. The book will be in the Azerbaijani language and "will have some degree of emphasis on the changes the world has embraced since the beginning of the century".
