Anti-nuke protesters greet Iranian vice president at Vienna UN event

Esfandyar Mashaei has been as outspokenly anti-Semitic in his statements as his boss Ahmadinejad.

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL JPOST CORRESPONDENT IN BERLIN
Bushehr 224.88 (photo credit: AP)
Bushehr 224.88
(photo credit: AP)
Members of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan Iran and activists from the Austrian chapter of Stop the Bomb protested Tuesday against the presence of Iranian Vice President Esfandyar Mashaei at the UNO-City in Vienna. Mashaei was in Vienna to donate the "Scholars' Pavilion" - a piece of architecture in which Iranian scientific figures are represented - to the Vienna-based UN organization. "The corrupt and criminal Zionist regime is harming not only the Arab and Islamic world, but humanity in its entirety," commented Mashaei last year on Israel. He added that "in order to save humanity from its different crises, there is no other way other than the limiting of Zionist influence on human society, because the root and origin of most of the world's current crises are related to Zionism." Speaking from Vienna, Stop the Bomb spokeswoman Simone Dinah Hartmann told The Jerusalem Post that roughly 40 demonstrators were protesting Mashaei's presence. "The Iranian regime, which is the only one in the world that made denying the Holocaust part of its foreign policy, should not be given a podium for its propaganda in Vienna and at the UN," she said. Hiwa Bahrami, from the Democratic Party of Kurdistan Iran, said in a statement, "It is a slap in the face of the democratic and secular opposition that a high-ranking representative of the Iranian dictatorship is given the opportunity to present his regime as a normal, harmless and equal member of the international community."