By Robert Mackey

December 23, 2009

Source:

Updated | 7:15 p.m. A British news anchor was suddenly invited to Iran to interview President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on this week, just days after his program broadcast with a man who claimed that he had helped to rig Iran’s June presidential election as a member of Iran’s Basij militia.

The anchor, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, explained in published Wednesday that he had been trying to obtain an interview for months and had been turned down twice before the sudden invitation.

After Mr. Snow was given a half hour with Mr. Ahmadinejad on Wednesday in the Iranian city of Shiraz, Channel 4 News published video and versions of the entire exchange online.

As Mr. Snow noted on his blog, the interview took place in beautiful surroundings, at “the gorgeous shrine of the great 14th-century Persian poet Hafeez.” On the same day, as my colleague , opposition Web sites said that Iran’s security forces prevented a mourning ceremony for a revered cleric in the city of Isfahan, by and using tear gas.

At one point in the conversation, Mr. Ahmadinejad suggested that the repression of dissent in his country was similar to that in the United States and Britain during protests against meetings of the G-20 . When asked about the “awful scenes of violence on the streets” of Iran during the crackdown on demonstrators who claimed that his election victory was a fraud, Mr. Ahmadinejad said, “the American police beat people in Pittsburgh, they arrest people and use batons and tear gas against people.”

After Mr. Snow raised the subject of the testimony the man who claims to be a Basij defector gave to Channel 4 News last week, Mr. Ahmadinejad first cast doubt on the ability of journalists to verify the man’s evidence and then added, in another apparent reference to the policing of G-20 summits, “You can see the scenes on the streets of London where people are being beaten by British police.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad also justified the jamming of broadcasts by the BBC into Iran by claiming that the BBC is an “instrument of British government foreign policy” and asking Mr. Snow, “Do you know anywhere in the world where the BBC has acted against the policies of the government?” (Mr. Ahmadinejad, apparently, is not familiar with over the issue of the intelligence that led to the war in Iraq, to choose one example among many.)

Mr. Snow also raised the fact that protests reportedly continued on Wednesday in Najafabad, the hometown of the late Grand Ayatollah Ali Hossein Montazeri, where mourning ceremonies for the reformist cleric have sparked demonstrations. (This on Wednesday purportedly shows a crowd in Najafabad chanting “We’re not afraid, we’re not afraid,” under the watchful eye of the security forces.)

Throughout the interview Mr. Ahmadinejad constantly dodged questions by changing the subject and expanding on what he says is an unchanging narrative of Iran resisting American and British imperialism. For example, when Mr. Snow asked Mr. Ahmadinejad about press freedom in Iran, and mentioned the Iranian-Canadian journalist , Mr. Ahmadinejad simply dismissed what he called Mr. Bahari’s “claims” before switching the conversation back to more comfortable ground, adding:

People say a lot of things. Do you think freedom prevails in the U.S.? And do you think the media in the U.S. is free?

In a similar vein, when asked about an article published in The Times of London on Wednesday, which said , Mr. Ahmadinejad refused to answer the direct question, “Is it true or is it false?” Instead he suggested that the Western media fabricates news stories “to control the world,” and said, “wise people would never waste time answering all these things.”