Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Coalition Gears Up To Protest Ahmadinejad Dinner

A coalition of Jewish and non-Jewish groups is planning a demonstration to protest a September 25 dinner organized by five American Christian organizations at which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be a featured guest.

“These religious leaders are about to betray their brethren across all religions, parties, and countries by ‘honoring’ the tyrannical regime of Ahmadinejad and the Iranian mullahs of this terrorist state,” protest organizers said in a statement posted on their Web site.

The rally will come just three days after another anti-Iran rally held outside the United Nations. That rally became embroiled in controversy after the organizers decided to rescind invitations to Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin and Democratic Party officials.

The sponsors of the dinner protest have invited Palin to participate, though she is not expected to attend.

The protest will take place outside the Grand Hyatt hotel in Manhattan at the same time that Ahmadinejad is dining inside. Among the 30 groups organizing the protest are Americans for a Safe Israel, Stand With Us and the Catholic League. The Ahmadinejad dinner has also prompted the American Jewish Committee to send a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon protesting the planned attendance of the president of the U.N. General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann.

“The President of the General Assembly, Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, has put the credibility of the United Nations into question,” the AJCommittee’s president, Richard Sideman, and executive director, David Harris, wrote in their September 22 letter. “The presence of the President of the General Assembly at an event in honor of Mr. Ahmadinejad would make a mockery of you, the United Nations, and the nations and leaders who have made a point of rejecting Holocaust denial whenever, wherever, and by whomever it is made.”

The September 22 protest outside the United Nations was organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and local Jewish groups. Because of the flap over Palin’s invitation, the event did not feature American politicians as it did in previous years. Among the participants were Israeli Knesset speaker Dalia Itzik, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, former Soviet refusenik Nathan Sharansky and former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler. The sizable crowd was made up largely of youth brandishing signs assailing Ahmadinejad for his anti-Israel pronouncements and his country’s poor human rights record.

The American presidential campaign remained mostly on the sidelines, except for a few signs directed against Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

A block away, one demonstrator, Bill Rubin, was standing at a corner, waving an Israeli flag and a sign that said, “Dems hate Sarah Palin more than they hate Islamo-fascists.”

“I am ashamed, you don’t tell someone to come to Shabbat, have the person accept and then say ‘Oh no,’” he said.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.