Should the Iranian President be Allowed to Visit Ground Zero?

Interesting thought, RR. The President was asked to visit one or both of the cities by the mayors of those cities during his visit last year. Here's an article from the Washington Post giving their take on why no President has done that up to the present time:


Hiroshima: The dreaded invitation
Obama declines offer to visit the bombed city on his first trip to East Asia

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 13, 2009

HIROSHIMA, JAPAN -- An inconvenient invitation awaits President Obama when he lands Friday in Japan. It's one that no sitting U.S. president has accepted and that Obama's tight schedule in Japan cannot accommodate.

Yet many Japanese have been talking about the invitation for much of this year, and it remains open: Come see what a U.S. atomic bomb did 64 years ago in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Obama -- maker of stirring speeches about "a world without nuclear weapons" and surprise winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize -- has raised expectations across Japan that he would break with the past and visit cities devastated by a weapon that only the United States has dropped on human beings.

"What's done is done," said Haruna Udo, 19, who was born in Hiroshima and attends college here. "I don't need an apology. But if Obama hasn't seen what an A-bomb can do to you, then he should come and look."

Uneasy relationship

Obama is expected to spend less than 24 hours in Tokyo, the initial stop of his first trip to East Asia as president, and he has said that "this time" he cannot accept the invitation. But in a television interview broadcast Tuesday in Japan, Obama said he "would be honored to have the opportunity to visit those cities at some point during my presidency."

Japan's focus on the possibility of a presidential visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is symptomatic of the emerging strains and enduring strengths of the United States' relationship with its closest ally in Asia.

Obama is deeply admired in Japan, with 85 percent of the population confident he will do the right thing in world affairs, according to a Pew Research Center survey in July. A year earlier, only 25 percent of those polled had similar confidence in President George W. Bush.

The United States itself, however, is less trusted. More than two-thirds of those surveyed here by Pew said that U.S. economic influence is negative for Japan, a likely reflection of how the sudden collapse last fall in Japanese exports to the United States pushed this trade-dependent nation into its deepest economic hole in more than half a century.

Newly elected Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, even though he publicly professes admiration for Obama, is trying to break free of what he has described as Japan's "somewhat passive" dealings with the United States, which is treaty-bound to defend this country in time of war.

To that end, Japan will soon end an eight-year mission in the Indian Ocean to refuel warships supporting U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan. It is also trying to reopen a $26 billion military package that involves moving a U.S. Marine Corps air base inside Japan and transferring 8,000 U.S. Marines from Japan to Guam. The United States and Japan agreed on the deal in 2006, and the Obama administration has bristled at Hatoyama's desire to renegotiate part of it.

The unresolved issue has become a serious sticking point in the Japan-U.S. alliance and is certain to be a focus of Obama's talks in Tokyo.

Ground zero


What is unlikely to be an official agenda item in those conversations is Obama's invitation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still, the mere possibility of these visits is fueling newspaper editorials, classroom debates and dinner-table arguments. Obama's Nobel has upped the speculative ante.

"Many of the past Nobel Peace laureates have visited ground zero," said an editorial in the Chugoku newspaper, which is based in Hiroshima, about 530 miles southwest of Tokyo. "We urge him to go and see the place himself and renew his commitment to a nuclear-free world."

More important than the Nobel, in the view of many Japanese, was Obama's April speech in Prague, which committed the United States "to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." In that speech, Obama said that the United States "has a moral responsibility to act" because it is "the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon."

In Hiroshima, those words astonished and delighted bomb survivors such as Sunao Tsuboi, who was 20 years old and about a half-mile away from ground zero when the A-bomb exploded. Heat from the blast burned skin off his face, back and arms. It melted away his ears. He has since had prostate cancer, colon cancer and chronic anemia requiring blood transfusions.

"Obama's position on these weapons is very close to ours," said Tsuboi, now 84 and the leader of a bomb survivor group. "Surviving victims of the A-bomb don't have very long to live. I think Obama knows that. We have high hopes that he might stop by."

But in the more than six decades since much of Hiroshima was incinerated, hope has not yet overcome political realities that have limited the options of Japanese and U.S. leaders in addressing lingering issues from World War II.

No sitting Japanese prime minister has visited Pearl Harbor or apologized for the surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941, that drew the United States into war.

In the United States, close attention to the suffering of Japanese bomb victims has sometimes been viewed as inappropriate criticism of the government's decision to use the bomb. In 1995, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, under pressure from 81 members of Congress, scrapped an exhibit that raised questions about the morality of dropping the bomb. In 2003, the museum rejected suggestions that a display of the Enola Gay, the airplane that bombed Hiroshima, should mention how many people died.

The bomb dropped on Aug. 6, 1945, killed an estimated 140,000 people. Nagasaki was bombed three days later, killing about 80,000. Six days after that, World War II ended with Japan's unconditional surrender.

In Hiroshima, the invitation to Obama will remain open, but he is hardly alone in not finding the time to accept it. According to the city's peace promotion department, no sitting head of state from any nation with nuclear weapons has visited the memorial, which lists the names of the dead.

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/12/AR2009111210925.html

Notice, RR, that it is also a fact "No sitting Japanese prime minister has visited Pearl Harbor or apologized for the surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941, that drew the United States into war." We have read many times in this forum the indignation of those in countries in the region, like China, over Japan never having given a clear apology for what happened before and during WWII, and that the history of that era in Japan is distorted in Japan's history books used to teach their children. It is an indignation I share. One could draw the conclusion that none of this is as simple as it might appear on the surface. President Obama is simply one of many. Read the last sentence.

 

^Interesting article, Deckard. I visited Hiroshima two months ago on my first trip to Japan. Pretty moving experience, to say the least.

 

Allowed and encouraged. Yeltsin visiting a Houston grocery store in '89 comes to mind.

 

While I've been to Japan, I haven't been to either city. I can imagine what it would feel like, however. I toured the site of a concentration camp in the Netherlands with one of my wife's older cousins, almost 30 years ago. Put into the camp himself after being caught at the Swiss border by the German army, during the Dutch occupation, it's in a new growth forest (new since WWII) and you'd never know it was there unless someone showed you. There's one guard tower, some embankments among the trees, and that's about it. He calmly pointed to one of the embankments and said, "That's where they were shot. I was sometimes forced to take the bodies away for disposal." The whole experience moved us. He still couldn't forgive Germany for what they had done. A bookend to that was touring Anne Frank's house with a young German couple we had become friends with in Amsterdam, and watching them start to cry during the tour. That was moving, as well. History can be tough, and long after events there are still consequences, consequences that can be unfair to those who came after.

 

Deckard - I did see that article. Cause I wanted to see if anyone had been before.

It has been quite some time . . . and it takes time to heal.
Good to see that time has come.

I dunno if the 9/11 pain has healed enough yet.

While Iran did not have anything to do with it
folx still associate them with it . . . ..

Rocket River

 

Why would any Japanese minister apologize for Pearl Harbor or any American President apologize for Hiroshima when all these people have (rightfully) dissociated themselves from the people who did those things?

I don't like the idea of bearing the burden of someone or something which you couldn't control, support or protest.

I am FOR feeling compassion TOGETHER for humans. Why can't Americans and Japanese both mourn the people who suffered in Pearl Harbor, and more importantly, those who suffered in the Japanese cities? Who cares about the apology?

It's insignificant and frankly it's a clear sign of insecurity about the morality of the action if over half a century later you're demanding an apology from a regime which has condemned the previous regimes and is completely turned over since then.

Come on people, it's not about nationality... Passports don't connect us that way. It's just about human compassion.

I hope either Obama or Hatoyama does the right thing and acts like the bigger man to show the lives of the people are more important than irrational national pride.

 

this is the moderate muslim voice who will lead the mosque at ground zero, from a 60 minutes interview from September 30, 2001:

BRADLEY: Are- – are — are you in any way suggesting that we in the United States deserved what happened?

Imam ABDUL RAUF: I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened, but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.

BRADLEY: OK. You say that we’re an accessory?

Imam ABDUL RAUF: Yes.

BRADLEY: How?

Imam ABDUL RAUF: Because we have been an accessory to a lot of — of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, it — in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.​

more, including his thoughts about sharia law, can be found here.

whatever his opinions, he's entitled to them, but he should not have a platform at Ground Zero. it would be akin to building a memorial to Nathan Bedford Forrest across the street from the Lorraine Motel.

 

Interesting info, basso...the whole initiative might not be as "innocent" as they try to make it seem, then?

 

I don't see that he said anything bad there. He claimed the US didn't deserve what happened, and truthfully stated that some of the U.S. policies upset people around the world who would want to strike out at the US.

 

Agreed. Many, many people have said this.

 

Let him, maybe it would have a positive effect on him. Though I doubt it.

 

I agree with those views above, because they are FACTS and it is hard to dispute facts, and stating facts does not make you an extremist just because no one wants to hear it or it offends them. Osama Bin Laden was made by the USA during the Afghan campaign against the Soviets. The U.S. supported him and Ronald Reagan brought over the Mujahideen leaders to the White House and parades them before the cameras. The CIA itself later on acknowledged those mistakes and called it blowback. I am not sure what part of all of that you dispute.

 

i don't dispute it, it's just irrelevant to the issue at hand.

 

Peaceful, freedom loving and wholesome American Michael Berry, who has a very popular radio talk show based in Houston and syndicated nationwide, advocates the bombing of the new mosque in NYC

http://www.cair.com/audio/michaelberry.wav

 

Muslim Legal Group attempts to intimidate Houston talk show host

CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, hopes to intimidate anyone who disagrees with them. They have filed a complaint against the Michael Berry Show, because we had the audacity to suggest that a mosque should not be built on our near the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack.

CAIR issued the statement below. They cut the audio down to play one line by Michael Berry, taking the comment out of context. The full call can be heard here.

“I did NOT advocate bombing any mosque. First, the supposed mosque does not exist. It is just a proposal, and I oppose where they intend to put it. It is spitting in the face of those who died in the 9/11 terrorist attack to put it there,” Michael Berry said. “Second, the caller was belligerent, and pushed too far, suggesting that any family member of a victim who is offended is somehow a racist. I can’t abide someone dishonoring these families, who’ve been through so much, in this way.”

Berry concluded, “This is how CAIR intimidates people into silence. They want to scare people into believing that having differing opinions will cost you your job.”

“While I stand by my disagreement of the building of the mosque on the site, I SHOULD NOT have said ‘I hope someone blows it up.’ That was dumb, and beneath me. I was trying to show “Tony” how much I opposed his opinion, but I went too far. For that, I apologize to my listeners.”

http://www.ktrh.com/pages/michaelberry.html

 

Unfortunately for Michael Berry, this is no joke for anyone who has been following the news lately, as an actual bomb was planted and did go off at a mosque in Florida

As has been clearly demonstrated recently, a terrorist attack inside America targeting Muslims is not news worthy, and is willfully ignored by the national media, as the following link shows:

Florida mosque bombed; FBI calls for help; national media mute

http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/florida-mosque-bombed-fbi-calls-help-nation

Where are the denunciations of these terrorist attacks and racial intimidation of Muslims in America? Where are those who demand daily that all Muslims denounce every single terrorist attack carried out by Muslims and yet never apply the same standard when their own zealots threaten others with violence?

Hypocrisy duly noted.

 

CAIR was founded in June 1994 by three officers of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP)—Omar Ahmad (IAP President; became CAIR President), Nihad Awad (IAP PR Director; became CAIR Secretary & Treasurer), and Rafeeq Jaber (IAP Chicago Chapter President; became CAIR Vice President). Also, Ibrahim "Dougie" Hooper, who assisted Awad's media efforts, became CAIR's communications director. IAP was an Islamist organization that it was later revealed raised money in the US for Hamas, though it billed itself as "a not-for-profit, public-awareness, educational, political, social, and civic, national grassroots organization"

In 1998, Omar Ahmad (a joint founder of CAIR) was reported to have said: "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth."

In 2002 CAIR launched an effort to "put quality materials about Islam in all 17,000 public libraries in the United States." The initiative was funded with an initial $500,000 contribution from Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, whose donation to the Twin Towers Fund was refused by then-Mayor Rudy Guliani because it came with a letter attributing US support for Israel for the 9/11 attacks.

California Senator Barbara Boxer in December 2006 withdrew a "certificate of accomplishment" originally given to former CAIR official Basim Elkarra after Boxer's staff looked into CAIR, and she became concerned about some of CAIR's past statements and actions, and statements by some law enforcement officials that it provides aid to international terrorist groups.

In 2008, the FBI discontinued its long-standing relationship with CAIR. Officials said the decision followed the conviction of the HLF directors for funneling millions of dollars to Hamas, revelations that Nihal Awad had participated in planning meetings with HLF, and CAIR's failure to provide details of its ties to Hamas.

U.S. Congressmen Sue Myrick (R-NC), Trent Franks (R-AZ), John Shadegg (R-AZ), and Paul Broun (R-GA) wrote Attorney General Eric Holder on October 21, 2009, that they were very concerned about CAIR's relationships with terrorist groups, and requesting that the DOJ provide each Congressman a summary of DOJ's evidence and findings that led DOJ to name CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism trial.

Pipes has accused CAIR of demanding that a billboard declaring Osama bin Laden "the sworn enemy" be brought down in 1998 as "offensive to Moslems", denying bin Laden's responsibility for the Africa embassy bombings, calling the conviction of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers "a travesty of justice," calling the conviction of the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman a "hate crime", calling the extradition order of suspected Hamas terrorist Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook "anti-Islamic", calling President Bush's closing of the Holy Land Foundation for collecting money used to support Hamas "unjust" and "disturbing", praising and defending convicted murderer H. Rap Brown as well as convicted attempted murderer Adnan Chaudhry, and their LA office head calling Israelis "zionazis"; he also quotes the FBI's former chief of counterterrorism Steven Pomerantz saying that CAIR "effectively" gives aid to international terrorist groups.

And some Muslims criticize CAIR for being overly conservative from a religious standpoint, for example by taking the disputed position that all Moslem women are required to veil their hair.

CAIR has been criticized for granting an award to Muzzammil Hassan, who later went on to become charged with the beheading of his wife. Mr. Hassan founded Bridges TV, a television station aimed at countering negative stereotypes of Muslim Americans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_American-Islamic_Relations

 

Good that he admits he was wrong, I guess he can get fined by the FCC and then we can move on.

Intimidation? LMAO! The guy issued a call for violence (also known as incitement) and he paints it as a matter of differing opinions?!! LOL! This is how right wing extremists and racists are spinning this, intimidation? CAIR merely reported it to the FCC, which it has every right to do GIVEN THE FACT that there have been a disturbing pattern of anti-Muslim violence (yes, violence, not just threats) and hateful propaganda that probably led to a bomb going off just a couple of weeks ago in a Florida mosque. For a radio talk show host to ignore this fact and say he wants the new mosque in NYC to be bombed, then he deserves what is coming to him, whether he gets fired or just fined for being so irresponsible on public air waves. This is HARDLY the first time this guy has said something controversial or dangerous, which frankly brings his sincerity into question. This sort of vitriol IS pretty much the trademark for his show.

 

To the readers in this thread: notice how ATW is going on a posting rant to distract from the fact that this guy issued a call for the bombing of the NYC mosque? Do you still not question ATW's real intentions and views? His only goal is change the subject and focus the light on those evil Muslims lurking in the background in a grand conspiracy to bring down the West.

If it quacks like a duck, as the saying goes. And he wonders why people think he is a bigot LOL!

 

The guy was wrong to say that the mosque should be bombed if it is built, probably to a degree where he should lose his job for it (even though he was probably provoked by the caller, he has to be more under control). But the guys who are trying to get him fired aren't saints either, that is all I pointed out.