http://www.boston.com/dailynews/313/world/Iran_s_Islamic_president_conde:.shtml

Iran's Islamic president condemns Sept. 11 attackers, calling them ''fanatics''

By Ranjan Roy, Associated Press, 11/9/2001 16:16

UNITED NATIONS (AP) Islamic Iran's reform-minded president declared at the U.N. General Assembly Friday that the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terror attacks were ''fanatics'' disconnected from the larger world.

The attacks ''were perpetrated by a cult of fanatics who had self-mutilated their ears and tongues, and could only communicate with perceived opponents through carnage and devastation,'' President Mohammad Khatami said.

But the condemnation of terrorism by the leader of a country once seen as the chief exporter of Islamic radicalism was tempered by a call to exercise caution.

''A misplaced sense of might could lead to failure to hear the calls of people of goodwill or the cries of children, women and the elderly in Afghanistan,'' he said.

He said the people of Afghanistan, Iran's eastern neighbor, which is the target of U.S.-led airstrikes, were living in a ''shadow of perpetual horror, hunger and disease.''

Khatami called the terror attacks ''an appalling crime'' against Americans.

''Terrorism is begotten through the ominous combination of blind fanaticism with brute force,'' he said. ''Terrorism is nothing more than a projection of destructive forces of the human unconscious.''

Iran, a predominantly Shiite Muslim nation, has openly sided with the U.S. goal of overthrowing Afghanistan's Taliban rulers, who have refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the terror attacks.

Khatami said he had urged U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to create an agenda to combat terrorism and ''unify international political will in uprooting this evil phenomenon.''

John Negroponte, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, urged dialogue.

''The greater danger confronting us in the world today is not that we speak in different languages, but that we don't always listen to any language,'' he said.

Terrorists, Negroponte said, had donned Islam's mantle, but ''these men did not, could not, represent Islam.''

Annan, in his speech to the General Assembly, said the United Nations must respond to international terrorism by bringing diverse people closer. He said the world must also reject the notion that one civilization is better than others.

''The idea that there is one people in possession of the truth, one answer to the world's ills, or one solution to humanity's needs has done immense harm throughout history,'' he said.

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2001