The president of Iran plans to visit New York City next month — just days after state media threatened to nuke it.
Iranian government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi announced the president’s plans to visit the Big Apple at a press conference on Tuesday. He said President Ebrahim Raisi is in the process of laying the groundwork for the tip to attend the 77th session of the U.N. General Assembly set to be held Sept. 13.
The announcement comes just days after Iranian state media declared that it might obliterate New York City with a nuclear warhead.
London-based Iran International reported that Bisimchi Media, an outlet connected with the Iranian government’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, released a short video titled “When Will Iran’s Sleeping Warheads Awaken,” according to Fox News.
The video claims that Iran has the capability to build nuclear warheads quickly “if the U.S. or the Zionist regime make any stupid mistakes.” It can do this by utilizing secret underground facilities that can withstand both ground-penetration bombs and a nuclear explosion, the video says.
With these nuclear warheads, Iran will turn New York City into “hellish ruins,” the video adds.
The video may play a role in President Joe Biden’s decision on whether to allow Raisi to visit next month, something several Republican lawmakers have urged him not to do.
Seven Republican senators sent a letter to Biden on Wednesday, urging him to deny Raisi and the Iranian delegates’ visas, according to the Jerusalem Post. In the letter, they cite Raisi’s involvement in human rights violations, as well as Iranian threats to U.S. national security.
Crimes against humanity
Following his election as president in June 2021 , Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard said on June 19, 2021 :
“That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran. In 2018, our organization documented how Ebrahim Raisi had been a member of the ‘death commission’ which forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed in secret thousands of political dissidents in Evin and Gohardasht prisons near Tehran in 1988. The circumstances surrounding the fate of the victims and the whereabouts of their bodies are, to this day, systematically concealed by the Iranian authorities, amounting to ongoing crimes against humanity.
‘As Head of the Iranian Judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi has presided over a spiralling crackdown on human rights which has seen hundreds of peaceful dissidents, human rights defenders and members of persecuted minority groups arbitrarily detained. Under his watch, the judiciary has also granted blanket impunity to government officials and security forces responsible for unlawfully killing hundreds of men, women and children and subjecting thousands of protesters to mass arrests and at least hundreds to enforced disappearance, and torture and other ill-treatment during and in the aftermath of the nationwide protests of November 2019.
“Ebrahim Raisi’s rise to the presidency follows an electoral process that was conducted in a highly repressive environment and barred women, members of religious minorities and candidates with opposing views from running for office.
“We continue to call for Ebrahim Raisi to be investigated for his involvement in past and ongoing crimes under international law, including by states that exercise universal jurisdiction.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER /NEWS MEDIA
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