Quote Of The Day: Very Thin Line Edition

“It is more offensive to break bread with the guy. I thought dinner was crossing the line.”
-- Abraham Foxman

Foxman is the president of the Anti-Defamation League. He was speaking of the Council on Foreign Relations' "meeting" with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- a "meeting" rather than a "dinner," since a dinner would show too much deference to today's Hitler.

Ahmadinejad was supposed to come and go, with no US forum other than the UN, but that was foiled by the Council's invitation, which came over protests from State and many of the Council's Jewish members.

The Jewish members decided not to resign from the Council en mass after the "meeting" strategy gave them diplomatic wiggle room. One wonders if Ahmadinejad would offer them any wiggle room before wiping Israel off the map.

From the NYT (which supplied the photo, too), some of Mahmoud's comments:

• On the holocaust: “I think we should allow more impartial studies to be done on this."
• His solution on nuclear fuel production: "The United States should shut down its own fuel production and within five years, we will sell you our own fuel, with a 50 percent discount!”
• On the Council itself, which definitely is not a shill for the Bush administration: “At the beginning of the session, you said you were an independent group. But almost everything that I was asked came from a government position.’’

The Council treated Ahmadinejad as they should have:

The greeting yesterday evening was not exactly overwhelming. There were no introductory handshakes, no diplomatic niceties. ... Iran’s effort to bring in television cameras was deflected, apparently because the council feared that the session would be used for political purposes in Iran ....

All in all, kudos to the Council. They handled it correctly, treated him cooly and it is good to have people who think about foreign policy to hear this guy in person.

Related Tags: Ahmadinejad, Council on Foreign Policy, Iran