Mr Khatami on civilisation

Dr Anne Bayefsky on former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, one of the principals of the recently concluded meeting of the U.N.'s Alliance of Civilisations:

What do the members of the "high level group" who drafted the report, such as former Iranian President Khatami, have to say about the needs of civilization? Khatami's expertise on the subject presumably comes from his reign as president of the leading state sponsor of terrorism. His personal presidential experience, for instance, includes the pursuit of nuclear weapons, the biggest crackdown on the Iranian media since the Iranian revolution, and rounding up and imprisoning Jews on trumped-up charges of spying.

"Another day, another UN report, irrelevant for anyone seriously interested in tolerance and co-existence": the Eye on the U.N. editor has it exactly correct.  The report of the Alliance of Civilisations released yesterday in Constantinople/Istanbul manages all of four sentences before it descends into the usual nonsense about how the conflicts in the Holy Land are at the root of every problem the world faces; it is priceless.