From The Age, March 18, 2009, by Barney Zwartz:
MELBOURNE Anglican Archbishop Philip Freier is ...hosting a function for former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami while he is in Melbourne this month.
...Mr Khatami, president of Iran from 1997 to 2005 ...was a sponsor of terrorism, a Holocaust denier and leader of a country that has often threatened to "wipe Israel off the map". ...[He has] called Israel 'an old, incurable wound on the body of Islam, a wound that really possesses demonic, stinking, contagious blood'.
Mr Khatami is being brought to Australia by La Trobe University's Centre for Dialogue and will give a public lecture on March 26. The Jewish Community Council has resigned from the centre's board of advisers in protest.
...Mr Khatami ... said in Iran yesterday he was withdrawing as candidate for president against the hardline incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to avoid dividing the reformist vote.
Professor Joseph Camilleri, director of La Trobe's Centre for Dialogue, said ...Mr Khatami was "a major intellectual of the 21st century" and that he would be discussing his influential theory of the importance of dialogue in international affairs....
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