The United States has spread terrorism throughout the world under the guise of working toward world peace, senior Muslim Brotherhood leader Kamal Helbawy told attendees at last weekend's International Conference on Global Alliance against Terrorism for a Just Peace in Tehran.
As such, the nation that "destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki…created terror in Korea and Vietnam…attacked Iraq and Afghanistan, and at the same time is blindly supporting Israel," should be viewed as the world's biggest terrorist, Helbawy said in written remarks posted on the conference's website.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad echoed the sentiment in his remarks. In typical fashion, he also assigned blame to Iran's go-to scapegoat, Israel, and called for its destruction.
"The reason for our insistence that the Zionist regime should be wiped out and vanished is that the Zionist regime is the main base for imposing oppression and harbors the main terrorists of the world," Ahmadinejad said.
No mention was made of Iran's support for designated terrorists Hizballah and Hamas, or other noted militants.
Attempts by the United States to show its genuineness in the fight against terrorism are nothing but a ruse, Ahmadinejad said at the conference. He dismissed "US allegations about the hunt down of the Al-Qaeda Leader, Osama bin Laden, as an act staged on the world scene" for domestic political reasons, and supported earlier comments by Helbawy that the United States had hindered real efforts by Iran to fight terrorism.
Helbawy, the former Muslim Brotherhood representative in the West who recently returned to Egypt after a self-imposed exile, has long been a vocal supporter of the Iranian regime and frequently appears in the Iranian press. On numerous occasions, he has promoted the Islamic Republic as the model for which all Muslims should strive.
The Iranian president noted that last weekend's inaugural "Just Peace" conference was launched to counter ongoing efforts by the United States to attempt to define terrorism according to its own national interests. In light of American maneuvering, "Iran deemed it necessary to initiate a 'sound' movement for the global campaign against terrorism," Ahmadinejad said.
On a similarly bewildering note, on Monday, Iran's PressTV reported that the Islamic Republic planned to launch a new English-language news agency to report on human rights abuses in the United States and Britain. No disclaimer was included in the announcement regarding Iran's own troubling record with regard to human rights including the brutal suppression of anti-government protests.