Another first for Barack Obama. The Times of Israel reports via the Associated Press that the president and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif “ran into one another on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.”
According to the Iranian news agency IRNA, the two “accidentally” shook hands.
The accident
represents the first handshake between an American president and Iran’s top diplomat since the 1979 Islamic Revolution ousted a pro-Western monarchy in Iran. The two countries have had no diplomatic relations since then.
But maybe in the time he has left Obama can correct that deficiency. He took steps toward appeasing our enemies in the war on terror when he reiterated his long-held position during today’s address to the General Assembly:
“Violent extremism is not unique to any one faith, so no one should ever be profiled or targeted simply because of their faith.” —@POTUS
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 29, 2015
Of course that statement, like all criticisms of racial or ethnic profiling, is true only if you collapse current events and all of history into an amorphous blob so that, say, the Crusades and current barbarism in the Middle East are happening simultaneously.
As for the handshake, last month Obama normalized relations with Cuba after half a century. And that was no accident.