The Washington Times
August 15, 2022
President Biden is facing growing calls to ban Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi from entering the U.S. ahead of next month’s United Nations General Assembly, further complicating the administration’s attempts to restart stalled nuclear talks with Tehran.
Iranian opposition groups in the U.S. and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say allowing the hard-line cleric who remains under U.S. sanctions for human rights abuses to step foot on American soil to attend the gathering of world leaders in New York would further legitimize the Iranian regime and overlook decades of human rights abuses they say Mr. Raisi carried out before taking office.
The Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC), a group allied with the Iranian dissident group the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, lined the National Mall over the weekend with thousands of photos of Iranians who were killed during the 1988 state-sponsored executions of political prisoners ordered by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and carried out by a three-judge panel on which they say Mr. Raisi served.
The group says Mr. Raisi, who was elected as Iran’s president last year, played a direct role in the murder of 30,000 political prisoners in the 1988 mass executions and more than 1,500 protesters during the 2019 uprising in Iran.
Amir Borjkhani, who spent nine years as a political prisoner inside Iran in the 1980s, said it was unthinkable that Mr. Raisi would soon set foot on the same U.S. soil where he has found refuge for the past 13 years.
