The New Horizon of Nader Talebzadeh
"…Nader’s contribution to world peace was his international conference, called "New Horizon", Here, he annually brought together American and international dissidents. His team flew us into Iran, for speeches, interviews, dialogue, creating a vantage point from which one could see a new kind of horizon beyond war and empire. It was a chance to see Middle East politics up close, and to see how much Iran wanted to help the people of Palestine.
I participated in Tehran in 2017, and then in the shrine city of Mashhad, in 2018. I wanted to come to New Horizon in Beirut in 2019, but in February of that year the Trump White House went to extraordinary lengths to attack Talebzadeh, and all of us who came to his conferences. The USA levied severe sanctions against him which remain in effect today, despite his death from heart failure on April 30th, 2022.
Back in 2019, the US Treasury claimed that Nader, through New Horizon, hosted "international conferences that have provided Iranian intelligence officers a platform to recruit and collect intelligence information from attendees, while propagating anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial". I am not sure any of that is true.
As someone who attended two New Horizon conferences, I was never asked to provide information to Iranian intelligence. My compatriots agree. I never witnessed Holocaust denial or any hate, and I wouldn’t have attended if that was what New Horizon was all about.
I asked Nader about that accusation, and he was passionate, "We never had Holocaust deniers, …We are not anti-Semites…In every conference we had, we had two or three or four Jewish participants, Jewish thinkers, the last one you were in, we had Rabbi Weiss in it, we had Miko Paled, who was born in Israel, wrote the book "The General’s Son", we had Norman Finkelstein. So no, this is untrue"…"
Source:
https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/512360/ThePost too long. Click here to view the full text.
