Word: hashemi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Formed in 1979 as Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's personal militia, the IRGC acquired a reputation for suicidal human-wave attacks in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. After Khomeini's death in 1989, the government of then President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sought to channel the guards' fervor into reconstruction projects, allowing them to dip into the coffers of massive religious and charitable foundations known as bonyads; in time, the guards came to control the foundations themselves...
...refused to say what he had done during the national trauma of the Iran-Iraq war, whether he had seen combat or lost friends. When I asked his opinion of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's famous 2001 Quds Day speech, in which he called for an "Islamic bomb" to counter Israel's nuclear arsenal, Ahmadinejad denied that Rafsanjani had ever made such a speech. I said that I'd been there, using an official Iranian translator, and that the speech had made headlines worldwide. "None of the Iranians here around the table recall such a statement," he said...
...more general question on the question of nuclear programs: I was at the Quds Day observance in 2001, our calendar, when Hashemi Rafsanjani said that there was a need for an Islamic bomb to counter the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Do you agree with that? I had never heard this statement...
...Just asking. I have one more question and then we will turn it open to the others. It's about Hashemi Rafsanjani. For 26 years, he gave Quds Day address at Friday prayers, but not this year and during the campaign I watched you, maybe faulty translation again, accuse Rafsanjani of corruption and that he was part of a corrupt establishment. Is that one of the reasons why Rafsanjani didn't give the speech this year, and also given those accusations, what are you going to do about that in your second term? About his personal corruption? These are after...
...Iranian politicians from across the ideological spectrum to speak their minds, were either shut down or scaled back. Former President Mohammed Khatami was scheduled to speak alongside Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's grandson at Khomeini's shrine two weeks ago, but the occasion was canceled. Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has delivered a Qods Day speech for decades, was replaced by a more hard-line Ayatullah who gave remarks in addition to an introduction by Ahmadinejad. And regime representatives including Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei had warned the Green Movement opposition against using Qods Day as an opportunity...