Mohammed Javad Larivani, Secretary General for the High Council for Human Rights of Iran, said that nuclear weapons violate Islam, and he denounced the independent report that Iran has a nuclear weapons program as a United States-driven report, and maintained that Iran is more transparent than the United States and the “renegade state” of Israel.
“We are not pursuing the nuclear armament for two basic reasons,” Larivani said today on Morning Joe. “Number one, there is a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader [of Iran], that it is against Islam[ic views of] prudence to build and use mass destruction weapons.” He added that nuclear weapons are “unlawful” under the fatwa. “Secondly, it doesn’t aid our security. It is more of a liability than an asset for us. Our military muscle is strong enough to deter or repel any imminent threat,” Larivani said.
“Quite frankly its impossible to take the Iranian denial seriously; they’re preposterous,” responded Richard Haas, a former State Department adviser, now preisdent of the Council on Foreign Relations. “There is a pattern — not a single incident, a pattern — over years of an Iranian program to move in the direction of nuclear weapons.”
“The whole series of allegations is produced and initiated by the United States,” Larivani said. “There are no secret programs in our nuclear program and development. Iran’s transparency is far ahead of the United States, far ahead of the UK, far ahead of France, and incomparable to Israel, which is a renegade state.”
Haas called the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons “extraordinarily damning,” and he noted that “there is now serous evidence of the Iranian testing of the implosive device that would be the heart of a nuclear weapon.”
