Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre’s visit to Tehran has caused a debate on social media about the wisdom of engaging with Iran.

Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre’s (left) visit to Tehran has caused a debate on social media about the wisdom of engaging with Iran.
Photo Credit: Denis Coderre / Facebook

Montreal mayor blasted for visit to Tehran

An outspoken Montreal lawyer is taking the city’s Mayor Denis Coderre to task for a controversial visit to Iran.

In a biting Facebook post Anne-France Goldwater blasted Coderre for meeting Tehran’s Mayor Dr Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf to conclude an “agreement of cooperation,” French language daily La Presse reported Monday.

“Do we need an ‘understanding’ of any kind whatsoever with a terrorist regime?” Goldwater wrote in her Facebook post, which has received more than 3,000 shares so far. “Canada doesn’t even have diplomatic relations with Iran, a country on our list of states that support terrorism.”

‘Terrorist regime’?

Iran supports the Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah and the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, which has been “massacring the people of Aleppo,” Goldwater wrote. And Coderre’s visit came just barely after Canadian-Iranian feminist academic Homa Hoodfar was released from Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, she said.

“It’s one thing to be anti-dog (there I said it),” Goldwater wrote referring to Coderre’s support for the controversial bylaw banning pit bull dogs in Montreal. “It’s a completely different thing to be pro-terrorist, or worse still not to realize that you lend legitimacy to a terrorist regime by shaking the hand of Tehran’s mayor.”

Coderre’s little publicized visit to Tehran two weeks ago was also criticized by some members of the Canadian-Iranian community.

“The Iranian regime is a terrorist regime,” Shabnam Assadollahi, an Ottawa writer and human rights activist who was imprisoned in Iran as a teenager, told the National Post newspaper. “Why would the mayor of Montreal make quiet deals with a terrorist regime?”

A spokesman for the mayor told La Presse that Coderre visited Tehran not in his capacity as the mayor of Montreal but as president of Metropolis, an association of global cities. Tehran has been a member of Metropolis for over 20 years.

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper cut Canada’s diplomatic ties with Iran and expelled all Iranian diplomats from Ottawa in 2012 over Tehran’s nuclear program, its stance on Israel and support for groups like Hezbollah. However, the government of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made restoration of diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic one of its foreign policy priorities in the Middle East.

Categories: International, Politics
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