It was supposed to be a blessed time to come together and diss the Great Satan…
But instead… The Islamist-Marxist Conference erupted in chaos after Aleida Guevara, Che Guevara’s daughter, shocked the audience with her blasphemous remarks.
It all started when Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the coordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom, insisted that communism was consigned to the trash heap of history.
And, it only went downhill from there.
Camilo Guevara, 45, son of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, takes a picture of his sister Aleida, 47, during a press conference at Amir Kabir University in Tehran. Aleida and Camilo are visiting Iran and are due to meet with Culture Minister Mohammad Hossein Safar Harandi, as well as with a deputy minister of foreign affairs and several lawmakers, the student ISNA news agency reported today.(AFP/Atta Kenare)
Sadly, Aleida and her brother Camilo needed to be whisked away after the conference erupted.
Amir Taheri reports in the New York Post:
The conference title was “Che Like Chamran,” a play on words designed to emphasize “the common goals” of Marxism and Islamism. It honored Mostafa Chamran on the 26th anniversary of his death, which coincided with the 40th anniversary of the death of the Cuban-Argentine guerrilla icon Che Guevara.
Chamran was a Khomeinist militant of Iranian origin who became a U.S. citizen in the ’60s before traveling to Lebanon, where he founded the Amal guerrilla group. He entered Iran in 1979 and helped the mullahs seize power. Appointed defense minister by Khomeini in ’81, he died in a car crash a few months later.
The conference had three guests of honor: Mahdi Chamran, a brother of Mostafa and an Ahmadinejad associate, and Che’s daughter Aleida and son Camilo.
Aleida, a pediatrician who lives in Havana, wore the mandatory Khomeinist hijab, while her brother had grown designer stubble to please the hosts. Also attending were an array of aging European and Latin American “Guevaristas” and Lebanese Hezbollah cadres…
Things went pear-shape thanks to one keynote speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, whose title is “coordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom.” Praising the late “Che” as “a true revolutionary who made the American Great Satan tremble,” he “revealed” that Guevara had been “a truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union.”
“Today, communism has been consigned to the garbage can of history as foreseen by Imam Khomeini,” Qassemi said. “Thus progressists everywhere must accept the leadership of our religious, pro-justice movement.”
Demanding the right to respond, Aleida Guevara told the conference that Qassemi’s claim might be based on a bad translation: “My father never mentioned God,” she said as the hall sighed in chagrined disbelief. “He never met God.”
The remarks caused a commotion amid which Aleida and her brother were whisked away, led into a car and driven to their hotel under escort…
Hugo Chavez in Tehran on an earlier trip in 2004 sits next to then Mayor of Tehran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Chairman of Tehran City Council Mehdi Chamran at the unveiling of a statue dedicated to Venezuela’s nineteenth century leader Simon Bolivar.
