Iran to sway narrative at NAM summit

Iran during a regional summit aims to make the case that U.S. policy in the region is out of step with the international community, a scholar said. The United Nations announced this week that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would travel to Tehran next week to attend a meeting for the Non-Aligned Movement. Mohammad Reza Majidi, Iran's envoy to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said trends in the international arena like the 2012 Summer Olympics were meant to draw attention from Western colonial ambitions. "The global oppression system spends all-out efforts aimed at drawing the world public opinion towards other issues, to ensure achieving its own hegemonic objectives," he was quoted by the official Islamic Republic News Agency as saying. Farideh Farhi, an Iranian export at the University of Hawaii, told The New York Times that Tehran would try to offer a competing narrative during next week's NAM summit. "A case is being made that it is not the 'global community' that has problems with the Islamic republic, as repeatedly asserted by U.S. officials, but merely a U.S.-led-and-pressured coalition of countries," she said. NAM was founded in 1961 in Belgrade and counts key U.S. allies among its 120 member states.