So Long, Mahmoud

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the largely-figurehead Iranian president that roiled politics with his allegedly fraudulent reelection in 2009, will be making the last of his high-profile visits to New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly. Next year, term limits and Iranian elections will remove him from office (the real power in Iran—Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—will remain). Many Iranians both in country and out will wish Ahmadinejad a not-so-fond farewell. But his lame duck status doesn't excuse those ills Ahmadinejad visited upon his own people. The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI), one of the top such groups working on the deplorable human rights situation in Iran, released a video yesterday reminding New York—and the world—to hold Ahmadinejad accountable. In the short clip, five Iranian-American human rights activists point to falsehoods offered by Ahmadinejad over his eight years in office:

Complaints against Ahmadinejad for speaking during Yom Kippur at this year's General Assembly seem peripheral, at best, to the very real rights issues presented in the ICHRI video. Those journalists who manage to get to ask Ahmadinejad questions during his inevitable junkets this week ought to keep his record in mind.