Here’s a great encore from the folks that brought you “We Con The World“:

The cojones on these Iranian loudmouths is always good for some chuckles.

YNet is reporting that Iran’s ambassador to UN is demanding that the Security Council take action in response to Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh’s recent comments that Israel would attack Iran if sanctions weren’t in place by Christmas.

Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Khazaee, sent a letter of protest to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moonin which he wrote that “there is no explanation for Israel’s continuing threats against Tehran”.

No explanation… other than the fact that Iran’s President continually threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map without warning.

In what is probably the most bizarre and unbelievable (literally) news of the year, London’s Daily Telegraph is reporting that Iranian president and notorious anti-Semite and Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might actually be a Jew!

Apparently, some people picked up on his former family name listed on the identification papers that he flashed during the recent vote which happens to be a family name used exclusively by Jews—and observant ones, at that!

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad’s birthplace, and the name derives from “weaver of the Sabour”, the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior.

…A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that “jian” ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews.

“He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents had,” said the Iranian-born Jew living in London. “Sabourjian is well known Jewish name in Iran.”

…The Iranian leader has not denied his name was changed when his family moved to Tehran in the 1950s. But he has never revealed what it was change from or directly addressed the reason for the switch.

Relatives have previously said a mixture of religious reasons and economic pressures forced his blacksmith father Ahmad to change when Mr Ahmadinejad was aged four.

Speculation that his family converted to Islam and changed the name is rampant, and the typical psychoanalyses are making rounds, the most prominent one being the obvious observation that his foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Semitism is his defense mechanism for deflecting attention to his Jewish roots in his extremist world of Shia Islam, mullahs, and anti-Semites:

Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.

Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: “This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad’s background explains a lot about him.

“Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith.

“By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society.”

Here’s one last interesting tidbit the Telegraph mentioned:

Mehdi Khazali, an internet blogger, who called for an investigation of Mr Ahmadinejad’s roots was arrested this summer.

This new revelation might explain why Ahmadinejad’s police state arrested this blogger.

For some more colorful background and commentary on this story, see Politics Daily’s post.

UPDATE
Meir Javedanfar writes a credible rebuttal in the Guardian to the Telegraph’s report:

…Professor David Yeroshalmi, author of The Jews of Iran in the 19th century and an expert on Iranian Jewish communities, disputes the validity of this argument. “There is no such meaning for the word ‘sabour’ in any of the Persian Jewish dialects, nor does it mean Jewish prayer shawl in Persian. Also, the name Sabourjian is not a well-known Jewish name,” he stated in a recent interview. In fact, Iranian Jews use the Hebrew word “tzitzit” to describe the Jewish prayer shawl. Yeroshalmi, a scholar at Tel Aviv University’s Center for Iranian Studies, also went on to dispute the article’s findings that the “-jian” ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. “This ending is in no way sufficient to judge whether someone has a Jewish background. Many Muslim surnames have the same ending,” he stated.

Upon closer inspection, a completely different interpretation of “Sabourjian” emerges. According to Robert Tait, a Guardian correspondent who travelled to Ahmadinejad’s native village in 2005, the name “derives from thread painter – sabor in Farsi – a once common and humble occupation in the carpet industry in Semnan province, where Aradan is situated”. This is confirmed by Kasra Naji, who also wrote a biography of Ahmadinejad and met his family in his native village. Carpet weaving or colouring carpet threads are not professions associated with Jews in Iran.

According to both Naji and Tait, Ahmadinejad’s father Ahmad was in fact a religious Shia, who taught the Quran before and after Ahmadinejad’s birth and their move to Tehran. So religious was Ahmad Sabourjian that he bought a house near a Hosseinieh, a religious club that he frequented during the holy month of Moharram to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hossein.

Moreover, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mother is a Seyyede. This is a title given to women whose family are believed to be direct bloodline descendants of Prophet Muhammad. Male members are given the title of Seyyed, and include prominent figures such as Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. In Judaism, this is equivalent to the Cohens, who are direct descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses. One has to be born into a Seyyed family: the title is never given to Muslims by birth, let alone converts. This makes it impossible for Ahmadinejad’s mother to have been a Jew. In fact, she was so proud of her lineage that everyone in her native village of Aradan referred to her by her Islamic title, Seyyede.

The reason that Ahmadinejad’s father changed his surname has more to do with the class struggle in Iran. When it became mandatory to adopt surnames, many people from rural areas chose names that represented their professions or that of their ancestors. This made them easily identifiable as townfolk. In many cases they changed their surnames upon moving to Tehran, in order to avoid snobbery and discrimination from residents of the capital.

The Sabourjians were one of many such families. Their surname was related to carpet-making, an industry that conjures up images of sweatshops. They changed it to Ahmadinejad in order to help them fit in. The new name was also chosen because it means from the race of Ahmad, one of the names given to Muhammad.

According to Ahmadinejad’s relatives the new name emphasised the family’s piety and their dedication to their religion and its founder. This is something that the president and his relatives in Tehran and Aradan have maintained to the present day. Not because they are trying to deny their past, but because they are proud of it.

In what is obviously a rhetorical question, Netanyahu today slammed the United Nations General Assembly, asking them “have you no shame?” for giving Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad a forum to speak. View the clip here:

And here is the full speech, in four parts:

Kudos to the New York Helmsley Hotel for their moral stand in refusing to host Ahmadinejad or the Iranian Mission, as reported by the NY Post.

Several months ago, an Iranian student group had booked a banquet hall at the hotel, at which Ahmadinejad was scheduled to appear and speak. The group, United Against Nuclear Iran, informed the hotel (and threatened a boycott), which promptly canceled the reservation and issued a statement through their spokesman, which included the following:

Neither the Iranian Mission nor President Ahmadinejad is welcome at any Helmsley facility. The Helmsley organization is grateful to United Against Nuclear Iran for bringing this matter to its attention so that appropriate action could be taken.

Now, if only we could evict the United Nations next…

The New York Times yesterday published a piece in their Op-Ed section by Danielle Pletka and Ali Alfoneh, entitled, “Iran’s Hidden Revolution“.

The look at the uprising from a perspective that so far I haven’t seen many others use.  Their analysis is that while everyone saw the external aspect of the uprising, namely the people protesting the election and futilely trying to bring down the government, another more successful revolution was taking place behind the scenes as a result.

The successful revolution that hardly anyone is talking about is the rise of military dictatorship in place of what was a theocratic government. While the power had been with the mullahs prior to Ahmadinejad’s rise to the presidency (his predecessor, Rafsanjani, had been a cleric as well), Ahmadinejad, a former officer in the Revolutionary Guards, has been successful in slowly shifting the power of government.

According to the article, Ahmadinejad was able to

consolidate power and to promote his brothers in arms. Fourteen of the 21 cabinet ministers he has appointed are former members of the guards or its associated paramilitary, the Basij. Several, including Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, are veterans of notorious units thought to have supported terrorist operations in the 1980s.

This creeping militarization has not been restricted to the central government: provincial governors, press commissars, film directors, intelligence officers and business leaders are increasingly former members of the guard. The elite force controls much of the economy either directly — the Basij has rights to oil extraction — or through proxy companies like Khatam al Anbiya, which dominates construction throughout Iran.

As the power shifted from the clerics to Ahmadinejad and the military, the clerics would fall in line and essentially give their “approval” of his policies to save face—to survive—and avoid any showdown. According to the article, the  rapid ratification of the election results is another example of just that:

Many have been struck by the crudeness of the recent vote rigging, with reformist candidates losing even their hometowns. The unusually speedy certification of the election and Ayatollah Khamenei’s quick blessing — “a divine miracle” — only served to underscore an obvious sham.

With the uprising stifled and Ahmadinejad and the military on top, this has only served to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the clerics and to complete the power shift from the clerics to the military under Ahmadinejad.