iPouya

There are rumors circulating on facebook and over the internet in general about Khamenei having died. Has anyone read anything credible about this matter? Does anyone have anything substantive for me to post? If this is true, it’s BIG.

The Guardian – Excerpt: 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.

Posted on Professor Vali Nasr’s Facebook profile – The Telegraph: “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. Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.”

I’ve been meaning to comment on the UN speeches but it took me a while to get here to do that, I’ve just been too busy with school. But things, I feel, are really falling into place and I’ve developed a routine so expect more frequent blog updates.

Anyway, in case you missed Qadhafi’s outrageous UN speech, click here. Since his tirade was extra long, it was broken up into different parts, all of which can be found on the sidebar. The UN conference was actually kind of entertaining, especially since clowns like Qadhafi turned the event into a circus.  He actually managed to outdo Ahmadinejad’s speech. Here is his rant.

I recently read a very interesting take on his speech and wanted to share it with you guys. The title of the piece is “President Ahmadinejad’s Diplomatic Victories in New York.” Here is the article:
“There is a cer­tain buzz in Iran­ian papers about Ahmadinejad’s trip to NYC last week. Echo­ing Israeli news­pa­pers crit­i­ciz­ing of Prime Min­is­ter Netanyahu’s remarks at the UN, the Iran­ian media is cel­e­brat­ing the unseat­ing of the state of Israel’s pri­mary jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for itself. Netanyahu’s rant about the Holo­caust (notice how ridicu­lous and disin­gen­u­ous he looks wav­ing papers prov­ing the Nazis’ inten­tion of anni­hi­lat­ing the Jews) was the most glar­ing indi­ca­tion that, 60 years after the end of the hor­rors of Nazism, the Prime Min­is­ter of Israel is now forced to stand in front of the world body and actu­ally argue that the Holo­caust DID hap­pen. For a nation whose pri­mary jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for exis­tence is to avoid another holo­caust, hav­ing to prove that the hor­ror hap­pened in the first place is noth­ing but a sign of deep dis­com­fort, a sign that Israeli polity feels a need to jus­tify itself, a sign that there might be sea changes boil­ing under the offi­cial pro­pa­ganda, self-victimization and chest beat­ing of the most mil­i­ta­rized soci­ety on earth. Com­ing out of the inter­na­tional out­rage over Israel’s mas­sacres in Gaza and recent UN reports call­ing Israeli actions in Gaza as war crimes and plac­ing an IDF gen­eral on a list of war crim­i­nals, Israel has many rea­sons to feel inse­cure … but not nec­es­sar­ily because Iran is going to start a war with it, rather, because it seems like Israeli politi­cians are not get­ting away with mur­der as eas­ily as they used to. But this time, Netanyahu’s rather typ­i­cal maneu­ver to divert atten­tion from inter­na­tional crit­i­cism by self-victimizing seems to have back­fired. By using Ahmadine­jad as that foil, Netanyahu ended up giv­ing Iran’s Pres­i­dent the plea­sure of seem­ing that he has a hand in Israel’s weak ide­ol­gi­cal standing.

Israeli papers are point­ing out as an embar­rass­ment, and in Iran, the offi­cial media is not los­ing the oppor­tu­nity to make this a vic­tory of their own.”