Close allies of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being “magicians” and invoking djinns (spirits).

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as “a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds”.

The arrests come amid a growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei which has prompted several MPs to call for the president to be impeached.

Read More: Guardian

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Photo: Jose Cruz (CC)

The BBC reports:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the release by the Wikileaks website of thousands of extracts from US diplomatic messages was simply psychological warfare against Iran.

He said the release would not affect Iran’s relations with other countries. The US said the release was “reckless” and put the lives of diplomats at risk.

The Obama administration has been scrambling to make sure similar leaks do not happen again. Government agencies have been ordered to tighten their procedures for handling classified information, ensuring that employees only have access to such documents as they need to do their jobs.

The Pentagon said it was making its computer systems more secure to prevent future leaks. And Attorney General Eric Holder said there was an “active and ongoing criminal investigation” into the release of the documents and anyone found responsible would be prosecuted.

… Among the revelations is a report that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had urged the US to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Mr Ahmadinejad shrugged off the leaks at a televised news conference on Monday, saying no-one should waste time reviewing the information.

“We don’t think this information was leaked,” he said. “We think it was organised to be released on a regular basis and they are pursuing political goals.”

Read more here.

Tehran, Iran: The building was smaller than I remembered. The fading images in my mind were grainy: angry crowds, students marching, flags burning, chants of “Death to America,” and Americans diplomats in blindfolds, It became a soap opera: Ted Koppel started his rise in TV News with ABC’s nightly “America Held Hostage” series, the forerunner to “Nightline.”

Back then, I was in radio news, just transitioning into TV. I remember publicly debating about what we should do with a DJ friend who had turned from a Vietnam War peacenik into a bomb Iran hawk.

In Iran, he takeover of the US Embassy—what students called its “conquering”– was justified as a blow against imperialism, the seizure of a “spy nest.”  It was, at the time, the most globally covered aspect of the Iranian Revolution, an audacious confrontation between people power and a foreign power.

The events that followed may have been considered revolutionary in Iran, but for progressive Americans they became the nail in President Jimmy Carter’s political coffin. He angered Iranians first when he toasted the Shah calling him a beloved figure. He then tried and failed to negotiate through third parties and later sent in a military ‘rescue” operation that crashed and burned leading to his own downfall.

The Iranians held him responsible for sheltering the ailing Shah; he in turn was being pressured by the likes of David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger to shelter the fleeing Monarch.

These events also helped bring on the turn to the right with the elevation of the actor we called “Ronnie Raygun.”  The hostages were released in a tacit agreement after 444 days in the very hour of his inauguration.

We are still living with the consequences, when wages declined, unions were broken, and military spending escalated. Reagan invaded Grenada and Beirut where the killings of hundreds of US soldiers sparked what we now label a War on Terror and which Iranians see as a “Clash of Civilizations.”

The despotic Shah, our faithful servant for so many years, was driven from power by a popular revolt with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini soon becoming the man we loved to hate.

Now, thirty plus years later, I am standing in front of what was once our Embassy surrounded today by well-kept lawns as it was then.

It is as if the past is never past, with so many ghosts still around.

The tragedy is that polarization between our two countries remains symbolized by what is now a very politicized museum with photos of the activists who crawled through a basement window and tunnel to take it over. They were demanding the return of the Shah to stand trial. They were protesting US interference in their internal affairs.

I didn’t remember that eight hostages — women and black employees — were released by Khomeini as a gesture. He urged the black men to return home and carry on the work of our most famous Muslim martyr, Malcolm X.

Malcolm was one of the Americans they admired.

There are rooms of creative if didactic art works, graffiti, and murals denouncing US policy, including our news media, which they see as a weapons system that has been deployed against them. (One slogan on the wall:  “Information R.I.P.”) Perhaps this is why my film WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception was shown here and is popular.)

The angry art is not the building’s most popular attraction. On the second floor, is the ex-Embassy’s own West Wing, behind a metal safe like door is where the spying was done.

The offices are pretty much as they found it—a soundproof glass encased safe room within a room, cryptographic equipment, communications gear that allowed them to tap Tehran’s telephones and a forgery bench where they invented passports and spread disinformation. (I once saw a similar room in a former Stasi secret police station in East Germany that kept tabs on everyone.)

The students found a secret document with a floor plan of the Ayatollah’s residence and other artifacts of CIA espionage including guns and coding machines.

Today, all of this is done digitally and with much more sophistication. Just last week, the US launched a massive new spy satellite to upgrade our global surveillance capabilities.

You don’t need Embassies anymore to do this dirty work. We have since set up a well-funded Office of Global Reconnaissance but it doesn’t seem be to making us any more secure.

These days, a small group like Wikileaks has found ways to release hundreds of thousands of documents that officialdom wants to hide..

(After the Embassy seizure, The US government downplayed spying by its diplomats calling it “routine.” The latest Wikileaks expose reveals that diplomats are spying more than ever.

As the students muscled their way into the Embassy back then, US officials were busy destroying documents, burning them in the basement, throwing them into chemical vats that turned paper into powder, and feeding them into huge industrial-strength shredders. I saw the machines.

They managed to keep the activists at bay for three hours while destroying sensitive and potentially embarrassing data before surrendering.

What they didn’t count on was that scores of students would spend weeks patiently and systematically piecing the shreds together, literally ironing and weaving the fragments into readable prose. They reconstructed the destroyed documents and published them in scores of books that topped the best-seller list in Iran, if there was one.

The late Bill Worthy, a legendary African American journalist, brought some of the books back to Boston in 1980 only to have them confiscated at the airport where he was threatened with prosecution.

Most Americans know little of Iran’s 2500 year history, its proud culture or the role played by the CIA in toppling the democratically elected the Mosaddegh government in 1953 that wanted to nationalize the country’s oil instead of being forced to allow the West to exploit it.  (The Ayatollah Khomeini referenced this event when he told the US: “You have no right to complain, because you took our whole country hostage in 1953.”) There is no evidence that the Ayatollah organized the Embassy takeover.

They don’t know that the US orchestrated Iraq’s invasion of Iran causing a half million deaths, many from chemical weapons. I met some of the still sick victims of those chemicals including a disfigured Member of Parliament who was a war correspondent. Saddam’s chemical attacks on Iran’s military got almost no press attention compared to his gassing of Kurds.

Our ignorance still feeds dangerous calls for war like those made recently by the pinheaded Lindsey Graham, a Republican Senator from the former Confederate State of South Carolina. He’s called for the sinking of Iranian Navy. He seems to have forgotten his own States role in launching the American civil war after a Naval battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack in Charleston harbor.

The Confederates started it, but the Union finished it, finishing them finally at a great cost. Today, the South and its attitudes have risen again.

Graham also seems unaware that if we attack them, Iran will likely block the Strait of Hormuz freezing oil shipments worldwide. Not a good thing.

Today, some US personalities want a theocratic state here like the one in Iran. Our own fundamentalists, many end of timers, politicized into Christian right movements, the antecedents of today’s Tea Party, fired up by vicious Islamaphobia.

Theocratic evangelists posing as TV commentators like Glenn Beck urge us to let God Rule, the message of some of Iran’s Mullahs.   George Bush denounced Iran as part of the  “Axis of Evil” while they do the same towards us. There is a poster in the former Embassy building denouncing U.S. evils.

I know my Iranian hosts expected me to be excited by visiting the Embassy as a symbol of an embarrassing set back to US plans.

I wasn’t.

I reminded them that when the Taliban took Iranian diplomats hostage, and threatened to kill them, Iran moved troops to the border, and was about to invade Afghanistan before we did.

The US government learned from the Embassy takeover not in terms of changing imperial policies but by investing in more security. It now builds vast and far more fortified “diplomatic” enclaves like Iraq’s Green Zone. Secrecy has become our national security state’s religion.

These symbols of our past conflicts have a way of blocking new initiatives and possible reconciliation. I am sure that the former Embassy building is on some target list for potential missile attacks on Tehran. Americans relish “payback” as much as Iranians.

Avoiding an escalation of tension will not be easy as Jaswant Singh, a former Indian finance minister, foreign minister, and defense minister explains: “In both countries, deep and mutually paralyzing suspicion has poisoned relations for three decades. Negotiations in such an atmosphere are almost fated to failure.”

Can anything be done?

On the plane back, I watched the movie SALT where Angelina Jolie stops a fictionalized nuclear attack on Tehran at the last second in a gun battle staged in the bunker below the White House.

Hollywood pictures the story as a plot by Russian renegades who want to use nukes to outrage the whole Muslim world and trigger a more apocalyptic jihad against the US.

At the same time, we are doing all we can to block Iranian nuclear ambitions, even as I told an audience in Iran about my own objections to nuclear power plans in favor of green energies—not a popular position.

There are legitimate non-fiction fears of a new war against Iran, another no-win conflict that will cause more death and sap more treasure.

The neo-cons are busy at work lobbying for just such a war, eager to replicate their “heroic victory” over Iraq. They are playing the fear card with lots of covert lobbying from Israel that claims Iran represents an “existential” threat.

To me, the arrogant right-wing politicians and propagandists in Israel are a far more dangerous threat to any prospects for peace. Successive American Administrations, like the current one, shovels sheckels at them, appeasing their contempt and occupation of Palestinians.

The world mocks dogmatic believers in the Koran while fanatical Torah worshippers have a free pass to practice hatred.

Talk about hypocrisy.

War is a profitable business, and as our economy continues its decline, we can anticipate more calls to “bomb, bomb Iran” so we can fight and spend our way to “recovery.”

Talk about insanity.

Already our sanctions are hurting the Iranian people and their businesses without seriously impacting their government, whatever the fiery pubic claims of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

We need to engage, but even the talks President Obama promised have yet to happen. Washington seems as frozen as Tehran in making a real overture.

What if Iran turned the former U.S. Embassy into an international peace and religious center for diplomatic discourse and mediation? That might be a gesture Washington could respond to. Why not recycle a relic of the past to enable a serious initiative for resolving conflict? The growing confrontation gives both countries an enemy to mobilize against while diverting attention from real problems.

Someone has to break the ice before we end up causing each other more pain!

My walk down a lane of bad memories convinced me that we need to work for a better future, not stay mired in the images and rhetorical combats of the past.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Photo: Jose Cruz (CC)

From the Washington Post:

The U.S. delegation walked out of the U.N. speech of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday after he said some in the world have speculated that Americans were behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks, staged in an attempt to assure Israel’s survival.

He did not explain the logic of that statement that was made as he attacked the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ahmadinejad has called for the destruction of Israel and is deeply at odds with the United States and European allies over its nuclear program and suspicions that it is designed to produce an atomic bomb. Iran says it is only working on technology for electricity generation.

The U.S. delegation left the hall after Ahmadinejad said there were three theories about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks:

• That “powerful and complex terrorist group” penetrated U.S. intelligence and defenses.
• “That some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view.”
• The Americans stood and walked out without listening to the third theory, that the attack was the work of “a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”

Mark Kornblau, spokesman of the U.S. Mission to the world body, issued a statement within moments of Ahmadinejad’s attack.

“Rather than representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people,” he said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable.”

Ahmadinejad, who has in the past cast doubt over the U.S. version of the Sept. 11 attacks, called for establishment of an independent fact-finding U.N. body to probe the attacks and stop it from turning into another sacred issue where “expressing opinion about it won’t be banned”.

Read more here.

From Al Jazeera:

PJ Crowley, the US assistant secretary of state, told Al Jazeera the statement was “totally outrageous”.

“[Those killed in the attacks] were people of all faiths, all nationalities. They were killed by 19 people, a plot perpetrated by al-Qaeda,” he said.

“We know who did it and they have admitted who did it. This idea that nine years later there is still some debate about who did it and why is outrageous.”

About 3,000 people died when hijackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and a fourth aircraft plummeted into a Pennsylvania field in 2001.

‘9/11 denier’

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, said: “[Ahmadinejad's] attack on the traditional version of the 9/11 story was similar to his attack on the traditional version of the holocaust.

“So you can now say President Ahmadinejad is both a 9/11 denier and a holocaust denier.

Read more here.

And from Foreign Policy Passport:

Just from the press highlights, readers might get the impression that Ahmadinejad’s U.N. speeches are anti-American barn-burners, similar to classics by Hugo Chavez or Daniel Ortega. But the truth is they’re much stranger than that. Ahmadinejad tends to set up his political arguments with extensive discourses on theology and moral philosophy. The corrosive influence of materialism on human society is a theme that he seems to return to each year. Here’s this a sample from this year:

Nimrod countered Hazrat Abraham, Pharaoh countered Hazrat Moses and the greedy countered Hazrat Jesus Christ and Hazrat Mohammad (Peace be upon them all). In the recent centuries, the human ethics and values have been rejected as a cause for backwardness. They were even portrayed as opposin wisdom and science because of the earlier infliction on man by the proclaimers of religion in the dark ages of the West.

Man’s disconnection from Heaven detached him from his true self. Man with his potentials for understanding the secrets of the universe, his instinct for seeking truth, his aspirations for justice and perfection, his quest for beauty and purity and his capacity to represent God on earth was reduced to a creaturelimited to the materialistic world with a mission to maximize individualitic pleasures. Human instinct, then, replaced true human nature.

Human beings and nations were considered rivals and the happiness of an individual or a nation was defined collision with, and elimination or suppression of others. Constructive evolutionary cooperation was replaced with a destructive struggle for survival.

The lust for capital and domination replaced monotheism, which is the gate to love and unity. This widepread clash of the egoist with the divine values gave way to slavery and colonialism.

There really isn’t any other world leader who speaks this way on the international stage. Most Western analysts tend to gloss over the religious/philosophical portions, which seems like an oversight given the emphasis he puts on them.

Read more here.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Photo: Jose Cruz (CC)

It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but on 9/11 I think he’s right — we haven’t been told the full story of what happened on September 11, 2001. From AFP via Breitbart.com:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned the accepted narrative of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, saying it was still not clear who was behind them.
“Something happened in New York and still nobody knows who the main perpetrators of that act were,” Ahmadinejad told diplomats and newspaper editors late on Sunday while on a brief visit to Qatar.

“No independent people were allowed to try and identify the perpetrators,” he charged.

“They say terrorists were hidden in Afganistan and NATO mobilised all its resources and attacked Afghanistan,” he said.

“They say that in the Twin Towers, 2,000 people were killed. In Afganistan, so far more 110,000 have been killed.”

Ahmadinejad has on several occasions questioned the accepted version of the 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda militants, which killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States.

In March, he referred to the attacks as “a big lie,” Iranian state media reported…

[continues at <AFP via Breitbart.com]

Google Trends confirms the U.S. is openly considering a raid on Iranian’s (non-existent) nuclear weapons facilities.

My articles on this subject have resonated throughout the anti-war community:

• August 9  The Maxine Waters Investigation: What is Iran Doing in this Picture?
• August 27 Waxman, Waters and Iran, Connect the Dots

We could be living in the most dangerous times the world has seen since the 1962 Cuba Missile crisis.

Here are the facts:

• A letter written before 1925 (AKA The Pike Letter). Albert Pike, author of “Morals and Dogma” in 1871 proposed the following plan in a letter to Giuseppe Mazzini:

“The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the ‘agentur’ of the ‘Illuminati’ between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion.

We shall unleash the Nihilists and the Atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute Atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.” [1]

• Barack Hussein Obama is the 44^th President with a biracial background (his estranged father was a Muslim).
• A Mosque has been proposed, in of all places, the site of the 9/11 attacks on America by Islamic terrorists.
• Obama, after purposely avoiding the controversy is now on record backing the construction of a Mosque near the “hallowed ground” of the World Trade Center. His statements are so contradictory and confusing that some have wondered if there is some other agenda at work. Mosque controversy swirls around Obama By: James Hohmann, Maggie Haberman and Mike Allen
• The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is behind the illogical location for a Mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero. CAIR is an organization that in 2007 was named an unindicted co-conspirator in connection with a plot to support the terrorists of Hamas. Mosque at Ground Zero, who is behind it Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America P. David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry

• Ahmadinajad, the leader of a country with a non-existent nuclear weapons capability and an air force that belongs in a museum recently threatened Israel, a country with a nuclear arsenal third only to the U.S and the Soviet Union. [2]

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, a growing unrest and instability between the Arabic World and the Modern State of Israel is tracking with the prediction in the Albert Pike Letter to Giuseppe Mazzini.

Normally, I don’t recommend those “take action”- campaigns: the ones that tell us, “It’s   not too late, click-here” to importune our “elected”- representatives with emails and faxes.

However, the perils of a nuclear confrontation with Iran are in line with Pike’s call for a Third World War; therefore, we need to harness the energy of the grassroots activists in the U.S. and around the world into The Power of Community, to prevent a war that could end all life on earth. We prevented a war in 2006 and 2008 and we can do it again in 2010.

Contact Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and demand she honor the commitment made by President Obama during the 2007 Democratic debate when he said that he would:

“As president, be willing to meet without preconditions with Iran’s leaders, and that the notion of not talking to one’s foes was ridiculous.” [3]

E-mail President of the United States, (202) 456-1414 Phone, (202) 456-2461 Fax

E-mail The Secretary of State,  (202) 647-6575 press 1 to leave a comment

“In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.” Dexter Gordon

Katherine Smith, PhD mandrell2010@gmail.com

Footnotes:

[1] Albert Pike’s Letter To Guisseppe Mazzini

A Diabolical Plan, or A Wild Prophecy? Cardinal Caro Y Rodriguez published The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled in 1925. Rodriguez names several references for a particular letter written by Albert Pike in 1871 suggesting a plan of universal destruction, one of which is Le Palladisme : Culte de Satan-Lucifer dans les Triangles Maconniques by Domenico Margiotta which I quote on the front page of this website, and which I believe indicates that Pike did indeed write something of that nature. Rodriguez alleges that on 15th August 1871 Albert Pike proposed the following plan in a letter to Giuseppe Mazzini. The quoted text below lays out a plan for three world wars ending with Luciferian World Government. WW1 occurred as proposed by Pike. WW2 occurred as proposed by Pike. WW3 is looking like it will occur as proposed by Pike.

[2] Who’s Telling the Truth About Iran’s Nuclear Program? by Muhammad Sahimi

Since February 2003, Iran’s nuclear program has undergone what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) itself admits to be the most intrusive inspection in its entire history. After thousands of hours of inspections by some of the most experienced IAEA experts, the Agency has verified time and again that (1) there is no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran, and (2) all the declared nuclear materials have been accounted for; there has been no diversion of such materials to non-peaceful purposes. Iran has a clean bill of health, as far as its nuclear program is concerned.

July 7, 2008 04:24 AM H. Con. Res. 362 – through efforts, Iran seeks to establish regional hegemony, threatens longstanding friends of the United States in the Middle East, and endangers American national security interests.

Regional hegemony is not achieved with Iranian army that has been designed solely to defend Iran, and an air force that belongs in museums.

To summarize: it is clear that practically every paragraph in the Senate and House Resolutions have factual errors, lies, exaggerations, and half-truths. Iran can be criticized on many grounds, particularly in the area of respect for human rights. But, Iran is not a threat to the United States or to Israel. It is not anywhere close to having the capability for manufacturing nuclear weapons, even if it wanted to.

Therefore, the American public must recognize these Resolutions for what they really are: War Resolutions proposed and pushed by neoconservatives in both the Democrat and Republican parties, various pro-Israel lobbies, and their allies.

It is crucial that the American public act now, today, by calling their congressional representatives before these “declarations of war” against Iran are passed. If we do launch an unprovoked attack on Iran the results will most probably be horrific to all sides, if not to the entire world.

[3] Mr. Obama first made waves with his views on Iran policy in 2007, when he said during a Democratic debate that he would, as president, be willing to meet without preconditions with Iran’s leaders, and that the notion of not talking to one’s foes was “ridiculous.”

Since becoming president, Mr. Obama has pursued diplomacy, but his stance has become steadily more confrontational. Iran’s Nuclear Program, The New York Times

The 10-part documentary [which Stone is planning] will address Stalin and Hitler “in context”, he says. “Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”

He also seeks to put his atrocities in proportion: “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30m.”

Why such a focus on the Holocaust then? “The Jewish domination of the media,” he says. “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years.”

Just to ensure wide coverage, Stone made sure to push a couple of other hot button issues, as reported by MSNBC:

If that weren’t enough, Stone also defended Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he met recently.

“Iran isn’t necessarily the good guy,” he said in the Times interview. “But we don’t know the full story.” Stone said U.S. policy toward Iran was “horrible.” (In 2007, Ahmadinejad rejected a proposal by the Oscar-winning director to make a film about him, calling Stone part of the “Great Satan” — America.)

Stone also praised Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez — subject of his “South of the Border” documentary — as “a brave, blunt, earthy [man].”

Two days before his official trip to Afghanistan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a “big lie” intended to pave the way for the invasion of a war-torn nation, according to Iranian state media.

Ahmadinejad, known for his harsh rhetoric toward the West and Israel, said the attack on U.S. soil was a “scenario and a sophisticated intelligence measure,” Iran’s state-run Press TV reported Saturday.

The assault was a “big lie intended to serve as a pretext for fighting terrorism and setting the grounds for sending troops to Afghanistan,” Press TV reported Ahmadinejad as saying.

It’s not the first time Ahmadinejad has denied a historical tragedy. In the past, he has denied the existence of the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of some 6 million Jews during World War II, and suggested Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

“Today,” he said Saturday, “with blessings from the Almighty, the capitalist system, founded by the Zionists, has also reached an end,”…

[continues at CNN]

Iran has sentenced five people to death and 81 others to prison terms of up to 15 years in a mass trial of opposition figures accused of fomenting the unrest that followed June’s disputed presidential election, state television says.

Offenses includ[ed] security violations, agitating against the Islamic Republic, violating law and order, damaging public and private property, and assaulting civilians and security forces.

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.

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.”