Indeed, one can plausibly argue that a quite different message has been sent by this Libyan uprising and that this message warns other ghastly regimes to crack down harder and faster to ensure that dissent is suppressed before it has time to build. In other words: Gaddafi’s fate is certainly exemplary but it may actually work against reform. Perhaps this is because it is hard to have just a little reform; once that door is opened there’s little chance of closing it. So better, from the dictator’s perspective, not to open it at all.

Nevertheless, that’s not something the Libyan rebels or their western supporters need concern themselves with. Since I was sceptical about the wisdom and worth of NATO’s Libyan mission one should admit that it has gone rather better than I thought it might. Score one for David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy. Even so, the battle is not won yet since Libya will, one suspects, need considerable assistance for years to come if this is to be something other than a temporary triumph.

Nor, actually, does this conflict mean Blair’s government was wrong to try and bring Libya in from the cold. 2011 is not 2001 and the UK (and US’s) interest now is not necessarily the same as it was then. This is an elementary point that many people like to ignore. Nevertheless, there it is. Supporting – or tolerating – bastards until such time as that support becomes impossible or counter-productive is not an especially noble practice but you can’t have everything. Of course, it helps to know when to jump ship too.

By: Alex Massie

spectator

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vitriolic attacks on the Jewish world hide an astonishing secret, evidence uncovered by The Daily Telegraph shows.

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.

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.”

Ahmadinejad showing papers during election. It shows that his family's previous name was Jewish

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.”

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London said it would not be drawn on Mr Ahmadinejad’s background. “It’s not something we’d talk about,” said Ron Gidor, a spokesman.

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 changed 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.

The Iranian president grew up to be a qualified engineer with a doctorate in traffic management. He served in the Revolutionary Guards militia before going on to make his name in hardline politics in the capital.

During this year’s presidential debate on television he was goaded to admit that his name had changed but he ignored the jibe.

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

Mr Ahmadinejad has regularly levelled bitter criticism at Israel, questioned its right to exist and denied the Holocaust. British diplomats walked out of a UN meeting last month after the Iranian president denounced Israel’s ‘genocide, barbarism and racism.’

Benjamin Netanyahu made an impassioned denunciation of the Iranian leader at the same UN summit. “Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium,” he said. “A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies the murder of six million Jews while promising to wipe out the State of Israel, the State of the Jews. What a disgrace. What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations.”

Mr Ahmadinejad has been consistently outspoken about the Nazi attempt to wipe out the Jewish race. “They have created a myth today that they call the massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and the prophets,” he declared at a conference on the holocaust staged in Tehran in 2006.
Telegraph

“Security forces attacked the crowd with electric batons … in the Vali-e Asr street to disperse the demonstrators,” Sahamnews said.

Witnesses said thousands of security personnel were deployed in Tehran to stop any revival of anti-government protests that followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial re-election in 2009.

Opposition websites had called for a “silent rally” to mark the vote, which reformists say was rigged to secure the hardline president’s win. Authorities say the election was the most legitimate since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

Sahamnews also said supporters of the opposition gathered in other parts of the city.

“Shopkeepers were ordered to close down their shops … hundreds of people have gathered in other areas of Tehran,” the website said.

Reuters

“The remarks of Britain’s foreign secretary [William Hague] are completely unfounded and based on a series of lies,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry told British Charge d’Affaires Jane Marriott, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency reported.

Hague told Britain’s Parliament this week Tehran was helping suppress anti-regime protests. He also said London had “credible information” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime had provided paramilitary training to Syrian security forces.

“Britain’s government is not qualified to make such comments about other countries because of [its] interfering measures and destructive role in the region’s developments,” the news agency quoted the ministry as saying.

Marriott was also informed of Tehran’s strong criticism over what the ministry described as London’s interference in Iran’s internal affairs as well as its “double standard” on recent Arab developments.

The British diplomat said she would convey Iran’s “strong protest” to London, the agency said.

London had no independent confirmation of the meeting.

Hundreds more Syrians fled into Turkey from the northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shoughour Thursday, Turkish officials said as residents anticipated a severe crackdown by the Assad regime in retaliation for the purported killing of 120 police and security officers early Monday by “armed gangs” of civilians.

Turkish authorities set up a second refugee camp and promised to keep the border with Syria open, The New York Times reported.

Ankara called on President Bashar Assad to allow peaceful demonstrations and to carry out reforms.

U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights Navi Pillay called on Syria Thursday from Geneva to stop the “assault on its own people.”

UPI

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, left, greets former Judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, right, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sits at center, during a religious ceremony, in Tehran, Iran.

By Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim
Reporting from Beirut and Tehran- Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wanted to send his onetime protege Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an unmistakable message: You’re replaceable.

The Iranian president had been skipping Cabinet meetings, apparently over Khamenei’s decision to overrule his firing of the country’s intelligence chief. So Khamenei asked a conservative lawmaker to begin assembling a caretaker Cabinet, just in case the president resigned or had to be removed, said an Iranian official close to the politician.

Ahmadinejad eventually returned to work. But he also had a message for Khamenei: I can still make a big mess.

He recently defied the nation’s constitutional watchdog, and Khamenei, by launching a drastic restructuring of the country’s government and naming himself caretaker minister of the country’s vast oil and gas resources, saying, “The president has the authority to replace ministers and be the caretaker himself.” But on Friday he was overruled again, by the country’s powerful Guardian Council.

The eyebrow-raising dispute between Ahmadinejad’s camp and the conservative clerical and political class is rippling across the world — and igniting concern inside Iran that it weakens the country’s ability to project power internationally at a moment of historic instability across the region.

Ahmadinejad and the conservative factions, which have long been suspicious of the president’s populist politics and anticlerical religious attitudes, are skirmishing feverishly over the country’s future, positioning themselves for survival once the frail, 71-year-old Khamenei dies.

Ahmadinejad has embarked on nothing short of a program to reinvent the Islamic Republic, adding touches of fiery nationalism and a version of evangelical Islam to the country’s identity. But his populist giveaways and talk of impending apocalypse threaten not only economic interests and the traditional power of the clergy but Khamenei himself.

The supreme leader, his allies and other factions want to keep Ahmadinejad in check as he seeks to expand his powers and build a political future for himself beyond the constitutionally mandated end of his second term in 2013.

They’ve tried a number of ways to clip his wings, including charging members of his entourage with sorcery and accusing the president himself of being bewitched by his controversial chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, whom they describe as leading a “pervert current” within the leadership.

This season of open political warfare within Iran’s political establishment isn’t likely to destabilize a regime born with deep factional cracks 32 years ago. But even officials in Tehran have warned in repeated public statements that the infighting may deepen rifts that could be exploited by rivals abroad.

“It’s an indication that the regime is in a lot of trouble,” said Alireza Nader, an Iran expert at Rand Corp. “It can’t handle the internal and external pressure. There are people in the country who can’t agree what to do about the future of the country, so they’re at each other’s throats.”

The crisis highlights the undemocratic warts of Iran’s political system just as a pro-democracy wave has swept across the Middle East. It has also embroiled figures within the highest levels of the country’s national security establishment, an unwelcome domestic political distraction for Iranians seeking to fend off pressure over the country’s nuclear program and extend its influence across the region.

Ahmadinejad falls into the mold of ambitious populist politicians as varied as Andrew Jackson and Hugo Chavez, trying to use his presidential pulpit to launch vast social changes and make his mark. But he’s stifled by entrenched political, military and economic interests in the clergy, political establishment, business world and armed forces — all rallying around Khamenei — who want to limit his future, which for now looks grim.

Ahmadinejad is not going down quietly. Much to their chagrin, Khamenei and allies who brought Ahmadinejad to power now find themselves the target of the same ruthless and confrontational tactics he has used against the country’s reformists and its international enemies.

“This is his character,” said professor Mahjoob Zweiri, an Iran expert at Qatar University in Doha. “He was not able to change that attitude when it came to conservatives. This is something in his blood. This is something in his nature.”

Iran’s powerful conservative establishment hailed Ahmadinejad when he was serving as a distracting lightning rod on the international scene and taking on its reformist enemies. It rallied behind him after his disputed 2009 reelection, when people poured into the streets to protest voting irregularities.

Analysts abroad and officials in Tehran, mostly speaking on condition of anonymity in a series of conversations in recent weeks, say the country’s elite may now rue the day Ahmadinejad was elected.

“He’s a hooligan and he proceeds in his projects by being extremely rude and ignoring everyone else,” said Mehdi Khalaji, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Analysts say intense mistrust between the factions ahead of 2012 parliamentary elections and the 2013 presidential election led to the alleged electronic surveillance of Mashaei’s office that caused Ahmadinejad to fire the intelligence chief and escalate tensions within the political establishment.

Ahmadinejad’s conservative rivals strongly suspect the president plans to pull some stunt in coming months, such as increasing populist cash giveaways or raising fuel subsidies, to bolster his popularity, or make those who block him look like entrenched elitists.

“The pervert current is busy right now preparing for the election campaign and has utilized remarkable facilities to achieve its goal,” Mohammad Nabi Habibi, secretary-general of the Islamic Coalition Party, one of the bastions of traditional power in Iran, was quoted as saying in a conservative newspaper, Farhikhtegan. “From a canonical and legal perspective, their goals and the means to achieve them are open to question.”

Khamenei’s request to lawmaker Mohsen Rezai to begin assembling a Cabinet was probably an attempt to play on the rivalry between the two men, who ran against each other in 2009. During Ahmadinejad’s absence from work, state television also showed Tehran Mayor Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, another intense rival of Ahmadinejad, paying a visit to Khamenei.

“The main aim was to frighten Ahmadinejad and to get him back to his office,” said an official close to Rezai’s camp, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In part, Ahmadinejad is an all-too-ordinary politician trying to carve out a niche in an extraordinary political system that grants presidents little power in the face of the supreme leader. Both his predecessors, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, were eventually sidelined after their terms were up.

“When you don’t have real power, you plot for a while and then fade away,” Khalaji said. “Ahmadinejad’s political life is over, and he and his allies will have very little chance in the next two elections.”

According to one story circulating in Tehran, so riled were Ahmadinejad’s rivals by his antics that a Revolutionary Guard commander threatened to pull the curtain on his disputed 2009 reelection, which furthered Iran’s international isolation and polarized the nation.

“We brought you back to power,” the commander supposedly told Ahmadinejad, according to a source in the camp of Rafsanjani, another rival of Ahmadinejad.

“Mr. Daneshjou is our witness,” he supposedly added, referring to Kamran Daneshjoo, the former election official accused by reformists of rigging the votes to favor Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad was said to have replied, “Even if Dr. Velayati was in my place as candidate, you would have had to do the same thing to save the system from the pro-Americans.”

Ali Akbar Velayati is a former foreign minister and a top advisor to Khamenei.

Many Iran experts inside and outside the country warn that a weakened Ahmadinejad could still make waves.

“The issue with Ahmadinejad is not that he’s the type of person who’s willing to give up power easily,” said Nader, of Rand Corp. “He wants to be part of the leadership, and he’s not going to go away.”

LAT

Ahmadinejad is behaving “unnaturally” and needs to be “saved,” Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, a former supporter of the president, told the weekly Shoma magazine.

The cleric said Ahmadinejad’s top adviser, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, has used has hypnotism, spells or charms to take control of Iran’s elected leader. “I am almost certain that he has been bewitched,” Yazdi said.

The president’s close relationship with Mashaei, and his recent refusal to cut those ties, has become a major liability for Ahmadinejad. According to the semi-official Fars News Agency, Mashaei and his allies are working to decrease the role of clerics in the Islamic Republic. In April, several close associates of Mashaei were arrested, among them a cleric predicting the coming of the Shiite messiah and a man accused of sorcery.

The new accusations from Yazdi indicate that decision-makers within Iran’s ruling elite want the adviser fired, a move which would seriously limit Ahmadinejad’s presidency, analysts say.

Ahmadinejad was scheduled to give a live speech Sunday night, but for unknown reasons the event was rescheduled from its usual prime time broadcast to later in the evening.

There was also fresh criticism over Ahmadinejad’s policies. Members of parliament Sunday threatened the president with impeachment over what they said was his abuse of power and illegal acts. The critics likened him to a dictator, pointing to his decisions over the weekend to merge eight government ministries and fire three top officials, the ministers of oil, welfare and industries, without parliament’s consent.

An influential lawmaker said that because of the “heavy difficulties” caused by the unprecedented anti-government protests that followed Ahmadinejad’s disputed 2009 election victory, parliament had spared him. But now, parliament will get tough with the president, Mohammad Reza Bahonar told the Majles News Web site, which belongs Bahonar’s political faction.

All options are open, the lawmaker said. “Legal purging starts with questions, which lead to warnings and end with impeachment,” he said.

The accusations illustrate a political shift that has taken place in Iran following a dispute between the president and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over the forced resignation of the intelligence minister in April. The issue laid bare long-simmering dissatisfaction with Ahmadinejad’s confrontational policies among some of his top supporters.

While the rift is over the extent of presidential power, the criticism largely focuses on Ahmadinejad’s closest aide, Mashaei, who opponents say leads a “deviated” current that is planning to bring down Iran’s system of clerical rule.

“We must make the infatuated person [Ahmadinejad] aware of his mistakes and save him – that is if only natural causes are involved,” Mesbah Yazdi said.
WP

Official media have reported on crowds complaining in the offices of the National Iranian Gas Co. since a two-week national holiday ended April 4. In Tehran, many people are refusing to pay their bills.

“I will not pay. I cannot pay,” said Hossein Solati, who lives with his wife and three children on the outskirts of south Tehran. “This is beyond my means.” In addition to steeper costs for home-heating and cooking gas, Solati said, the price of fuel for his truck has also soared since the start of the year.

The price increases follow the implementation in December of a plan by the Ahmadinejad government to cut off state subsidies, forcing the prices of many staples, including gas, electricity and bread, to rise to market level.

Officials had sought to protect the poorest from steep gas-price increases by gradually increasing rates as the number of cubic meters used goes up, as well as offering regular cash handouts. But in Tehran, even some people in poor neighborhoods are reporting a jump in their latest bi-monthly bill from $20 to about $140.

The price hikes are potentially dangerous for the government, according to analysts, who say they could revitalize the grass-roots opposition movement that organized dozens of streets protests after Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection in 2009. The most recent protests, in January and February, appeared to shock some Iranian leaders, who had publicly announced that the movement was a spent force. The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt this year have been attributed in part to high food prices.

Iran’s parliament, which faces elections next year, is now demanding that prices be lowered. “The people don’t have the ability to pay their utility bills, and the distributed cash subsidy is not enough,” Hamid Reza Katouzian, head of parliament’s Energy Commission, told the Shargh newspaper Saturday.

On Monday, a government economic spokesman responded that people could pay their bills in installments and that gas prices would automatically decline when warmer weather sets in. A spokesman for the gas company told the semi-official Mehr News Agency that 70 percent of customers had paid their bills.

“We are studying the complaints,” he added.

Dozens of people gathered Monday at the company’s branch office in Tehran’s affluent Sharak-e Gharb district, where they took turns complaining to a haggard-looking official sitting behind a wooden desk. A woman wearing a Versace head scarf said her bill had increased 16-fold. “I can afford to pay,” she said. “But why should we pay this much when our country is one of the largest gas exporters in the world?”

The official raised his hands in a gesture of despair. “I haven’t even paid myself,” he told her. “I don’t know what to answer you.”

Several governments before Ahmadinejad’s had debated amending the bloated state subsidy system but had held off, fearing it would prove politically suicidal in a nation where dirt-cheap utilities have long been considered a birthright.

Ahmadinejad’s move, which followed similar subsidy cuts in other emerging countries, was hailed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who complained in a recent speech that resources had been wasted in the past and called for “even greater leaps” in Iran’s economic growth.

Amir Mohebbian, an analyst who generally supports Ahmadinejad’s government but is critical of some steps it has taken, said he expects that the government will come up with relief measures if public pressure becomes too great but that prices will still end up far above the old levels.

“Be sure that the government has its social feelers out,” Mohebbian said. “Basically, they threaten us with death so that we are happy with a fever.” WP

Announced in Saudi official media, Assad’s second trip to the world’s top oil exporter this year is the latest sign of a thaw in bilateral relations.

The meeting comes days after a state visit to Lebanon last week by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, whose nuclear energy program Riyadh fears could lead to Iran becoming a nuclear-weapons state.

Riyadh has been trying to convince Syria to loosen its alliance with Iran and adopt a more Arab-focused foreign policy with the kingdom, hinting at stronger economic cooperation.

The 2005 killing of Lebanese statesman Rafik al-Hariri drove a wedge between Saudi Arabia and Syria but both countries have been trying to calm tensions over the tribunal which may indict members of Hezbollah, Iran’s main ally in Lebanon.

“I think the main theme will be Lebanon,” Saudi political analyst Khaled al-Dakhil said.

Saudi newspapers gave wide coverage to Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon last week.

Saudi-owned daily Asharq al-Awsat said: “Iran had decided to operate in Lebanon openly rather than from behind a smokescreen.”

Assad and Abdullah visited Lebanon together in July to avert a crisis between Hezbollah, also backed by Syria, and factions aligned to Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, who is the son of the slain Sunni Muslim leader and is backed by Riyadh.

Hezbollah, which is part of the national unity government, has denounced the U.N.-backed court as a tool of U.S. and Israeli policy and called on Hariri to repudiate the tribunal.

While Saudi Arabia and Syria try to calm tensions in Lebanon they so far remain at odds over the tribunal. Riyadh has long supported the Hague-based court.

Syria, initially implicated by U.N. investigators of the bombing that killed Hariri, always has viewed the tribunal as politically motivated. Syrian officials say any indictments of Hezbollah would be considered as targeting Syria too.

The Saudis might ask Assad to restrain Hezbollah, Dubai political analyst Theodore Karasik said.

“Keeping a lid on Lebanon’s political factions is especially critical in the current security environment,” he said.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in July that Hariri had told him the tribunal would indict “rogue” members of the Shi’ite guerrilla group for his father’s killing.

Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally alarmed by Iran’s growing regional influence since the 2003 Iraq war, has tried for two years to persuade Damascus to loosen its alliance with Iran.

But little has emerged on the ground in terms of economic cooperation since King Abdullah visited Syria in a landmark visit last year. Some Saudi firms have put out feelers to Syria.

In April, a private Saudi waste-water company was granted contracts worth around $3 million.

“I don’t think that economic relations will take off much any time soon,” a Western diplomat in Riyadh said.

Dakhil said Assad and Abdullah also could discuss the political vacuum in Iraq after an inconclusive vote in March, fueling concerns that insurgents might exploit the void.

“In Iraq the differences between Saudis and Syrians are much less than in Lebanon,” Dakhil said. Reuters

But Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot reported Sunday that Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah deceived the Iranian President.

The daily said the gun was a type of weapon that has not been used by the Israeli military since the early 1970s, meaning it could not have been taken from soldiers during the 2006 war.

The paper quoted a military spokesperson as saying the weapon was “most likely” an FNFAL 7.62 rifle that went out of use in 1974.

The 2006 war resulted in the killing of over 1200 Lebanese mostly civilians and 160 Israelis mainly military. Over 1 million mostly Shiites became homeless and over 120, 000 housing units were destroyed . But the end of the 34 day war Hezbollah chief declared a “divine victory “

According to media sources, Mehdi Khazali, a physician and anti-government blogger, was summoned to Evin Prison yesterday and arrested for “activities against national security and disturbing public minds.”

Mehdi Khazali nominated himself to run in the 2007 parliamentary elections but the Guardian Council disqualified him because he had made allegations of fraud in the ninth presidential elections.

A year later, he was disqualified from joining the National Medical Board but was voted into the governing board of Media Co-operative of Tehran.

In the past two years, he has repeatedly criticized Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his blog and website.

In an interview two years ago, Khazali was quoted as saying: “Ahmadinejad is an attention freak and is even willing to die in order to attain fame.”

He had also said: “Ahmadinejad will not be an obedient lamb, in fact I can see the day when he will stand up to the leader!”

Al-Arabiya quoted Khazali two years ago saying: “Ahmadinejad is Jewish-born and has changed his last name.”

Mehdi Khazali wrote condemning blogs regarding the violent reaction of the government to the widespread protests to the alleged vote fraud in the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.

He was arrested last summer in the wave of arrests following the presidential elections and was released after three weeks on a $20,000 bail.

Mehdi Khazali, is the son of Ayatollah Abolghassem Khazali, a hardline member of the Assembly of Experts and a staunch Ahmadinejad supporter. The extremist cleric has disowned his son. Payvand