Iran's Velvet Revolution?

By Jeremy Gillick What will change if Mirhossein Mousavi, a former Iranian Prime Minister, a "moderate," and the primary challenger to reigning Iranian president and rabble-rouser Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wins this Friday's much-hyped Iranian election? Will Iran abandon it's nuclear program or change its position vis-a-vis Israel or the United States? Will the country undergo a "velvet revolution," as Saeed Laylaz, editor of an Iranian business daily, told Ha'aretz it would? Or might Ahmadinejad's cult-like supporters, backed by the Basij paramilitary and the Revolutionary Guard, revolt, a possibility considered by Robert Dreyfuss at The Nation? The answer, of course, is that we don't know. In addition to knowing very little about how Iranian politics actually work--even many of the foremost American experts on Iran concede this unfortunate deficiency--Mousavi himself is a mysterious candidate. Writing in The New...

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Jews for Ahmadinejad, Onion-style

In an effort to improve his standing among Jews, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tried yesterday to make out with a member of the ultra-Orthodox sect Neturei Karta. Ahmadinejad has been in the dumps among pro-Semites since giving a speech at the UN earlier this week condemned by Barack Obama as anti-Semitic (see below for the full text). On Wednesday, though, Ahmadinejad met with a group of Neturei Karta rabbis who presented him with a $700 silver trophy and told him they loved him. Neturei Karta, a radical ultra-Orthodox group that believes the Jews should not have their own state in the Holy Land until after the messiah comes, spent Tuesday protesting the protests against Ahmadinejad. According to Ynet, Neturei Karta Rabbi Yisroel David Weiss, who was at the meeting, said that "the encounter was 'very successful' and was conducted...

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