Even the Guardian appreciates the irony...
When the Iraqi journalist, Muntazar al-Zaidi, hurled his shoes at the then-US president, George Bush, in December, Iranian officials declared him a hero and hailed his gesture as a mark of Islamic courage. They were presumably less impressed this week when Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was similarly targeted during a visit to the north-western city of Urumiye.
Ahmadinejad found the shoe on the other foot as he waved to the crowd from an open-top car on his way to give a speech at a local stadium. An Iranian website, Urumiye News, reported that a shoe was hurled at the president as his convoy drove through a central square. Security guards waded into the crowds but failed to find the culprit. A hat was also thrown in Ahmadinejad's direction before his car sped away.
The event went unreported on mainstream Iranian news outlets but has been hotly discussed on the country's highly active blogosphere. Some pro-Ahmadinejad bloggers have dismissed the reports as rumours spread by "royalists" and "counter-revolutionaries". However, Ahmadinejad has been on the receiving end of flying footwear before. A shoe was thrown at him during a students' demonstration at Tehran's Amir Kabir university in December 2006.
Urumiye News said the latest protest came when a disturbance broke out after a vehicle in the presidential convoy struck an elderly man who walked onto the road to try and hand Ahmadinejad a letter. People became angry when the driver failed to stop to attend to the injured man. Eventually an ambulance in the motorcade was forced to take him to hospital after jeering crowds blocked its path.
Ahmadinejad travels frequently to Iran's provinces in a bid to boost his popularity. He commonly receives large numbers of letters requesting financial assistance and other help during such trips.
After Zaidi's protest in Baghdad, Iranian officials paid tribute by holding several public shoe-throwing competitions in which contestants threw footwear at caricatures of Bush. Iran's main shoemaking federation also offered to supply a lifetime of shoes to Zaidi, who remains in a Baghdad jail awaiting trial.
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Iranian Foreign Minister Monouchehr Mottaki on Saturday said Tehran found Morocco's decision to sever ties with the Islamic republic both surprising and questionable. In the first official reaction to Friday's move by Morocco, Mottaki said Iran will "offer a response in a statement" later today to Rabat's decision. "The action by the Morocco government is surprising and questionable," Mottaki told reporters.
On Friday, Rabat announced it was cutting ties with Tehran, resurrecting a row sparked by a senior Iranian official who questioned Bahrain's sovereignty. The decision followed Rabat's express backing for Bahrain -- despite Iran moving to patch up their differences -- with Morocco accusing Tehran of seeking to impose its Shiite Muslim ideology on the Sunni-ruled Arab state.
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Iran weighs the Obama administration's plans to invite the country to attend an international conference on Afghanistan later this month.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wrapping up a trip to the Middle East and Europe, said Thursday that the Obama administration has plans to invite Tehran to attend a confab on Afghanistan.
"If we move forward with such a meeting, it is expected that Iran would be invited as a neighbor of Afghanistan," Clinton told reporters in Brussels.
While the move was regarded in the West as a "major overture" and a "dramatic turnaround," it was met with skepticism from some Iranian officials.
"This [invitation] is not a new phenomenon," said the head of the Iranian Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, on Friday.
"Washington and Tehran have previously discussed the Afghan security and development in the Bonn conference, during which Iranian officials played a constructive and active role," he said.
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Posted by: Fred ||
03/07/2009 00:00 ||
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Iran's Parliament speaker says the ICC arrest warrant for Sudan's president is an insult to the African country and the Muslim world.
After arriving in Khartoum on Friday, Speaker Ali Larijani said the so-called human rights guardians in the International Criminal Court (ICC) showed that they are on the wrong path by issuing the warrant.
The ICC on Wednesday issued an international warrant for the arrest of President Hassan al-Bashir.
The warrant was issued at the request of The Hague-based court's Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo who holds Bashir responsible for the atrocities committed in the western Sudanese region of Darfur.
Six years of armed rebellion in the Darfur region against the Khartoum government has reportedly claimed 300,000 lives.
Bashir had earlier blamed the West for conspiring against him, saying that issuing an arrest warrant would be of "no value".
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Posted by: Fred ||
03/07/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
"How dare the kufrs sit in judgement over a member of the Master Religion?!?"
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Iran's Parliament speaker says the ICC arrest warrant for Sudan's president is an insult to the African country and the Muslim world. 
