[Al Arabiya Latest] Bahrain shut down its oldest daily newspaper for "violating the country's press code," the official news agency reported Monday, a day after the paper published a report that suggested Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was Jewish.| Gentlemen do not accuse other gentlemen of being *shhhh* Juices. |
The official BNA news agency carried the same notice but did not elaborate on the nature of the violation and the reasons behind the abrupt closure were unclear.
The AFP news agency reported that staff at the newspaper said the action followed the publication on Sunday of an article on Iran in which a female member of Bahrain's Consultative Council, Samira Rajab, came down hard on the Iranian government and suggested that Ahmadinejad was Jewish. "Islamic Republic -- Popular Fury," an opinion piece by Rajab, was a harsh critique of the current events taking place in Iran, which is facing the worst unrest since the 1979 revolution due to disputed election results, and discussed a live debate that took place between the incumbent and his reformist challenger Mehdi Karroubi.
Rajab wrote: "In a televised live debate between Mehdi Karroubi and Ahmadinejad, Karroubi took a jab at Ahmadinejad's origins and said 'my full name is Mehdi so and so Karroubi' so what is your full name?'"
Rajab went on to write that Ahmadinejad stated his name but failed to mention his "real" surname "which all Iranians know to be Jewish and that is what Karroubi was trying to get at."
Goldstein. I knew it all along.
The question of Ahmadinejad's origins have been raised before by the son of one of the republic's conservative Ayatollahs, Mehdi Khazali, who wrote on his website that the president had changed his family name from the originally Jewish name Saborjhian.
Right. Levi or Cohen?
| Lots of converts to Islam over the centuries who'd been born Jewish, Christian or whatever. Mr. Karroubi sounds like a Spanish grandee claiming only Christians in his bloodline back to the year dot. |
| But the Guardian's British readers are not supposed to care about such things, so why on Earth would the Guardian's reporter and editor choose to include that information? |