The tabloids of the world are literally ‘full of it’ this morning. The ‘expose’ of the decade….. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is ‘secretly Jewish’!
Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is secretly … Jewish?
BY Rich Schapiro
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Jewish roots
Oy vey!
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – perhaps the world’s best-known Holocaust denier – might actually be Jewish, according to a bombshell report published on Saturday.
Ahmadinejad’s family apparently changed its name from Sabourjian, a Jewish name meaning “cloth weaver,” when it converted to Islam after his birth, the London’s Daily Telegraph says.
The nuke-pursuing Iranian was photographed in March holding up his identity card, revealing a scrawled note suggesting the shocking name change.
The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Ahmadinejad’s hometown of Aradan. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior, the paper says.
Experts told the Telegraph his vitriolic attacks against Jews could be an attempt to hide his past.
“This aspect of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s background explains a lot about him,” said Ali Nourizadeh, of the Center for Arab and Iranian Studies. “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.”
A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that the “jian” ending to the Sabour name shows that the family had been practicing Jews.
“He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents had,” said the Iranian-born Jew. “Sabourjian is a well-known Jewish name in Iran.”
Truthful said,
October 4, 2009 at 17:28
On the plus side, he is now immune from criticism, due the Cloak of anti-Semitism. And no one may draw hook nosed cartoons of him anymore. What’s good for the goose…
Scarlett said,
October 4, 2009 at 17:32
Seems more likely an attempt to hurt his popularity with the “he is secretly Jewish” rumor. Being Jewish is not a crime or something of which to be ashamed. Being a Zionist who kills innocent unarmed civilians — including children, who maintains an apartheid society, who thinks that the only good Arab is a dead Arab, who demonizes Iran over their nuclear activities yet won’t agree to sign the NPT themselves or allow nuclear inspections of their facilities — those are things that should be a crime and of which one should definitely be ashamed.
Methinks Israel doth protest too much …
Cadavre said,
October 4, 2009 at 18:20
Truthful,
Semitic does not mean Jewish. Semitic has nothing to do with religion. Semitic is an anthropological designation based on language. Palestinians are semitic. Ethiopians, whose ancestors were the biblical Hebrews, as was Moses, are semitic.
Look at King Tutt’s death mask. Does he look like he was from Poland?
Leaning Yiddish at the Hebrew University does not a Semite make. Iran has lot’s of Jews. Many are the diaspora – the refugees that fled or were forced out of Palestine / Canaan when the UN created the state of Israel and gave the descendants of converted European claimants to Judea the deeds to Palestinian history and property.
Hitler’s government transported German Zionists to Palestine in 1938 (can you blame him?). Hitler’s government also provided lots of German Marks and Machine tools, and even renamed a German ship to the “Tel Aviv” prior to the cruise. The ancestors of German Zionists missed the cruise on Noah’s Arc, and the Hebrew University spends much effort in trying to rearrange the dots so that it appears otherwise. So, in some sense, the SS Tel Aviv, was the Zionist Arc. Does that make Hitler their Noah?
The best summary of the history of the creation of Zionist State is in a 1961 speech by Benjamin Freedman ay SweetLiberty.org. The Federal Reserve, World War I and World War 2 resulted from the history of the creation of the Zionist state.
kassandra said,
October 4, 2009 at 20:50
Can he now make aliyah? Apparently, about 10-20% of Iranians can claim a Jewish grandparent. Can they all make alyiah now? That’s about four plus million at the least. Israel let Russians, Slavs, become Israelis with just one Jewish grandparent, surely they won’t discriminate against their fellow Semites? Is a one-state solution in sight? The implications are wonderful.
brian said,
October 5, 2009 at 01:51
look on the bright side:
of course, what this means is now when people criticise president Ahmadinejad, we can cry: antisemitism!
Haj Ahmar said,
October 5, 2009 at 07:07
If you look at his “anti-semetic” statements about the holocuast, all of them came at a time that resulted in helping israel by distracting attention from the Gaza War for instance or from discussions in the human rights conference in Geneva in which the issue of equating zionism with racism was comming up.
If you also look at iran’s bahaviour in Iraq, you will realize that all his talk about being anti-american or anti-israel is just that: talk (if it were not for iran’s help in instigating civil war in Iraq and actively partcipating in it through its revolutionary guard trained militias, the US would have been out of Iraq since 2007 at the latest).
Is he of Jewish ancestry? the issue came out in the presidential debate where Karroubi gave a list of his ancesstors and asked Najad to do the same, but Najad did not (it also came out in an article by an iranian writer. i will try to get the reference posted). Does that matter? Not at all. What should matter is his policies all of wich (contyrary to what he says) support “the big devil’s” occupations in Iraq and Afganestan.
nota said,
October 5, 2009 at 16:54
@Truthful
Or maybe he now be described as “a self-hating Jew” by the Zionists….
brian said,
October 6, 2009 at 06:44
‘If you look at his “anti-semetic” statements about the holocuast, all of them came at a time that resulted in helping israel by distracting attention from the Gaza War for instance or from discussions in the human rights conference in Geneva in which the issue of equating zionism with racism was comming up’
Haj, whoever u are…Ahmadinejad has consistently used his office to put the plight of palestinians on the worlds conscience…not that it has one….But Your efforts to demonise Ahmadinejad make me wonder just who you really are!
The US has no intention of leaving iraq…a fact your bound to be glad of!
Haj Ahmar said,
October 7, 2009 at 07:39
Brian,
Iranian policy has been helping US/Israel in the area for a long time. For relations between israel/iran that continued after the shah, look at Trita Parsi’s book ” Treaturous alliance …..”
Also look at what iran is doing in Iraq, whose occupation was made on behalf of israel and where complete cooperation between US and Iran continues to this day.
Offcouse US will not leave Iraq unless it is forced out by resistance (which almost happened were it not for iranian interference) OR unless Oil dries out. US is able to stay in Iraq only because of Iranian support (and offcourse that of the stooge governemts in the gulf).
Rick said,
October 8, 2009 at 08:13
The LIE of Ahmadinejad being a Jew exposed
Rumors of Ahmadinejad’s Judaism have been greatly exaggerated
Over the weekend, a British newspaper published an item which claimed that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, perhaps the most vocal anti-Jewish leader of the modern era, was, in fact, Jewish by birth. Unfortunately for those who appreciate irony, it appears as though that that initial report was inaccurate.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/6256173/Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad-revealed-to-have-Jewish-past.html
In the Daily Telegraph’s original story, which sparked a mini-worldwide uproar, the paper claimed that a high-resolution photo featuring Ahmadinejad holding up his Iranian identity card in 2008 revealed that his family had once changed its name from Sabourjian, a Jewish surname that was reported to translate to “cloth weaver,” to Ahmadinejad after he was born, renouncing Judaism and embracing Islam in the process. The apparent stunning revelation led many on the Web to guffaw in amazement and, of course, crack jokes on the irony of the whole scenario.
But today the Guardian, another British newspaper, thoroughly rebutted the claims made in the Telegraph’s piece over the weekend. The paper spoke to Iranian/Jewish historian David Yeroshalmi, who emphatically disputed the Telegraph’s claims about the interpretation of Ahmadinejad’s former surname, which they claimed “derives from ‘weaver of the sabour,’ the name for the Jewish tallit shawl in Persia.” Said Yeroshalmi, “There is no such meaning for the word ‘sabour’ in any of the Persian Jewish dialects, nor does it mean Jewish prayer shawl in Persian.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/05/mahmoud-ahmadinejad-jewish-family
Upon closer inspection, a completely different interpretation of “Sabourjian” emerges. According to Robert Tait, a Guardian correspondent who travelled to Ahmadinejad’s native village in 2005, the name “derives from thread painter – sabor in Farsi – a once common and humble occupation in the carpet industry in Semnan province, where Aradan is situated”.
http://www.inminds.co.uk/article.php?id=43
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jul/02/iran.roberttait
This is confirmed by Kasra Naji, who also wrote a biography of Ahmadinejad and met his family in his native village. Carpet weaving or colouring carpet threads are not professions associated with Jews in Iran.
http://www.payvand.com/news/08/feb/1107.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90397578
Further, the Guardian also consulted with one of their correspondents who has covered Ahmadinejad since his election in 2005, as well as an Ahmadinejad biographer, who stated that the Iranian president’s parents were quite steeped in Islam. They both say that Ahmadinejad’s father, Ahmad Sabourjian, was a religious Shia who taught the Koran, at one point even buying a house near “a religious club that he frequented during the holy month of Moharram,” in addition to saying that Ahmadinejad’s mother is a “Seyyede,” a title given to a woman believed to be a direct blood descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.
As far as why Ahmadinejad’s father changed the family’s surname, the Guardian reports that it had more to do with Iranian class structure than any attempt to conceal a Jewish heritage:
When it became mandatory to adopt surnames, many people from rural areas chose names that represented their professions or that of their ancestors. This made them easily identifiable as townfolk. In many cases they changed their surnames upon moving to Tehran, in order to avoid snobbery and discrimination from residents of the capital. The Sabourjians were one of many such families. Their surname was related to carpet-making, an industry that conjures up images of sweatshops. They changed it to Ahmadinejad in order to help them fit in.
* Brett Michael Dykes is a contributor to the Yahoo News Blog
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20091006/wl_ynews/ynews_wl943