A shanda!
Oct 5, 2009 Faith and Works, Oppression, Orient, Past is prologue
From the Telegraph of London (via Insty):
A photograph of the Iranian president [Ahmadinejad] 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.
Oy, not only an antisemite — but the worst kind! A Jewish one! And from a family in the shmatta trade, even!
This is only partly funny. It is also only partly surprising. Jews do have a way of rising in prominence regardless of where they are. When they are in the wrong place, unfortunately, their rise … does the Jews, and the world, no favors. And typically, unfortunately, they assert their purported non-Jewishness very assertively against Jewish values and people, perhaps to “prove” how not-Jewish they are or, perhaps, for more complex moral and psychological reasons.
Which is why they should, you know, be in the right place, by which I do not mean a place found on the map.
And in this case, by the way, what’s the real story? Well, continue with the article:
The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.
Well, there you have it. No wonder they converted — they had a Jew-hating mamzer like this for a kid!
UPDATE: Glad I got that in before the inevitable debunking:
Professor David Yeroshalmi, author of The Jews of Iran in the 19th century and an expert on Iranian Jewish communities, disputes the validity of this argument. “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. Also, the name Sabourjian is not a well-known Jewish name,” he stated in a recent interview. In fact, Iranian Jews use the Hebrew word “tzitzit” to describe the Jewish prayer shawl. Yeroshalmi, a scholar at Tel Aviv University’s Center for Iranian Studies, also went on to dispute the article’s findings that the “-jian” ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. “This ending is in no way sufficient to judge whether someone has a Jewish background. Many Muslim surnames have the same ending,” he stated.
Turban-tip to LGF.
Leave a Reply