Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Ahmadinejad To Resign; Facing Arrest? Not So Fast..

Iran: No Sorcery But A Constitutional Struggle  Like others, I took this story at face value.  According to Moon of Alabama, the rumors of Ahmadinejad's political demise have been exaggerated.  Excerpts:

So there is sorcery within the Iranian government of president Ahmadinejad, allies of him have been arrested for it and he will step down?

Today Yves Smith links to a Raw Story piece which is headlined Iranian president may resign after allies arrested, charged with sorcery. Raw Story has no sources for that claim but a link to a Guardian piece which claims:
Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits).

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

The Guardian provides no source for its report but that Iranian website Ayandeh it links to.
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But back to the Guardian's source, the futurist Iranian/Swedish/Norwegian website ayandeh.nu. I can not find (google translate link) any article that would fit this as a source for the "sorcery" and "arrests" the Guardian reports. The website is a mix of futurology including from Vahid V. Motlagh, Iranian human rights stuff and a few news items about Iran. It is neither really Iranian nor a reliable source.

The whole sorcery and arrests claims are likely nonsense invented to make a little reported constitutional crisis within Iran's ruling class look more mysterious than it is.
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What astonished me was how little this whole issue was reported on in the "west" over the last weeks. That may well be because the "western" distorted viewpoint of Ahmedinejad as a "hardliner" who "lost the elections" and as the Iranian judiciary branch as "clerics" gives the wrong frame of reference to understand simple politics in Iran. Not understanding what was going on let reporters turn to nonsensical claims.

Having assumed the journalist who wrote this story did due diligence regarding its claims, I'm just as guilty as the others who passed this story on.  If it happens again, I will offer a correction as opposed to letting bogus information pass.  A fundamental struggle here in the beginnings of The Age of Aquarius is Discernment of Stimulus/Data.  Bad information should be addressed whenever it occurs.
The Guardian provides no source for its report but that Iranian website Ayandeh it links to.

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