Why Ahmadinejad Acts the Way He Does at the U.N.

[frigidmagi]

Tnr

[quote]Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at the United Nations and his utterances elsewhere in New York are, again, proof that the Marxist-Islamist Molotov cocktail that produced the Islamic revolution is rebelliously alive among Iran’s ruling elite. The country’s ruler—Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader—unquestionably cleared that speech, and Ahmadinejad is to Khamenei what the Marseilles soccer baron Bernard Tapie was to the effete François Mitterrand: a man of action and violence who expresses mundanely what the more ethereal and physically timid alter ego could not. It was said of Tapie (born in 1943) that President Mitterrand could easily imagine him machine-gunning Nazis in a French café—something not at all possible of the Vichy-comfortable, money-eschewing, bookshop-loving leader of the Socialist Party.

Khamenei has really had no spiritual brothers since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s right-hand man, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, gave him the mantle of leadership in 1989. Rafsanjani picked Khamenei to succeed “the Imamâ€