A growing rift between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has bubbled to the surface recently, fueling speculation that the president will resign.
The schism began months ago, but came to a head in recent weeks when Ahmadinejad dismissed Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi. Khamenei, who has final authority on all political decisions, immediately re-instated the minister in a move widely perceived as a rebuke to the president.
In retaliation, Ahmadinejad skipped two Cabinet meetings, but by Sunday, May 1, he signaled he was stepping down from the fight and instead identified two familiar adversaries: Israel and the U.S. According to the AP, he ended the fight “by ending his apparent boycott of Cabinet meetings and accusing the U.S. and Israel of exaggerating internal rifts.”
However, the bitter power struggle continues. On Thursday, the battle took a strange turn as allies of Ahmadinejad found themselves slapped with charges of sorcery. As the Guardian reports, several people, including the president’s chief of staff, were charged with being “magicians.” Abbas Ghaffari, one of them men arrested, was described as “a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds” by an Iranian news website.
Friday, the tension seemed to come to come to a breaking point, with reports that Ahmadinejad had received a deadline to either accept the re-instatement of the intelligence minister or submit his resignation. The Guardian reports:
Meanwhile, the president was reportedly absent from religious ceremonies this week at Khamenei’s house, where he was publicly criticised by close allies of the ayatollah. Iranian officials are traditionally required to participate in such ceremonies in order to cover up any political rift that might compromise Khamenei’s power.
While it remains to be seen which option the controversial leader will choose, the public nature of the disagreement is a rare occurrence in Iranian politics, in which political infighting is carefully concealed from the public.
(Source: Huffington Post)
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8 Responses
Maybe heads will roll as they are prone to do with their history of beheading
There are a lot of things Iran is hiding from the world besides their nukes and this little spat.
Hashem Yerachem.
With all respect to your editorial decision-makers, that picture beside the article undermines your credibility as a news organization. Furthermore, it is beneath the Yeshiva World (which, as Yeshiva World News, you represent on the web to readers unfamiliar with the Jewish world) to use such a crude form of mockery. Rabbosai, illustrating with pictures like that runs a serious risk of a chilul hashem on the wider web. Shouldn’t we be better than that? It isn’t our way to call others “monkeys and pigs!” (Comment doesn’t need to be posted – intended for editors)
These are the nutjobs who Obama believed he could negotiate with. Which makes one wonder the sanity of the people who voted for Obama.
No. 4: Do you seriously doubt the sanity of a majority of the American people, i.e., “the people who voted for Obama”? Do any of the following thoughts occur to you, or make any sense to you?
1. President Obama’s public optimism about negotiating with Iran is a public posture, which he has assumed for tactical reasons to demonstrate his readiness to negotiate with an obdurate US opponent, rather than cut off the possibility of negotiations or threaten the unpopular (and impractical, given the committment of US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq) use of force to deal with Iran. The US president’s public posture of readiness to negotiate can win support from other nations for future US military action, if and when it becomes necessary, or embarrass the Iranian regime to the negotiating table.
2. The assumption that those who disagree with me are “insane” is unfounded and reflects an underlying weakness in my own reasoning and weakness in my faith in my own reasoning.
#5 I do not respond to you why do you bother?
No. 6: You just responded to me, but that’s not why I bother.
Why do you comment? Probably for the same reasons I do. I have a high opinion of myself and feel that my opinions are of great benefit to readers.
And by the way, doesn’t anybody have the sensitivity, or the wit, to think that the photo accompanying this article is an insult to the Great Apes?