Word: ahmadinejad
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Never in the 30 years since that revolution has Iran experienced anything like the popular protests that we have seen in the past week. By now, the accusations of election fraud are fairly well known. It is implausible that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won in a landslide re-election. It is doubtful that he not only took the capital city, Tehran - the heart of the reformist movement - by a staggering 50% but also managed to win in Azerbaijan, the birthplace of his chief rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, by a 4-to-1 margin. (As an Azeri friend of mine said, this...
...richest, and former President Mohammed Khatami, by far the country's most popular statesman, have both thrown their support behind the protesters. Two of Iran's highest religious authorities, the Grand Ayatullahs Hossein Ali Montazeri and Yousof Sane'i, have issued fatwas condemning acts of election fraud. Even Ahmadinejad's conservative rival, Mohsen Rezaei, a former Revolutionary Guards commander and a far more hawkish figure than Ahmadinejad, has claimed the election was rigged...
...protests. He made his remarks in front of many thousands of people either in the campus or lining the surrounding streets in his first public address since the outcome of last Friday's disputed presidential election. He insisted there had been no fraud in the result, describing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election win as "definitive." He added that the "Islamic establishment would never manipulate votes and commit treason. The legal structure in this country does not allow vote-rigging. If the difference was 100,000 or 500,000 or 1 million, well, one may say fraud could have happened...
...Khamenei affirmed his support for Ahmadinejad, saying the President's views on foreign affairs and social issues were close to his own. He also accused the other candidates of insulting Ahmadinejad before the election. "They swore and called the president superstitious and called him names, which is embarrassing. They forgot about morality and law," he said...
...None of this is to exonerate the other candidates. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Iranian paramilitary force responsible for most of the terrorism against the U.S. Conservative Mohsen Rezaei was the Guards' commander. And Mehdi Karroubi, like Mousavi, was deeply involved in Lebanon in the '80s. According to my Hizballah contact, he too was a patron of Mughniyah...