i read the headline

and thought it was some sort of spoof. however, after reading the (short) article, i guess it's possible ahmadinejad WAS born a jew. how weird (i can't think of another word but weird really doesn't do it) if it were true

Report: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was born a Jew

By Stephen C. Webster
In a stunning report on Saturday, a British newspaper claimed to have uncovered proof that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- notorious among the international community for denying the holocaust -- was actually born a Jew.

According to The Telegraph, a high resolution photograph of Ahmadinejad holding up his Iranian identity card, taken just before the 2008 election, reveals that his family changed its name shortly after he was born, renouncing their Jewish faith and adopting Islam.............

admiral william fallon is retiring

is it because he's done his duty and just wants to retire. OR is it because his commandant in chief is a lunatic who wants to start YET ANOTHER WAR? i guess we'll just have to wait (for more people to be killed, displaced, tortured and gravely wounded)
Mideast military chief resigns after magazine article
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says that Admiral William Fallon, the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, is resigning.
Gates said Fallon had asked Gates for permission to retire and that Gates agreed.
Fallon was the subject of an article published last week in Esquire magazine that portrayed him as opposed to President Bush's Iran policy. It described Fallon as a lone voice against taking military action to stop the Iranian nuclear program.
In one passage, the magazine said:
So while Admiral Fallon's boss, President George W. Bush, regularly trash-talks his way to World War III and his administration casually casts Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as this century's Hitler (a crown it has awarded once before, to deadly effect), it's left to Fallon--and apparently Fallon alone--to argue that, as he told Al Jazeera last fall: "This constant drumbeat of conflict . . . is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions."
Gates described as "ridiculous" any notion that Fallon's departure signals the United States is planning to go to war with Iran. And he said "there is a misperception" that Fallon disagrees with the administration's approach to Iran.......

and this:
Middle East commander resigned by phone from Iraq
By Nancy A. Youssef McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Adm. William J. Fallon, the commander of all U.S. military operations in the Middle East, abruptly ended his nearly 42-year military career Tuesday with a phone call from Iraq in which he asked to resign because of controversy caused by his criticism of the Bush administration's Iran policy.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said Tuesday in a hastily convened news conference that he accepted Fallon's resignation because it was the "right thing to do."
Fallon's phone call, and Gates' decision to accept his resignation, ended weeks of speculation within military circles about how long a military commander who appeared to challenge Bush administration policy could hold onto his job.
Army Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, Fallon's deputy and a one-time commander of efforts to train Iraq's security forces, will lead U.S. Central Command until the Senate can confirm a permanent replacement, Gates said. Fallon's resignation is effective March 31.............

did king george and his court

push iraq into the arms of iran? it's possible. if it does happen, what will the supporters (of king george and his court) say? will they blame THAT on others? will they not hold king george and his court accountable? this is our WORST nightmare. oh i blame congress and the senate as well. THEY have buried their heads in the sand all along (except for a few)

Ahmadinejad calls Iraq 'brotherly'
Ahmadinejad Says Landmark Visit to Iraq Opens New Chapter in 'Brotherly' Relations
QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday his landmark visit to Iraq opened a new chapter in "brotherly" relations between the two countries, which were once bitter enemies. Ahmadinejad is the first Iranian president to visit Iraq. The trip not only highlights his country's growing influence on its Arab neighbor in the post-Saddam Hussein era, but it also serves as an act of defiance toward the U.S., which accuses Iran of training and giving weapons to Shiite extremists in Iraq.
The Iranian leader went from Baghdad's airport to a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who gave him a red-carpet welcome. The two kissed four times on the cheek in the traditional fashion and a band played the two countries' national anthems.
"We had very good talks that were friendly and brotherly. ... We have mutual understandings and views in all fields, and both sides plan to improve relations as much as possible," Ahmadinejad said in a news conference with Talabani at the Iraqi president's residence, located across the Tigris River from the new U.S. Embassy in the fortified Green Zone.........

it's absolutely

frightening there are 'professors' like this ANYWHERE, much less columbia

The Columbia Professor Who Also Doesn't Think Gay People Exist in the Middle East
Queer Theory
by James Kirchick
.........................Yet while the audience in the Roone Arledge Auditorium and millions of television viewers laughed and booed at the Islamist rube, there was one man--ensconced at Columbia University, no less--who was likely nodding along in agreement. His name is Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, and he legitimizes, with a complex academic posture, the deservedly reviled views on homosexuality espoused by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals. .....................

talk about people

who SHOULD be on a NO FLY list........

why was THIS dude allowed into our country when innocents cannot come here?

Live From New York, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Unreality Show
By Dana Milbank
"For hundreds of years, we've lived in friendship and brotherhood with the people of Iraq," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the National Press Club yesterday.
That's true -- as long as you don't count the little unpleasantness of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when a million people died, some by poison gas. And you'd also have to overlook 500 years of fighting during the Ottoman Empire. But never mind that: Ahmadinejad was on a roll.
"Our people are the freest people in the world," said the man whose government executes dissidents, jails academics and stones people to death.
"The freest women in the world are women in Iran," he continued, neglecting to mention that Iranian law treats a woman as half of a man. ..........