Telegraph | News | 'Divine mission' driving Iran's new leader
Telegraph | News | 'Divine mission' driving Iran's new leader: "The 49-year-old Mr Ahmadinejad, a former top engineering student, member of the Revolutionary Guards and mayor of Teheran, overturned Iranian politics after unexpectedly winning last June's presidential elections.
The main rift is no longer between 'reformists' and 'hardliners', but between the clerical establishment and Mr Ahmadinejad's brand of revolutionary populism and superstition.
Its most remarkable manifestation came with Mr Ahmadinejad's international debut, his speech to the United Nations.
World leaders had expected a conciliatory proposal to defuse the nuclear crisis after Teheran had restarted another part of its nuclear programme in August.
Instead, they heard the president speak in apocalyptic terms of Iran struggling against an evil West that sought to promote 'state terrorism', impose 'the logic of the dark ages' and divide the world into 'light and dark countries'.
The speech ended with the messianic appeal to God to 'hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace'.
In a video distributed by an Iranian web site in November, Mr Ahmadinejad described how one of his Iranian colleagues had claimed to have seen a glow of light around the president as he began his speech to the UN.
'I felt it myself too,' Mr Ahmadinejad recounts. 'I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink…It's not an exaggeration, because I was looking.
'They were astonished, as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.'"
The main rift is no longer between 'reformists' and 'hardliners', but between the clerical establishment and Mr Ahmadinejad's brand of revolutionary populism and superstition.
Its most remarkable manifestation came with Mr Ahmadinejad's international debut, his speech to the United Nations.
World leaders had expected a conciliatory proposal to defuse the nuclear crisis after Teheran had restarted another part of its nuclear programme in August.
Instead, they heard the president speak in apocalyptic terms of Iran struggling against an evil West that sought to promote 'state terrorism', impose 'the logic of the dark ages' and divide the world into 'light and dark countries'.
The speech ended with the messianic appeal to God to 'hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace'.
In a video distributed by an Iranian web site in November, Mr Ahmadinejad described how one of his Iranian colleagues had claimed to have seen a glow of light around the president as he began his speech to the UN.
'I felt it myself too,' Mr Ahmadinejad recounts. 'I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink…It's not an exaggeration, because I was looking.
'They were astonished, as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.'"
posted by Solomon | 10:25 PM
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