With the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hurling some fighting words at Israelis, Jews and Jewish history, many who read Jewschool are trying to figure out exactly who the hell this guy is and more importantly: Who the hell voted for him?
In the brand new issue of Bidoun, a new, mega-slick magazine of “arts and culture from the Middle East, Coco Ferguson, a Tehran resident, sheds a bit of light on the political and cultural climate in Iran and how Ahmadinejad managed to crush his more moderate opponent, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani:

“I had no idea that a diminutive blacksmith’s son from Garmsar, whom commentators had written off as a right-wing oddball, would mobilize 17 million Iranians to vote him into power-silencing the stereos. While allegations of vote rigging and coercion by the Revolutionary Guard hover over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s passage through to the second round of voting, it’s hard to argue with the decisive sixty-two percent of the vote with which he trounced Rafsanjani, the Godfather of Iranian politics, in the run-off for the presidency…
…The emphasis on the youth vote had been a red herring. Ultimately it was not the lop-sided demographic of Iran but another statistic that turned out to be the key to the election: high unemployment, fifty-two percent of which is that of youth.Rafsanjani tried to stir up hype around a kind of Ronald Reagan “trickle-down” model for wealth creation. Ahmadinejad’s supporters wore looser t-shirts and tighter headscarves and were unconvinced by Rafsanjani’s intentions to open Iran to the free market economy. Like the surprise win of India’s Congress Party in 2004 over the BJP’s India Shining campaign, Iranian voters chose a man who at least promised to look after the poor.”

As the world is menaced by his paranoiababble, he’s managed to exploit the rampant unemployment of his country’s youth to further isolate its bright minds from the rest of the world.
The Article