Ahmadinejad Hailed In Middle East

[Purveyor]

The president of Iran, who has made a point of defying the West and Israel, has won admiration even among Sunni nations.


CAIRO — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a flinty populist in a zip-up jacket whose scathing rhetoric and defiance of Washington are often caricatured in the Western media, has transcended national and religious divides to become a folk hero across the Middle East.

The diminutive, at times inscrutable, president is a wellspring of stinging sound-bites and swagger for Muslims who complain that their leaders are too beholden to or frightened of the Bush administration. Ahmadinejad, who arrived in New York Sunday ahead of a U.N. General Assembly meeting, is an easily marketable commodity:a streetwise politician with nuclear ambitions and an open microphone.

"I like him a lot," said Mahmoud Ali, a medical student in Cairo. "He's trying to protect himself and his nation from the dangers around him. He makes me feel proud. He's a symbol of Islam. He seems the only person capable of taking a stand against Israel and the West. Unfortunately, Egypt has gotten too comfortable with Washington."

Ahmadinejad's appeal is especially strong in Egypt, where he is compared to the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose bold, yet doomed vision of pan-Arabism in the 1950s was also aimed at stemming Western influence. In the minds of many Egyptians, Iran's quest to expand its nuclear program despite United Nations sanctions is similar to Nasser's confrontation with the British and French over nationalizing the Suez Canal.

What's striking in Ahmadinejad's case, however, is that the leader of a non-Arab Shiite nation has ingratiated himself with the Middle East's predominantly Sunni Arab population.

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http://www.latimes.com:80/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-ahmadinejad24sep24,0,4518874.story?coll=la-home-world

[fenriswolf]

1. ya know this guy seems level headed

if their was going to be any chance at real peace in the middle east and reconiliation between nations it seems like this guy would be the first stop on the long road to peace.

[ROakes1019]

2. good vs evil

I get so tired of the demonizing of anyone who doesn't subjugate himself to Bush et al. I don't know how sincere Ahmadinajad is but he seems much wiser than Bush. He is demonized just as Chavez is, while the peoples of their countries see them as laudable. There is no proof that A is trying to get a nuclear weapon but even if he is he would have one compared to Israel's hundreds. The Bush et al constantly rave about Iran's inteference in Iraq while we're the biggest inteferrers and Saudi Arabia next.