Crazy Delicious (And I Do Mean Exactly That): Ahmadinejad Weakened In Power Struggle, As Key Allies Are Accused of... Sorcery

I saw people mentioning "sorcery" in the comments but thought it was an in-joke that you had to be there for.

Note: This is a repost, in case you didn't see Maetenloch's 12:50 am posting on this. Which I, um, didn't.

Now what do we make of this? On one hand, it's lunatic to accuse a political rival of employing "supernatural powers" to advance his policies.

On the other hand... well, it's Ahmadinejad. Why not?

And he's created a lunatic cult of supernatural beliefs, so: Set a sorcerer to catch a sorcerer.

Close allies of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits).

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

The arrests come amid a growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei which has prompted several MPs to call for the president to be impeached.

On Sunday, Ahmadinejad returned to his office after an 11-day walkout in an apparent protest over Khamenei's reinstatement of the intelligence minister, who the president had initiallyasked to resign.

Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, a hardline cleric close to Khamenei, warned that disobeying the supreme leader – who has the ultimate power in Iran – is equivalent to "apostasy from God".

Actually the dispute does involve the Biggest Genie of All, the Twelfth Mahdi. Ahmadinejad and his fellow sorcerers are pushing the idea that his return is at hand, and they are using divination magic to prove this prediction. The conservative clerics, on the other hand (and here conservative means "not quite insane"), maintain that the return of the divine cannot be predicted by man and to claim so, I assume, is a kind of blasphemy.

As they say in the movies: It's so crazy it just might work!

posted by Ace at 01:52 PM

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