Well, I don’t really know what he dreams of other than a world map without Israel on it, but things are getting a little rocky for the Iranian President. See there’s a bit of a power struggle between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In what was seen as a move to consolidate his power ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections, Ahmadinejad fired a Khameini loyalist, intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi. Objecting to this move, Khameini simply reinstated him. Ahmadinejad then kind of went on strike for 11 days, essentially not showing up for work and important cabinet meetings. Khameini, for his part, didn’t waste time and began a series of arrests of Ahmadinejad loyalists. This is where things start getting weird.

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”.

Throw in a theological dispute regarding the nature of the return of the hidden Imam and what you have going on is full scale weirdness here. So far it seems that the living Imams have the upper hand but you just never know what’s going to happen when genies are involved. Like Ahmadinejad, their alleged boss, genies are sneaky!

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ck

Founder and Publisher of Jewlicious, David Abitbol lives in Jerusalem with his wife, newborn daughter and toddler son. Blogging as "ck" he's been blocked on twitter by the right and the left, so he's doing something right.

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