Informed Comment - ...

Ahmadinejad was presumably, by his appointment of Rahim-Masha'i, trying to signal three things.

1. He is not just a puppet of the hard liners, or even of Khamenei (Ahmadinejad portrays himself as a populist standing up to the fat cats and elites on behalf of the little person, a message he could hardly keep on point if he is just a hired gun of . . . the elite).

2. Ahmadinejad is tolerant of Iranian liberals. Rahim-Masha'i has been accused of favoring religious pluralism (saying that all the great religions are true) and of declaring that "Islamism" is outmoded and its era over with (thus he is accused of being a 'post-Islamist' in Asaf Bayat's terminology). The appointment may have aimed at mollifying some of the reformists?

3. Ahmadinejad is not the crackpot on the question of Israel that his opponents in the presidential race, such as Mir Hossein Mousavi, had painted him.

The Friday prayers sermon this week was led by Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a consummate hard liner. He delivered a no-holds barred attack on the reform movement as undermining both the clerical ideology of the iranian state and the success in cutting Iran off from foreign interference. ...more at the link

_{I feel the American worker has been sacrificed to the capitalist idols in the ancient Mayan fashion. - Sue Lamb, NYT reader}