Ahmadinejad family vacations will never be the same.
There are some things, Iran’s Parliament has decided, that a public official should simply not be allowed to say — especially in reference to Israel.
Threats of a “crushing response” to Israeli aggression seem to be fine, as a representative of Iran’s supreme leader recently demonstrated. But suggesting that Iran is a friend of the Israeli people, well, that is an “unforgivable mistake,” Parliament declared Wednesday.
In a statement signed by some 200 members of the 290-seat assembly, Iranian lawmakers called on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to dismiss Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, the vice president for tourism, after he repeated on Sunday his earlier comment that “we are a friend of all people in the world, even Israelis and Americans.”
In his comments, Mashai, a political ally of Ahmadinejad and one of his in-laws, specified “for a thousandth time” that his country was against Israel, not Jews.
But Parliament was not placated. “We do not recognize a country called Israel and so we cannot recognize a nation called Israel,” the lawmakers said in their statement, according to Fars, the semiofficial Iranian news agency.
“If Mr. Mashai does not have the political awareness that the Israeli people are the same people who have occupied the homes of millions of innocent and oppressed Palestinians and have created the army of the Zionist regime, he has no right to hold such a position,” the statement added.
Mashai, whose daughter recently married Ahmadinejad’s son, was the second member of Ahmadinejad’s cabinet to come under fire by Parliament this week.
I can just imagine the next family dinner….
Ahmadinejad: Can the Jew-lover please pass the salt?
