Bahrain closes paper critical of Iran

According to the BBC, Bahrain has closed a paper for being critical of Iran’s handling of the election. I wrote this post in April, pointing you to an article in Business World about Iran’s Gulf allies. Bahrain, a state with a majority Shia population, gave no reason for the closure of Akhbar al-Khaleej, but Radio France Internationale claims it was because the paper published a claim that Ahmadinejad is of Jewish origin. This isn’t a new claim, and many inside Iran believe it to be true. Earlier this year, Mehdi Khazali, the son of Ayatollah Khazali, wrote on his personal website that Ahmadinejad had changed his family name from Saburjian and hails from the town or Aradan. Khazali urged an investigation into the Saburjians’ family history.

The part of the article mentioning Ahmadi’s Jewish roots was probably not the reason for the paper’s closure, but the combination of this claim with an attack on the whole regime by Samira Rajab guaranteed it. Ahmadi won the election thanks to “millions of fraudlent votes”, wrote Rajab. More provocatively: “After 30 years, the cover has been pulled away… and Islamic democracy has been shown in its most repugnant dictatorial forms.”