Half of the world

To all those who love Isfahan...

Fart and the temple

As can be seen, I have been reading Mr. Abtahi's blog fairly regularly and although his unfailing support of Mr. Khatami is a little unnerving to say the least, I recently had to admit that I enjoyed some of his posts.

Well, clearly now, they are after him, and I am not surprised because he has been quite critical of some of the political stances taken lately.

For those who cannot read Persian, Mr. Abtahi has been accused by an ultra-conservative site of having his blog designed and run by Baha'is. And in order to make their accusations look credible, the authors of the article included a number of links. Out of curiosity, I tried all of them... and (of course) none of them led to anything that might remotely suggest any link to the alleged designers.

Moreover, there is this box on the side of the article that without showing any name indicates "Age:24" and then what can be assumed to say "Children: no", "Ethnicity: Middle-Eastern", "speak: Persian" (which is not correct English, by the way...), and "Religion: Baha'i" . Now, the form being in English, I really wonder where in the Western world would any form ask for one's religion?...

But my final question is: so what? And even if Mr. Abtahi's website designers are Baha'is, what does it have to do with the way the site is designed or run? Are they running subliminal messages so that everyone reading the blog are going to become hypnotized and convert? Is Mr. Abtahi less of a Muslim cleric because of his webmasters' alleged religion?

Relativity

I must say, I was a little disappointed with the analysis around Mr. Larijani's resignation. It is strange how when one ultra-conservative is replaced by an even more ultra-conservative he suddenly becomes "conciliatory"... Not to mention the fact that the conservative then becomes a moderate.

But a few days ago, I was nicely surprised by Omid Memarian's piece for OSI.

Red and orange

It is the time for harvesting:

Pomegranites

and saffron