Surprise!

The news came out yesterday that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran and holocaust denier, might in fact be of Jewish descent. This should not come as a major shock if it turns out to be true, since some of the most adamant anti-Semites in history have had Jewish heritage, from Louis B. Mayer, the producer of the pro-Klan documentary Birth of a Nation, to Harold von Braunhut, the inventor of sea monkeys and member of white supremacist group Aryan Nations. Even Adolph Hitler may have been a quarter Jewish, as his grandfather was unknown but his grandmother conceived his father while living with an upper-class Jewish family in Austria.

Ryan Gosling starred in a great film about Jewish antisemitism called The Believer, based on the life of an ethnically Jewish neo-Nazi. As we have seen in anti-gay pastors who turn out to be homosexual or segregationist politicians who actually have African-American relatives, The Believer demonstrated that the most common source of vitriolic hate speech is in fact self-hatred. Like homophobia among gays, Jewish anti-Semitism comes from a desperate desire to assimilate in a culture that distrusts and discriminates those who are different.

Links:
1.Ahmadinejad's Jewish Past on the Telegraph.co.uk
2. Jewish anti-Semitism on the SPLC Intelligence Report website

PS: While I'm at it, here's a BBC report on how Ahmadinejad may have been one of the terrorists who took Americans hostage in the 1979 capture of the US Embassy in Tehran.