The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
NOTE: The following excerpt is from the BOTW archives of March 12, 2009:
Mullahs Say the Darnedest Things
A popular children’s TV program has been canceled by IRIB, Iran’s state broadcaster, because of an “embarrassing disclosure,” London’s Guardian reports:
The unsuspecting presenter, Dariush Farziayi, asked the name of the toy animal his young caller had been given as a reward for good behaviour.
“Well, my father calls him Ahmadinejad,” the child replied.
Ahmadinejad is also the name of Iran’s nutball president. The Guardian adds that “the incident is believed to have been the last straw following several other naive indiscretions by callers, which caused acute embarrassment and offended Iran’s religious conservative mores”:
In one instance, Farziayi was left open mouthed and groping for an appropriate response when, after asking a participant to hand the phone to his mother or father, he was told: “They are in the shower.”
On another occasion, asking which of two twins was kissed first by their father on his return home from work, he was answered: “My daddy always kisses mummy first.”
It is not the first Iranian broadcast to become a victim of the pitfalls of live transmissions. In the 1980s, the spiritual leader of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, pronounced death sentences for the makers of a radio programme in which a female respondent named a Japanese soap opera character as her role model, rather than Fatimah, the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter. They were later pardoned.
Last week the New York Times’s Roger Cohen described Iran as follows: “Significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist. Anything but mad, the mullahs have proved malleable.” If nothing else, the mad mullahs who run Iran are making a monkey out of Cohen.
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