CNN's Reza Sayah on Ahmadinejad's inauguration in 2009 vs. 2005

Yesterday I noticed a lot of messages on Twitter saying "Ahmadinejad kisses Khamenei's shoulder in ceremony, a sign of respect and loyalty in Arab culture", which was repeated over and over again. Kind of strange considering that Iranians aren't Arabs. It turns out though that the source is this video from CNN with Reza Sayah, where he says exactly that:



With someone else you would probably conclude that this was a schoolboy mistake in thinking of Iranians as being Arabs, but Reza Sayah is fluent in Persian and was born in Iran, so you'd have to assume that he's aware of this simple fact. That means that this is probably an ever-so-subtle dig at Ahmadinejad and the importance he places on issues in the Arab World (especially Palestine), which he often talks about much more than issues of the day in the country he was supposed to represent.


Meanwhile, this article from Press TV gets the nod for the WTF headline of the day - it says that Abtahi and Atrianfar have dismissed claims that their confessions were extracted under pressure. Of course they "dismissed these claims", because they're still being detained!