Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Yid Vid: Andy Samberg Hearts Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Of course, Andy Samberg is just joking. Others are more serious in their infatuation with Ahmadinejad. For instance, “sallykohn” recently wrote a diary entry on Daily Kos titled “Why I Have A Little Crush on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

She wrote:

I want to be very clear. There are certainly many things about Ahmadinejad that I abhor — locking up dissidents, executing of gay folks, denying the fact of the Holocaust, potentially adding another dangerous nuclear power to the world and, in general, stifling democracy. Even still, I can’t help but be turned on by his frank rhetoric calling out the horrors of the Bush Administration and, for that matter, generations of US foreign policy preceding.

And then she concluded:

Monday, when Ahmadinejad speaks at Columbia University in New York, I’ll be listening. Maybe with a bottle of wine and some soft music playing in the background. If I can get past the fact that, as a Jewish lesbian, he’d probably have me killed, I’ll try to listen for some truth.

Ugh.

Right-wing bloggers, of course, have made hay out of this and similar diaries on Daily Kos. What Kos’s critics usually fail to note is that the diarists are the equivalent of mere commenters on other sites and don’t necessarily represent the views of the Kos editors (and, in any case, left-wing blogs certainly have no monopoly on stupid rhetoric). Still, the number of Kos diarists last week who were making apologies for Ahmadinejad (or arguing he’s no worse than Bush) does suggest troubling currents swirling among the Netroots.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.