From The Angry Arab: Arab attitudes to Ahmadinajad

The position of Arab intellectual and public sympathy for Ahmadinajad needs to be explained (not justified). It is not that Arabs like Ahdmadinajad per se: but they really hate his enemies so much that they make the choice. The fact that Ahmadinajad's enemies are the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, not to mention Israel and the US, endears him to many Arabs. Having said that: I personally don't trust the Iranian regime on the question of Palestine. Remember that it dealt with Israel during the Iran-Iraq war. And if there is one that I distrust and despise most, it is Rafsanjani--who one should remember is the fruit of the Iranian regime itself. If the regime was not corrupt at it core, a Rafsanjani would not have emerged. The genuine Iranian reform movement (and I am not talking about the Allahu Akbar crowd of Mousavi) needs to distance itself from Rafsanjani, just as the Syrian opposition movement (finally) distanced itself from `Abdul-Halim Khaddam. By the way, it is hilarious when Zizek dismisses talk about Ahmadinajad as a leftist (and I of course agree because Ahmadinajad and the Islamic regime don't deserve the label of the left), and then implies that Mousavi or Rafsanjani are leftists. In sum, Neither Ahmadinajad, nor Mousavi or Rafsanjani. Chant after me NOW.