Peter Kohanloo

Last week, Foreign Policy ran a curious item by the Iranian-American journalist and commentator Reza Aslan. Juxtaposing selected quotations from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and Republican presidential aspirant Rick Santorum, Aslan challenged readers to determine “Who said what?” The purpose of this sophomoric exercise was to demonstrate how Khamenei and Santorum are supposedly theocratic mirror images of each other. What seems to have eluded Aslan, however, was the basic fact that Khamenei is a merciless Iranian tyrant, while Santorum is a duly elected former United States Senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Such vile moral equivocation is typical of Aslan, who has established a reputation for apologizing for Iran’s mullahs. Nevertheless it inspired me to devise another quiz exclusively for the readers of Iranian.com: Who said what? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Reza Aslan?

Remember—no cheating!

1. “Iran has among the fairest and freest elections in the whole of the Middle East.”

2. “Every Iranian has a cousin in the Revolutionary Guard.”

3. “Iran … has a robust political culture.”

4. “Iran has never attempted or even thought about attempting a terror attack on U.S. soil.”

5. “Iranians decide who they want to be president.”

6. “The six people who ran [for president] in 2005 offered a greater diversity of religious and political thought than any Republican or Democrat.”

7. “The Iranian constitution allows everyone to run [for president].”

8. “No analyst has yet to provide a single thing Iran government [sic] gains in assassinating a meaningless Saudi figure on U.S. soil.”

(Answers: 1. Aslan; 2. Aslan; 3. Aslan; 4. Aslan; 5. Aslan; 6. Aslan; 7. Aslan; 8. Aslan.)

Peter Kohanloo’s writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Weekly Standard, and the National Post, among other publications.