Who cares?! (Part II)

     I'm pretty sure that most people are over this, but the record must be corrected...

     It wasn't only my friend Natalia who legitimately wondered a) whether the story about Ahmadinejad's "Jewish roots" was an April Fool's joke played by some fool so foolish he didn't know that we are in the month of October, and/or b) what all the fuss was about: he's still a dangerous hate-filled doofus ready to nuke the world. 

     So today the Guardian has apparently corrected the record. The headline?: Ahmadinejad has no Jewish roots. The theory of his Jewishness was based on the slim evidence of the etymology of his family's name, "Sabourjian" (before they changed it to Ahmadinejad when Mahmoud was 4 years old). There was the usual hand-wringing that followed the announcement of his Jewish roots-- "Now the world will blame the Jews for his ridiculousness!"-- but what most strikes me is the non-chalantness with which the various reports dissected what the existence (or non-existence) of Jewish roots might mean. Meir Javedanfar, of the Guardian, concludes,

According to Ahmadinejad's relatives the new name emphasised the family's piety and their dedication to their religion and its founder. This is something that the president and his relatives in Tehran and Aradan have maintained to the present day. Not because they are trying to deny their past, but because they are proud of it.

What past is this reporter talking about? The Sabourjians' life in Iran? The history of all Iran, including both the persecution of Jews and the peaceful co-existence of Jews and Muslims? Why, all of a sudden, is the Sabourjian-family's past defined only by whether they were Jewish or non-Jewish? Either way, they lived with Jews in their midst-- if we dig far enough, I'm sure we could discover some sort of kinship between the Sabourjian-family and some other (definitively?) Jewish family. And this is probably true of any family that has lived in lands where (openly) Jewish Jews live. The problem is the very division of pasts into Jewish and non-Jewish. Or black and white. Or x or y. 

     The point is, if there is a distinction between A and B, and if they are distinguished in contrast to one another, ipso facto, their histories-- or rather, their very beings, their existence as distinct letters of the alphabet-- depend on their relation ship to one another. A is not A without B, and B is not B without A.