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By Ira Sharkansky
 JERUSALEM—There is a story afoot that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was born Jewish. Details are that the family had been Sabourjian, a well known Jewish name, and that Mahmoud's parents converted to Islam and changed their name when the president was a child.
Will the story have legs? Will it serve to embarrass or even unseat the Holocaust denier?
He would not be the first closet Jew who was anti-Semitic. A junior league variety was Daniel Burros, member of the American Nazi Party and Kleagle of the New York State branch of the Ku Klux Klan. He committed suicide hours after someone made public his Jewish background. More prominent was Alois Schicklgruber. He became Adolph Hitler, and is said to have been concerned that his illegitimate roots included a Jewish grandfather. The parents of Karl Marx converted before his birth. In On The Jewish Question and other works, Marx equated Judaism with the evils of capitalism.
A better story is Benjamin Disraeli. Political opponents mocked him for being a Hebrew. Rather than acting against his
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Jewish origins, he argued that Christianity was "completed Judaism."
Within hours of the Ahmadinejad story appearing in Israeli media, a radio station brought in an expert who claimed it was highly unlikely. He asserted that there is no record of any Jewish families living in the village where Ahmadinejad was born. He traced the story to a political adversary, who made it up in order to embarrass the president. A television station broadcast clips from Ahmadinejad's opponents claiming he was a Zionist Jew and a spy for Israel. They showed him in a yarmulke against the background of an Israeli flag.
If Iranian activists curse one another for being Jewish, one ought to be careful before making heroes of Ahmadinejad's opponents..
Might this become another case of overenthusiastic Israelis backing a flawed cause, such as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction? Israeli officials promoted that story in the Bush White House. The failure to find anything affected the reputations of the American president and Israeli intelligence.
Before all of this broke, a friend from the gym, a religious Jew, spoke about the irony of Ahmadinejad being his distant relative.
So is he or isn't he?
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