Let’s be serious now

N IRANIAN news agency has been fooled into publishing a fake poll from a satirical US website that claimed many Americans prefer Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Barack Obama.

The Onion, based in Chicago, said 77 percent of rural workers would rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Ahmadinejad than Obama. The piece was repeated word for word by the Fars news agency.

Another piece in The Onion depicts Ahmadinejad glowing green and telling UN delegates he’s an actual weapon of mass destruction.

Not too long ago it reported that Congress was considering moving

Afrom Washington, and this was given splash treatment in China in the state-run Beijing Evening News.

All this is irresponsible and childish. I hope it doesn’t detract from the credibility of my own despatch to was Fars news agency, to the effect that Ahmadinejad is 43 percent more popular in SA than president Jacob Zuma; that he’s 48 percent more popular than former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema; that Ahmadinejad is considered a certainty to win the Idols song competition; and that Heyneke Meyer has selected him to play flyhalf against the All Blacks on Saturday.

Let’s have none of this frivolity. We foreign correspondents have standards to maintain.

E-mail Mercidler@inl.co.za Letters PO Box 47549, Durban, 4000 Fax 031 308 2333 THE IDLER Graham Linscott