Iran: How "Ahmadinejad v. Paul the Octopus" Became a Global Showdown

It was only a sentence in a very, very long speech.

After a rather slow start --- "if one really makes a big success of it, the middle age will be the period in which what was achieved in youth would be consolidated" --- President Ahmadinejad's talk at the closing ceremony of the Iranian Youth Festival in Tehran last Friday was full of juicy soundbites.

There was the denunciation of a US-led plot "to carry out a military invasion of one or two countries in the Middle East, which are our friends, with the help of...disgraced Israelis". There was the portrayal of a deceitful Russian President Dmitry Medvedev offering support by "perform[ing] at a US show". There was the declaration, "The Iranian nation will crush hundreds of America's propagandist plays with its will and unity."

Little wonder, then, that this sentence initially slipped by with little notice: "Recently in the World Championship [football's World Cup] you saw that those who proclaim to have reached the peaks of history wanted to manipulate people's minds through superstition, an octopus, fortune-telling and such things."

Enter the magic of the German newspaper Bild. On Monday, their intrepid reporters turned Ahmadinejad's aside into the Main Event: "He incites against Israel, against the US and the West in general --- but now the crazy Iranian dictator is going after Paul the Octopus!...For Ahmadinejad, Paul is a symbol of the propaganda and superstitions of the West."

Paul the Octopus, for those who have been away from Planet Earth this summer, was the unexpected star of the 2010 World Cup, picking the winner in all of Germany's matches (including, at great risk to his life, Spain's defeat of the Germans in the semi-final) and then calling the Spanish victory over Holland in the final. He had also allegedly intervened in Iranian politics, calling an ultimate win for opposition figure Mir Hossein Mousavi over the Supreme Leader.

Forget minor events like Ayatollah Khamenei's "I am the Rule of the Prophet" fatwa or the manoeuvres against the Iranian President. Paul v. Mahmoud was the story, sometimes the only story --- once you looked past mythical or real nuclear weapons, of course --- on Iran.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Daily Telegraph of London, which has a penchant for Wacky Ahmadinejad stories (see their superlative "Mahmoud is a Jew" effort), proclaimed, "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian leader, says Paul the Octopus, the sea creature that correctly predicted the outcome of World Cup games, is a symbol of all that is wrong with the western world." (There was no mention of Bild for its investigative coup.) And by Wednesday, British tabloids such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, as well as the broadsheet The Guardian, were reprinting the story with minor changes in wording (although The Guardian deserves a bonus point for the headline, "West Spreads Evil Tentacles into Iran").

Time magazine picked up the tale --- "[Paul] just calls it like it is — or will be". Rory Fitzgerald at The Huffington Post attempted satire by penning Paul's response: "He...said that he had never before seen such a lack of a sense of humor in a human being, despite the fact that he lives in Germany." Fox News posted the item in its "Science and Technology" section. IsraelPolitik, "The Political Blog of the State of Israel", jumped in, "If Paul the Octopus is on Ahmadinejad’s 'hitlist', no one is safe."

By Wednesday afternoon, there were so many reprints or minor variations of the tale --- all without noting the original Ahmadinejad sentence, all without crediting Bild --- that The Los Angeles Times (which credited The Daily Telegraph) was publishing a round-up.

Is there a moral here? Probably not. It's just a tale of how the world works, when the fatwa of a Supreme Leader --- a Supreme Leader who may be in political trouble --- just can't match up to the scenario of Bad Guy Politician v. Eight-Legged Psychic.

And you don't even need Paul --- or Mahmoud for that matter --- to tell you that.

[Thanks to Borzou Daragahi for sending me a full copy of Ahmadinejad's speech]