Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is planning to throw a rock at Israel during his visit to Lebanon, the New York Times quoted al-Manar TV, Hezbollah’s television station in Lebanon.
After Ahmadinejad’s scheduled meeting with Lebanese officials in Beirut, he plans to tour southern Lebanon, a region close in vicinity to occupied Palestine.
Ahmadinejad will take part in various events during his southern Lebanon visit, and one of the events is the inauguration of a garden where he will perform his symbolic gesture to throw a rock at the direction of Israel.
‘Not welcome’ group tells Ahmadinejad
Meanwhile, a Sunni Islamist group in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli sent a blunt "not welcome" message to Ahmadinejad on Thursday ahead of his visit to the country.
Several banners and pictures of the Iranian leader, who is due in Lebanon October 13-14, went up in the mainly Sunni port city expressing discontent at the visit.
"You are not welcome in Lebanon", read in Arabic one banner hung over a pedestrian bridge in the Abu Samra neighborhood and signed by the Islamic Labour Front-Emergency Committee.
"No to Wilayat al-Faqih" said another banner in a nearby neighborhood, referring to Iran’s brand of Islamic rule.
A picture of the hardline leader in another part of the city bore an X over his face and a message that read "Wilayat al-Faqih is not welcome here".
The doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, as it is called in Iran, grants absolute authority over all matters — religious, social and political — to a marja, or senior spiritual leader.
Next week’s visit will be Ahmadinejad’s first official trip to Lebanon at the invitation of his counterpart Michel Sleiman.
The visit has sparked controversy, with members of the pro-Western parliamentary majority calling Ahmadinejad’s plan to tour the border region with Israel a "provocation" and Washington also expressing concern.
Iran is a key ally of Lebanon’s Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which fought a devastating war with Israel in 2006 and has been blacklisted as a terrorist organization by Washington.
Iran is an overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim country. In multi-confessional Lebanon, Muslims are the majority, with Shiites and Sunnis each accounting for a bit over 30 percent of the four-million population. Around 34 percent are Christians.
Iran’s judiciary warns gold merchants over strike
Iran authorities have threatened to take legal action against gold merchants in Tehran’s main bazaar if they don’t call off their two-week-old anti-tax strike, local media reported Thursday.
Iran’s government has been trying to find ways to boost revenue – including by raising taxes – amid low oil prices and other woes that have hampered the country’s ailing economy. But it has had to be cautious in the face of widespread public discontent.
Several newspapers, including the state-owned Jamejam and the Donya-e Eqtesad economic daily, quoted Tehran chief prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi as saying the "judiciary will confront whoever disturbs public order by closing the bazaar." He did not elaborate.
Tehran’s gold merchants began their strike in September to protest a government plan to impose a 3 percent sales tax. Iran suspended the tax in 2008 after a rare strike by merchants, who fear it could lead to more income tax in the future.
Experts say the tax will make the merchants’ income more transparent.
The merchants – known as bazaaris in Farsi – are a powerful sector, and a series of merchant strikes helped lead to the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the pro-U.S. shah. Since then, the bazaaris have been seen as a religiously conservative bedrock of support for Iran’s Islamic clerical leadership.
The battle over taxes comes as Iran wrestles with a slew of economic troubles.
The country has been hit hard by lower revenues from oil, which brings in some 80 percent of the state’s income. Even before the drop in oil prices, the government of Ahmadinejad talked of dramatically cutting subsidies on fuel, food and other items in a bid to cut the budget.
But so far, the government has stayed away from substantial changes in the subsidies system, apparently wary that it fuel greater price increases and stoke public anger. Authorities say they have succeeded in bringing inflation down to less than 10 percent, but some experts believe it is more than 20 percent on certain basic needs.
Iran’s economy has also been hit by U.N. sanctions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program.