Image of Ahmadinejad Clasping Hands With Chavez’s Mother Angers Clerics, So His Supporters Turn to Photoshop

Marcelo Garcia/Miraflores Press Office, via Associated Press President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran with Hugo Chávez’s mother, Elena Frías, at her son’s funeral last week in Caracas.

To his critics in the West, the image of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clasping hands with the grief-stricken mother of Hugo Chávez at her son’s funeral last week in Caracas might have seemed like a rare glimpse of a firebrand politician’s softer side. But the clerics who rule Iran saw something very different: proof that the Islamic Republic’s official representative had flaunted that nation’s absolute ban on physical contact between unrelated men and women

As the Iranian press blogger Arash Karami explained, the reaction to the photograph was swift and furious from religious conservatives. One of them, Hojat al-Islam Hossein Ibrahimi of the Society of Militant Clergy of Tehran, called on the authorities to ensure that the candidates to replace Mr. Ahmadinejad in the upcoming election be carefully screened to ensure that they understand what is prohibited by the laws of Shiite Islam. “In relation to what is allowed and what is forbidden,” he said, “we know that no unrelated women can be touched unless she is drowning at sea or needs medical treatment.”

In response, some Ahmadinejad supporters, including a cleric who was part of his entourage at the funeral and witnessed the interaction, insisted that the photograph of the president apparently hugging Mr. Chávez’s mother, Elena Frías, was a “forg! ery,” created by digital manipulation. Others circulated online what they said was the image before it was altered in Photoshop, showing Mr. Ahmadinejad in the same embrace with an older man.

Unfortunately for Mr. Ahmadinejad’s camp, those assertions were quickly rendered inoperative by a series of countervailing truths.

First of all, the photograph of the president consoling Ms. Frías was not distributed by a Western news organization seeking to cause him trouble, but by the Venezuelan government, which provided identical copies of the image to three leading photo agencies.

Second, a conservative Iranian news site, Entekhab, proved in short order that the image of the president with the older man was, in fact, the fake. A side-by-side comparison produced by Entekhab showed that this image had been created by lifting the head f Mohamed El Baradei, the former chief of the United Nations nuclear agency, from a previously published photograph of him greeting another, male, Iranian official with a kiss in 2007.

A screenshot from an Iranian news site, showing how two genuine news photographs were edited to create a false image of Iran’s president hugging Mohamed El Baradei.

Then, perhaps inevitably for an event carried live on television networks around the wor! ld, video! soon appeared online that seemed to show Mr. Ahmadinejad attempting to comfort Ms. Frías in just the manner pictured in the still image. As a Zapruder-like close analysis of the footage from the Iranian exile news site Gooya showed, two figures who can be clearly seen in the background of the photograph, the cleric in the president’s entourage and a woman in dark sunglasses, could be seen clearly in the exact same positions in the video.

An Iranian exile news site’s video analysis of images of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the funeral of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela last week.

In something of a rearguard action, as the press blogger Mr. Karami noted, a news site close to the president then tried to apply another sort of spin. The site, Shabakeye Iran, explained that Mr. Ahmadinejad often avids shaking hands with women on foreign trips by clasping his own hands together “in the manner of people from East Asia,” and provided several archival photographs of that apparently working a treat.

As Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, seemed to understand, his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, frequently avoid shaking hands with women he meets by clasping his hands together in a gesture of greeting.

When Mr. Ahmadinejad made this gesture of greeting at t! he funera! l last week, the site said, Mr. Chávez’s “grieving mother, with tears coming down from her eyes, suddenly put her hands on top of his.”

In some respects, the incident recalled a similar controversy that erupted in 2007, when Mr. Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, the reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami, was caught on video briefly shaking the hands of three women, as he made his way through a crowd of well-wishers following an address in the Italian city of Udine.

Video of Iran’s former president, Mohammad Khatami, apparently shaking the hands of three women in the Italian city of Udine in 2007.

As the Guardian correspondent in Tehran at the time, Robert Tait, reported, fter a similar outcry, and threats to strip Mr. Khatami of his religious position, the former president also attempted to deny that the images were fake “and insisted he had not shaken hands with any of the women who had approached him.”