Twitter account in Rouhani’s name issues ‘fun facts’ about world leaders
At 20, Obama smoked pot, Merkel was a waitress and Assad was a student, read some of the bizarre trivia tweets
A Twitter account in the name of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday unleashed a bizarre but amusing set of informative tweets about world leaders at age 20.
Using the hashtag Presidentat20, the account of @DrRouhani tweeted about US President Barack Obama: “Obama was continuing his education at university at 20. He is said to have been on alcohol and Marijuana then!”
In 2006, two years before he was elected president, Obama famously said of his smoking days: ” When I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point.”
About Russian President Vladimin Putin, the account wrote that at age 20, he was working for “Russian security agencies.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was honored with a tweet in which she was initially referred to in the masculine: “Angela_Merkel got his degree at the age of 20 while she was working as a waitress, too.”
UK Prime Minister David Cameron — the only non-president on the list — “was working as a researcher at a Conservative Party’s research center and was a member of the notorious Bullingdon Club,” an Oxford University exclusive drinking society known for trashing pubs, dorms and restaurants.
“We all do stupid things when we are young and we should learn the lessons,” Cameron told the BBC in 2011 in response to a question about his Bullingdon days.
The account preceded the set of tweets by asking if followers (over 25,000) knew “what the great presidents of the world had been doing at the age of 20? coming soon…”
The account in the Iranian president’s name seemed to be going through the list of leaders heading the P5+1 negotiations with Tehran over its controversial nuclear program, which are set to resume next week. The P5+1 is made up of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the US, the UK, Russia, China and France — plus Germany. But there were still no tweets about what French President Francois Hollande or what the recently appointed Chinese leader Xi Jingping may have been doing at the tender age of 20.
Syrian President Bashar Assad, included in the list, received quite a tame reference with “was studying medicine at university of Damascus at the age of 20.”
As for “himself,” the account chose to reveal that at that age, Rouhani “used to speak against the Shah in support of Imam Khomeini.”
It’s safe to assume that the twitter account in Rouhani’s name will not reveal to its followers that at age 20, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a team leader in the Sayeret Matkal special forces unit of the IDF.
It is unclear whether this account is really used by the Iranian president, although it has tweeted statements by Rouhani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and has information and news from Iran.
Another account in the name of the president, @HassanRouhani, has significantly more followers (over 128,000) and was the account used to issue the famous well-wishing Rosh Hashanah greeting in September this year, after which a top adviser to the president denied that Rouhani even had a Twitter account.
However, the statements and information in that account have often been cited by media organizations as being reliable and verifiable.