The Ponsoby News latest issue has a fawning article about Golriz Ghahraman.

In that article it says that upon arrival in New Zealand in 1990 when she was nine years old :

Golriz had had little education and spoke only broken English.

But hang on…schooling in Iran starts at age six, so she should have had three years of schooling. She wasn’t living in a war zone as we’ve now discovered, despite her claims to the contrary.

Worse, when she clarified her position on the witnessing of air raids, it as apparently while she was in Tehran on her “school holidays”. They were the unluckiest of holidays, coinciding with the end of the only 53 days where Tehran was targeted by Scud missiles from Iraq.

For the benefit of Ghahraman who condemns US involvement in the Iran-Iraq war and the use of US sourced weapons, a Scud missile is made in Russia…and at that time, Soviet Russia.

Nonetheless, there is another contradiction about her upbringing that needs explaining more fully.

Either she went to school and had those glorious holidays in Tehran at a time when 2 million residents of Tehran were fleeing in the other direction…or she had little education and spoke only broken English. In the meantime she has sure made up for with a classic whiny, question-asking-at-the-end-of-the-sentence Kiwi accent.

None of her multiple stories match up. This MP has been glossing over, hiding and in some instances outright lying about her past.

If only she had just told the truth, but then that was never a really sexy story that would have elevated her so high on the Greens list. Then again, having the close personal support of the leader always helps in that regard.