I first heard about the Telegraph's "Ahmadinejad is Jewish" exposé on Facebook. The comments came flooding onto my coworker's wall. Among my favorites: "hahahhahahaha oh mannnnnnnnn this is so funny right now to the point where i cant even say the wordsssss."

That's certainly how a lot of bloggers felt about it. In fact, Telegraph blogger Damian Thompson used "Hahahahaha" as his nut graf.

The Telegraph claimed that an identification document Ahmadinejad held up in one of his election photographs showed his birth name listed as Sabourjian, a common Iranian Jewish name. Since the original story was published, the Guardian interviewed several Ahmadinejad biographers and Iranian scholars who claimed that Sabourjian wasn't necessarily a Jewish name and, furthermore, that the Iranian leader's mother was actually a direct descendant of Mohammed.

The bickering between the two papers hasn't been as vigorous as I'd expect from the British press. The Telegraph has yet to issue a response to the Guardian's piece (published Monday). That may be because the Telegraph relied heavily on a single photograph to support much of the story, and only offered two related articles in the following days: a short piece that said there were 25,000 Jews living in Iran, and another article on celebrities with Jewish ancestry, including Elvis and the Queen. Not exactly the in-depth background articles I would have expected.

As a news consumer with zero expertise on the origin of Iranian surnames, I tend to trust the multi-sourced reporting in the Guardian's piece, but I'd like to hear what the Telegraph can come up with to support its claims. Wall Street Journal blogger James Taranto agreed, writing, "We must confess we are a bit skeptical. Sabourjian sounds like an Armenian name to us."

As I note above, as soon as the story was published, it began to make the rounds on Facebook and Twitter. Five days later, chatter around the story is quickly fading. Whether it's true or not, the story has impacted Ahmadinejad's reputation in the region and around the world. The Telegraph's Damian Thompson remarked, "I mean, think about it: this venomous anti-Semite and Holocaust denier will never be able to play the anti-Israel card again without members of his audience sniggering. 'How can you attack your own cousins?' they'll ask."

Even if Ahmadinejad wasn't born to Jewish parents, there was still a reaction story waiting to be written. How did Iranian Jews take the news? In a post titled "He Does Sorta Look It," Time magazine's Joe Klein writes, "One of the more popular rumors in Iran when I visited last June was that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Jewish."

If he is, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote one of the most interesting ledes: "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's scathing attacks against Israel and his repeated denials of the Holocaust could be motivated by a desire to conceal his own Jewish roots, an Iran expert told the Daily Telegraph on Saturday."

This self-hating Jew angle swept through the blogosphere this week, but with so little follow-up reporting on the Ahmadinejad case, it didn't factor heavily into the subsequent coverage.

Unless a resourceful reporter can get a DNA sample from Ahmadinejad and send it to the Genographic Project, we'll probably never know his true ancestry. But that doesn't mean we should stop asking questions. Did the Telegraph story lead or follow the "self-hating Jew" thread weaving through the blogosphere? And what about the silence of the Muslim press? Is Al Jazeera above reporting on a thinly sourced story that has traction mainly among new media "journalists" who are willing to let "Hahahahaha" pass for a nut-graf? Or is their keeping mum akin to the taciturn reporting in the Christian press around the outing of right-wing homophobes like Ted Haggard and Larry Craig?

Stay tuned...and keep digging.