Mean Girls and meaner trolls: the rise of Twitter diplomacy

You can tell a lot about a leader by the diplomats they choose to represent them. Brezhnev had Anatoly Dobrynin, Nixon had Henry Kissinger, and Benjamin Netanyahu has Regina George. The queen bitch of North Shore High, fictional setting of the 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls, is blunt, conniving and vicious with a mid-hallway putdown. Played by sweetness personified Rachel McAdams but scripted by the acid Tina Fey, Regina is not someone you’d like to encounter in double French — or at Camp David. That is no doubt why the Israelis selected her as the latest face of digital hasbara.

Ayatollah Khamenei — probably not a connoisseur of high school chick flicks — had a run-in with Regina on Monday. Iran’s Supreme Leader is on Twitter, natch, and he posted a cheery message to his 500,000 followers: ‘Our stance against Israel is the same stance we have always taken. #Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.’