Iran and Israel: Lost in translation?

Iran and Israel: Lost in translation?

Babak Yektafar explains the meaning behind Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rhetoric

Thursday May 15th, 2008

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterates controversial statements calling for an "end to the Zionist regime," leading different news services to translate his words in different ways, some making them sound more belligerent than others. The Real News Network Senior Editor Paul Jay speaks to Babak Yektafar of Washington Prism to discuss the meaning of the statements.

Babak Yektafar, Editor-in-Chief of Washington Prism is a graduate of Farleigh Dickinson University with a B.A. in Communications. From 1999 to 2005, Babak was a producer with C-SPAN network’s national live morning program, Washington Journal.

Transcript:

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, THE REAL NEWS NETWORK: US President George Bush arrived in the Middle East on Wednesday for a five-day tour of the region. He landed in Jerusalem, where he took part in celebrations surrounding the 60th anniversary of Israel's creation. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reacted with a searing warning to Israel, which has elicited international scrutiny over the exact meaning of his words. To discuss the latest comments about Israel from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, we're joined from Washington by Babak Yektafar, editor-in-chief of Washington Prism. Welcome back, Babak.

BABAK YEKTAFAR, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, WASHINGTONPRISM.ORG: Thank you for having me.

JAY: Early Wednesday morning in the city of Gorgan, Iran, just outside of Tehran, President Ahmadinejad, speaking to a crowd of supporters, had this to say:

(CLIP BEGINS)

MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, IRANIAN PRESIDENT (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): The Zionist regime is dying. The region's nations hate this fake and criminal regime and if they find any opportunity, they will root out this fake regime.

(CLIP ENDS)

JAY: The subtitling that we showed you came from a translation provided to us by Associated Press. Reuters translate it like this: [text on screen] "given the briefest chance, to regional nations, they will destroy it"—"destroy it" clearly meaning the regime, the Zionist regime. Some of the publications seem to stretch it to the destruction of Israel. This reminds us of 2005, when President Ahmadinejad made another speech that was translated around the world in two very different ways. Most of English media heard a translation saying that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth, whereas an Agence France-Presse translated it and others translated it as saying the Zionist regime is doomed to disappear. So I guess what I'm asking you here is there's two very different camps of translating what Ahmadinejad is saying. One is, you could say, a somewhat observer's voice, in grammatical terms a more passive voice: the Israeli regime is doomed; the Israeli regime will collapse. But another translation is far more active, which is to destroy the regime; sometimes it gets, more often than not in American media, as destroying Israel. So can you tell us what in fact is Ahmadinejad saying?

YEKTAFAR: Well, first of all, as you know, Paul, one of the difficulties of dealing with language, be it language used in the Middle East or English or any other, is these words, the nuances of the words, the context within which these words are being used, the word that he used yesterday in his speech in Farsi is the word ["ree-shih-KAN"], which literally translates into uprooting or pulling out from the roots the physical entity that's being uprooted. You also mentioned the phrase or the word that was used in 2005, which started this whole issue. Again, that's the word—he used the word ["math"], which given the context, given as to how it's being used, it means disappearance. And he at the time meant, and all throughout, I believe, has maintained that he is essentially talking about the physical state, physical borders of the state of Israel, and the government, or the regime, as he mentions, "the fake regime" he often uses. And I think in a lot of ways not only Ahmadinejad himself but the hierarchy of Iran's Islamic republic have tried to portray that this does not mean that they want to wipe out the Jewish population or anything like that. They constantly refer to the Jewish minorities in Iran and the representation that they have in the Iranian Parliament and so on and so forth. They're always as careful, as careful as they can be, to make sure that the reference is to the existence of the state of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, the whole issue.

JAY: Now, the Iranian government does not recognize the state of Israel.

YEKTAFAR: No, they don't.

JAY: Ahmadinejad's made it clear he doesn't recognize the legitimacy of the state or the borders of that country.

YEKTAFAR: Exactly.

JAY: But it's one thing not to recognize it, and it's quite another to say you're in some active way going to destroy it, which is what we keep hearing over and over again from the White House and from most of the media. In terms of what Ahmadinejad is saying to Iranians in Iran, what is the real meaning of what he's saying?

YEKTAFAR: He is approaching it in two ways. I don't think I have heard, read anything that specifically portrays this as some sort of attack by Iran against the state of Israel. I think a great deal of reaction that we've seen actually is because of the fear that the Islamic republic has of a possible attack by Israel, and this has escalated with the United States being there. What Ahmadinejad has portrayed the situation is more of not a direct attack by Iran, but encouraging the people in some sort of an uprising, parallel to the whole idea that, again going back to the whole justice issue and the way he feels about the Shiite hidden Imam whose return is going to herald the end of the world and, you know, justice to the world and all that, that if the will of the people and some sort of an uprising is there among the neighbors, among the oppressed people of Palestine, among other Arab nations, and so on and so forth then Israel has no chance, *and it will be destroyed.

JAY: *But clearly Ahmadinejad's language often is very provocative. He's not a fool—he knows how this is going to play in international public opinion. He knows what organizing a Holocaust conference is going to play out in world public opinion. To some extent, he doesn't care, he wants to send that message, or is he just completely focused on Iranian public opinion and it doesn't matter too much to him how it plays out internationally?

YEKTAFAR: Well, a big part of it is the way he is focused on the Iranian internal politics, and that to the extent that he wants to have a system, essentially, or he wants the Islamic republic to go back to a kind of system that he believed made the Islamic republic the way it is, (A). And (B), a lot of it again comes from the fact of the mistrust that he has and a great deal of people, the ones, the veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, the mistrust that they have of the western world, and the way that the western world has treated Iran, as well as other countries in the Middle East. And, again, going back to the issue of Israel in the speeches that he has, that's his thing, that the state of Israel—and he calls it a fake regime—is there at the insistence and backing of other criminal powers, and usually this means the United States and Great Britain.

JAY: Now, people in the press and certainly the American government government portray Iran rather monolithically, at least the rulers of Iran. Ahmadinejad represents a very specific faction within the Iranian ruling elite. Is the kind of provocative rhetoric that he uses, does it represent the supreme leader? Does it represent people like Rafsanjani? How unified are they around this kind of positioning?

YEKTAFAR: That's the interesting thing about Iranian politics and the dynamics of the Iranian politics. There is no such directive, as far as I have observed and I can tell, by the supreme leader that this is how it should be done. However, there are groups here that are at play in trying to get the nod from the supreme leader. Remember, the supreme leader has never essentially taken a specific position in regards to foreign policy, even domestic policy. He essentially acts as an arbitrator, and he's very comfortable doing that. So when people like Ahmadinejad and people who think like him come up and say things of that nature, he has a tendency of seeing how does it play? How does it play internally? How does it play externally? If he's really unsatisfied, he will tell them to stop, you know, and clamp down, or he mobilizes other forces there to say things contrary to what Mr. Ahmadinejad has said. And we've heard things from Mr. Larijani, the former nuclear negotiator, who's insisting that, you know, we should start negotiating with the West and the United States, or Mr. Rafsanjani, who says that this kind of rhetoric and talk is not beneficial to the future of Iran, and all it's going to do is that it's going to invite trouble from, you know, various forces that are surrounding us.

JAY: Is Iran actually a credible threat to Israel? Or is this really all about Hamas and Hezbollah?

YEKTAFAR: Well, you have to realize all this talk about—I've said it many times—about Iran being this power or emerging power, there really isn't much there that tells me that Iran is a power that can be in a conventional war, that can have that kind of a power.

JAY: Babak, we're going to end the section here, and we're going to start a part 2 interview and discuss just what is Iran's role in the region and its relationship to Hezbollah, Hamas, and particularly what's going on in Lebanon now. Please join us for part 2 of our interview with Babak Yektafar. Thank you.

DISCLAIMER:

Please note that TRNN transcripts are typed from a recording of the program; The Real News Network cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

US plot to nail Iran backfires

US plot to nail Iran backfires
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The George W Bush administration's plan to create a new crescendo of accusations against Iran for allegedly smuggling arms to Shi'ite militias in Iraq has encountered not just one but two setbacks.

The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki refused to endorse US charges of Iranian involvement in arms smuggling to Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, and a plan to show off a huge collection of Iranian arms captured in and around the central city of Karbala had to be called off after it was discovered that none of the arms was of Iranian origin.

The news media's failure to report that the arms captured from Shi'ite militiamen in Karbala did not include a single Iranian weapon shielded the US military from a big blow to its anti-Iran strategy.

The Bush administration and top Iraq commander General David Petraeus had plotted a sequence of events that would build domestic US political support for a possible strike against Iran over its "meddling" in Iraq, and especially its alleged export of arms to Shi'ite militias.

The plan was keyed to a briefing document to be prepared by Petraeus on the alleged Iranian role in arming and training Shi'ite militias that would be revealed to the public after the Maliki government had endorsed it, and that would be used to accuse Iran publicly.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen told reporters on April 25 that Petraeus was preparing a briefing to be given "in the next couple of weeks" that would provide detailed evidence of "just how far Iran is reaching into Iraq to foment instability". The centerpiece of the Petraeus document, completed in late April, was the claim that arms captured in the southern city of Basra bore 2008 manufacture dates on them.

US officials also planned to display to reporters Iranian weapons captured in both Basra and Karbala. That sequence of media events would fill the airwaves for several days with spectacular news framing Iran as the culprit in Iraq, aimed at breaking down US congressional and public resistance to the idea that Iranian bases supporting the meddling would have to be attacked.

But events in Iraq did not follow the script. On May 4, after an Iraqi delegation had returned from meetings in Iran, Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said in a news conference that Maliki was forming his own cabinet committee to investigate the US claims. "We want to find tangible information and not information based on speculation," he said.

Another adviser to Maliki, Haider Abadi, told the Los Angeles Times' Alexandra Zavis that Iranian officials had given the delegation evidence disproving the charges. "For us to be impartial, we have to investigate," Abadi said.

Dabbagh made it clear the government considered the US evidence of Iranian government arms smuggling to be insufficient. "The proof we want is weapons which are shown to have been made in Iran," Dabbagh said in a separate interview with Reuters. "We want to trace back how they reached [Iraq], who is using them, where are they getting it."

Senior US military officials were clearly furious with Maliki for backtracking on the issue. "We were blindsided by this," one of them told Zavis.

Then the Bush administration's plot encountered another serious problem.

The Iraqi commander in Karbala had announced on May 3 that he had captured a large quantity of Iranian arms in and around the city. Earlier, the US military had said that it was up to the Iraqi government to display captured Iranian weapons, and now an Iraqi commander was eager to do just that. Petraeus' staff alerted US media to a major news event in which the captured Iranian arms in Karbala would be displayed and then destroyed.

But when US munitions experts went to Karbala to see the alleged cache of Iranian weapons, they found nothing they could credibly link to Iran.

The US command had to inform reporters that the event had been canceled, explaining that it had all been a "misunderstanding". In his press briefing on May 7, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner gave some details of the captured weapons in Karbala but refrained from charging any Iranian role.

The cancelation of the planned display was a significant story, in light of the well-known intention of the US command to convict Iran on the arms smuggling charge. Nevertheless, it went unreported in the world's news media.

A report on the Los Angeles Times' blog "Babylon and Beyond" by Baghdad correspondent Tina Susman was the only small crack in the media blackout. The story was not carried in the Times itself.

The real significance of the captured weapons collected in Karbala was not the obvious US political embarrassment over an Iraqi claim of captured Iranian arms that turned out to be false. It was the deeper implication of the arms that were captured.

Karbala is one of Iraq's eight largest cities, and it has long been the focus of major fighting between the Mahdi Army and its Shi'ite foes. Muqtada declared his ceasefire last August after a major battle there, but fighting resumed there and in Basra when the government launched a major operation in March. Thousands of Mahdi Army fighters have fought in Karbala over the past year.

The official list of weapons captured in Karbala includes nine mortars, four anti-aircraft missiles, 45 rocket propelled grenade (RPG) weapons, 800 RPG missiles and 570 roadside explosive devices. The failure to find a single item of Iranian origin among these heavier weapons, despite the deeply entrenched Mahdi Army presence over many months, suggests that the dependence of the Mahdi Army on arms manufactured in Iran is actually quite insignificant.

The Karbala weapons cache also raises new questions about the official US narrative about the Shi'ite militia's use of explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) as an Iranian phenomenon. Among the captured weapons mentioned by Major General Raied Shaker Jawdat, commander of the Karbala police, were what he called "150 anti-tank bombs", as distinguished from ordinary roadside explosive devices.

An "anti-tank bomb" is a device that is capable of penetrating armor, which has been introduced to the US public as the EFP. The US claim that Iran was behind their growing use in Iraq was the centerpiece of the Bush administration's case for an Iranian "proxy war" against the US in early 2007.

Soon after that, however, senior US military officials conceded that EFPs were in fact being manufactured in Iraq itself, although they insisted that EFPs alleged exported by Iran were superior to the home-made version.

The large cache of EFPs in Karbala which are admitted to be non-Iranian in origin underlines the reality that the Mahdi Army procures its EFPs from a variety of sources.

But for the media blackout of the story, the large EFP discovery in Karbala would have further undermined the credibility of the US military's line on Iran's export of the EFPs to Iraqi fighters.

Apparently understanding the potential political difficulties that the Karbala EFP find could present, Bergner omitted any reference to them in his otherwise accurate accounting of the Karbala weapons.

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

(Inter Press Service)