The place that refers to itself by the comical name:
“Foundation for Defense of Democracies” seems to be full of lawyers. One of its
members, Thomas Joscelyn, apparently has the added distinction of being a
senior fellow at the joint. When he writes articles, he does what lawyers do
which is to make his case by citing facts and the law if he is in a court of
law, or citing facts and arguments if he is in the court of public opinion.
He has done that – or tried to – in an article he wrote
under the title: “Obama's Weak Diplomacy with Iran ” which he published on
November 7, 2014 in the Weekly Standard. The trouble is that you go through
1400 words with a question that keeps ringing in your head: What's the point?
You are forced to ask the question because nowhere does it become apparent what
it is that he is arguing about. Eventually, you realize – at the moment he
rests his case – that he never had a case to begin with. You conclude he was
trying to make the readers believe he was arguing a genuine case … and too bad
if the readers didn't get it.
He dishes out all that verbiage with several anti-Obama
diatribes strewn throughout the presentation, and ends with this: “Iran wants the U.S. out of the region.” That's it?
Puzzled, you wonder if he means to say this is a good thing or a bad one; if
the U.S. should take the
hint or reject it; whether America
should stand its ground and fight when push comes to shove or pack up and flee
the region at the first hint of trouble.
Joscelyn seems to take umbrage with the fact that the
leaders of Iran believe in
the doctrine they posted on their website, which reads as follows: “The
conditions of the region are the result of policies that non-regional powers
have adopted in Syria .
Iraq
has the capability to defeat the terrorists. We believe there is no need for
the presence of foreigners in this country. Iran
views the security of Iraq
– a brother and a neighboring country – as its own security.”
So you ask: What's wrong with that? And you find no answer
in the article except for this remark: “How can this be viewed as anything but
a repudiation of Obama's offer?” So be it, you say. But what does it mean in
the grand scheme of things or with the case he is struggling to make? Nothing apparently.
Your puzzlement deepens but then your eyes fall on something. You see the word
DAESH placed inside a quotation, followed by this explanation: [a derogatory
way of referring to the Islamic State.] This being totally false, you start to
get clues as to what is going on.
Knowing what DAESH is, and seeing these people – including
Christiane Amanpour of CNN – struggle to make sense of it, you realize that no
one who speaks Arabic or Farsi is giving them the straight goods. So let me do
it free of charge if only to reduce the level of ignorance on this Dark
(formerly New) World. There are only three vowels in the Arabic Alphabet. They
are the equivalents of “A” of “O” and of “I or Y or E”. Arabic is said to
resemble shorthand because even those few vowels are used sparingly. Instead,
accents (represented usually but not exclusively) like a short dash, are placed
above the consonant to indicate the sound of “A” or below the consonant to
indicate the sound of “I or E”. For example an S with a dash above it is
pronounced “Sa”; with a dash below it is pronounced “See.” The same goes for
the Aleph which is the Arabic for “A” but that is at times pronounced as an “I
or an E” when the accent is marked below it.
Now look at these words: Islaam, Eslam, Aslama. All three
exist in Arabic, and each means something slightly different. But here is the
catch, they are all written almost exactly the same way. They begin with the
Aleph, followed by the equivalent of the S, followed by the equivalent of the
L, followed by the equivalent of the M ... like this: “Eslm”. Only the first
word (where there is a double “aa” in English) is there an Aleph after the L in
Arabic. This word takes an accent below its Aleph and is pronounced “Islaam” to
mean Islam. The second word, “Eslam” is the imperative of a verb that does not
exist in English; it would translate roughly as: become a Muslim or convert to
Islam. The third word “Aslama” is the past form of the word to mean: “he
converted to Islam.” By the way, if that was a woman, you would have written
“Aslamet.” Yes, it's complicated but that's Arabic grammar.
Now that famous word DAESH. It is the acronym for “al-Dawla
al-Islameyah fee al-Eraq wa'l SHam.” It literally translate into: “The country
Islamic in Iraq and the
Sham,” Sham being Arabic for Levant . But
because the Aleph in Islameyah is used inside an acronym, it is does not take
the accent below it. Therefore, it is pronounced as an “A” and not as an “I”.
Which is why you have DAESH instead of DIESH. The made-up word is just an
acronym, and not “a derogatory way of referring to the Islamic State,” like
says Thomas Joscelyn.
Now that you know all this, it will be easy for you to
imagine how wrong these people can be when writing about cultures they know
little or nothing about … relying solely on faulty translations done by people
who should be doing something else for a living.
This is why even a bunch of clowns can get together in America and
concoct some kind of a tank they would call defender of democracies or some
such comical locution, and make Seinfeldian cases about nothing.