Like many others, I did not understand how there could be any confusion between Syria and Bahrain or how the Arab Spring became “an Islamic Renaissance”.
Changes as such are difficult to occur no matter how complicated the spoken language is. Although committing such a mistake appears impossible it seems that everything is possible in Iran which is currently “the keeper” of the so-called non-aligned states.
What happened during the last summit in Tehran was more than strange; it was a sarcastic and explicit political bias against the backdrop of all the killings taking place in happening in Syria. Iranian state television, which sponsored the “non-aligned” activities, committed a mistake in its live broadcast when translating the speech of Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi, in Tehran. It substituted Mursi’s mention of the Syrian regime as Bahrain and changed the term “Arab Spring” to “Islamic Renaissance” in addition to other altered words that apparently “confused” the interpreter who probably thought that only the Iranian people or their supreme leader could understand Persian. He assumed that no one would pay attention to this confusion except fr, the guardians of state of affairs of the Islamic Republic.
I would like to thank Iranian activists who wrote on their blogs and websites about this incident which they considered an insult that targets them, not just other individuals. They want the world to realize the essence of “the objection” based on what happened at the Tehran summit.
Describing the incident as an exaggerated mistake is as big a joke as Iran hosting the non-aligned summit. Ironically, Iran’s main concern is to defend and ally itself with the murderous regime in Syria. It is even willing to embarrass itself in front of the whole world just to give the Syrian regime the chance to continue its violence and killing in the name of this axis.
The mistake committed by Iranian television was definitely not a mistake.
It is the clear reflection of the burning crisis in a broken heart. It is a kind of hallucination that the perpetrator judges as unexposed. What happened in Tehran is the reflection of the fall of a discourse and the end of logic. It reflects the crisis that we are witnessing as a public and how Iranian society has sensed the change. They simply transform Syria to Bahrain and the Arab Spring to an Islamic Renaissance and then issue a statement of apology in which they do not offer clarifications. I mean what mistake would change Syria to Bahrain?
Syria becomes Bahrain using the same logic that presents Bashar al-Assad as a gentleman defending freedom and pictures of Daraya’s victims as terrorist gangs that should be killed and eradicated until the last remaining child.
However, the problem is that no matter how many times we expose this discourse and discount its language, the logic will never change and the gap will keep on widening.
Didn’t President Assad receive the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross and welcome the committee’s work in Syria as long as it was “independent and neutral”, according to the official statement?
(The writer is a columnist with Asharq al-Awsat where this article was first published on Sept. 6, 2012.)
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