I’m not qualified at all to translate Persian into English, so I look to people who are fluent in Persian to do that kind of work for me. Professor Juan Cole tells me that Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said our president has a mental illness. To explain his translation, he does a little philology which seems reasonable to me.
[Rouhani] said that in addition, “the White House is confronting mental illness (ma`luliyat-i dhihni).”
The phrase he used comes from medieval Arabic medicine. An `illah is an etiology or cause for a disease. Someone stricken with a symptom is `alil, i.e. sick. Some purists have argued that `alil, which signifies a person to whom something has been done, is more accurate than ma`luliyat, which has the marker of an abstract noun (like the English “-ness”) attached to a passive participle. But be that as it may, both `alil and ma`lul have come to mean “ill” in Persian, with these high-falutin’ Arabic words equivalent to the simpler Persian bimar.
Ma`luliyat-i dhihni is thus means precisely “mental illness.”
It does not suggest impaired intelligence, just impaired sanity.
I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of what Professor Cole is saying here, although I’m certainly willing to listen to other opinions. Even in English, the term “mental illness” is poorly defined, but it is not commonly applied to people who are born with mental disabilities. The suggestion is usually that something has gone wrong. A person has become ill.
Nonetheless, my phone sent me an alert from the New York Times this week informing me that Mr. Rouhini had just called our president “mentally retarded.” Some people will take offense at a foreign leader launching childish insults at our head of state. Others will be offended at the particular term, as “mentally retarded” is now considered the kind of politically incorrect insult that can get your kid suspended from school. It seems like a prejudicial and inflammatory thing to do to blast out a nationwide message to people’s phones that inaccurately translates what the Iranian president said in a way that will anger most Americans in one way or another.
Ordinarily, I’d see this as irresponsible but not very consequential. But this isn’t a questionable translation from Norwegian. President Trump authorized and then called off military strikes against Iran on Thursday of last week. One reason Trump may have refrained from going through with the attack is that he knows public opinion does not favor war with Iran. Sending out prejudicial blast messages to people’s phones seems like a good way to change public opinion on that score, so unless news agencies want war they should be more diligent and cautious about what they report. Reporting that the president of Iran said that “the White House is confronting mental illness” doesn’t have the same effect as reporting that he called Trump “mentally retarded.” I don’t think too many people will fail to see the difference.
What’s more, Rouhani’s made extended remarks which provided context for the “mental illness” statement. He didn’t just walk up to a podium, launch an insult, and drop the mic. He was responding to a near attack on his country that was followed by the imposition of new sanctions that impact the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As Professor Cole explains, as Iran’s senior cleric, Khamenei receives religious donations from all over the world which he redistributes as charity, much like Pope Francis does in the Vatican. According to Rouhani, the new sanctions will impact these religious donors. We may not care about this side effect, perhaps because we don’t think Khamenei distributes this money exclusively for religious purposes, or because money is fungible and we just want him to have less of it to throw around. But it’s not hard to see how others might see this policy as an affront to their religion and an extreme overreaction. I don’t know what people expect an Iranian politician to say in this context when our president is seriously considering bombing their country and imposing sanctions on the devout. Accusing the “White House” of mental illness actually seems rather mild to me.
I didn’t get any of this context when my phone sent me the alert about “mental retardation.” It’s not going too far in my mind to say that this kind of reporting could start a war and get a lot of people needlessly killed.
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Der Trumper is a person of below average intelligence who was either born with an accompanying severe personality disorder or developed one over time. By 2016 it hardly mattered which was which, as he was simply delighted with himself and his mental deficiencies and maladies, as was the failed white electorate.
Trumper has already engaged in personal insults with his admired North Korean dictator pal, so presumably he can take some more jibes from Iran, even if unintended by Rouhani. The main point of Trumper/Bolton/Pompouseo’s Iran policy is that it’s incoherent, one minute being about (unobtainable) regime change and the next about preventing nuclear weapons (for which we had a perfectly functional mechanism/strategy in place courtesy Obama, and which the neocons had to talk the boneheaded Trumper into dismantling, for no particularly good reason other than that our catastrophic “ally” (Netanyahoo’s Israel) was against it.)
As an ignorant 75-year-old adolescent, Trumper is now boastfully blathering about “no exit strategies for me!” apparently under the delusion that he will “win” a war against Iran solely from the air. That he makes such statements makes clear how utterly unfitted he is to be commander in chief of even the Bolivian Navy. The air power fantasy has been disproved time and again. He will be able to degrade Iranian infrastructure and kill many civilians, which will be satisfying to the minority of Americans sadists that voted for him and support him, but will ultimately get the nation nowhere other than another round of global condemnation of America, which is our lot as a result of the “conservative” movement. Of course, a serious, non-failed nation would have a national legislature which would simply vote an immediate resolution that Trumper has no authority to launch an air strike on Iran without prior its approval, but we have long ago given up on being a serious nation.
Der Trumper has already been shown as a weak leader with last week’s vacillation on the planned strike on Iran. He has now put himself in the position of being susceptible to humiliation from his Fox and Fools blackmailers, and it’s likely just a matter of time until he caves into von Bolton and Pompouseo’s bellicose demands for air strikes, which our militarist generals have already shown themselves happy to carry out, strategy or no. That will start the irreversible tit -for-tat escalating conflict that is now pretty much baked into the cake–unless Putin really does call the shots and orders Trumper to stand down. Why the rest of the civilized world is willing to stand idly by and watch this unqualified fool play president on the world stage, issuing braindead threats and unjust sanctions, is one for historians to ponder.
Yep. That 75 year old adolescent is getting more childish by the day. He loves playing games. Our only hope here is even he knows a war is not that much fun since things have a way of going sideways, like his “ winning” moves with Chinese sanctions. But Bolton and Co, now thems a couple of fools.
what a surprise, the NYT lying us into war. There’s never been anything inadvertent about that.