A reader sent me this tweet and asked my opinion: "
Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam)
3/12/15, 8:55 AM
@thekarami @lrozen Most of these senior guys in IRGC & Hezbollah speak both Arabic and Persian." She is typically clueless. While it is true that almost all Iranian leaders and diplomats who deal with the Arab world (or who don't deal with the Arab world) are fluent in Arabic--albeit with a heavy accent--almost none of the Hizbullah leaders speak Persian. Nasrallah is an exception in this regard. Once the Iranian a chargé d'affaires in Lebanon in the 1980s, Mahmud Nurani, complained to me about this phenomenon: he said that Iranians all know Arabic and none of the leaders of those Lebanese groups or Shi`ite clerics know Persian or bother to learn it. I once asked to visit the library of the Consultative Center (the affiliated think tank) in the suburbs of Beirut. I asked its director (who is now MP), `Ali Fayyad about the Persian books. I said: some of you studied Persian? He said: none, really, and we were wondering what to do with those Persian books (gifts from Iran) because no one uses them.
Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam)
3/12/15, 8:55 AM
@thekarami @lrozen Most of these senior guys in IRGC & Hezbollah speak both Arabic and Persian." She is typically clueless. While it is true that almost all Iranian leaders and diplomats who deal with the Arab world (or who don't deal with the Arab world) are fluent in Arabic--albeit with a heavy accent--almost none of the Hizbullah leaders speak Persian. Nasrallah is an exception in this regard. Once the Iranian a chargé d'affaires in Lebanon in the 1980s, Mahmud Nurani, complained to me about this phenomenon: he said that Iranians all know Arabic and none of the leaders of those Lebanese groups or Shi`ite clerics know Persian or bother to learn it. I once asked to visit the library of the Consultative Center (the affiliated think tank) in the suburbs of Beirut. I asked its director (who is now MP), `Ali Fayyad about the Persian books. I said: some of you studied Persian? He said: none, really, and we were wondering what to do with those Persian books (gifts from Iran) because no one uses them.
