Iranian politician denounced for saying Israelis can be friends

Michael Theodoulou, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: August 13. 2008 11:35PM UAE / August 13. 2008 7:35PM GMT

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, has courted notoriety abroad with virulent diatribes against Israel, but now one of his closest aides is in hot water at home for claiming that Iranians are “friends of all people in the world – even Israelis”.

Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, a vice president in charge of cultural heritage and tourism, was robustly denounced yesterday by more than 200 conservative deputies in the Iranian parliament who urged the president to take action against his ally.

“Mr Mashaie does not have the right to take such a disgraceful stance and he is not competent to hold such responsibility,” said a statement issued by a commanding majority of deputies in the 290-seat parliament. “Condemning this regretful position, we deputies ask Dr Ahmadinejad to deal with him seriously,” the statement added.

It is not the first time Mr Mashaie has provoked uproar. Early last year he featured on a video relayed on the internet applauding unveiled women dancing at a private function in Turkey. Mr Mashaie accused two parliamentary deputies of smearing him by editing the footage to give the false impression he had stayed for the whole event whereas, he maintained, he had left when the dancing started.

Mr Mashaie first made remarks about Iranians being friendly with the Israeli people last month. He swiftly backtracked after being mauled by the Iranian media. But he made another apparent U-turn on Monday by insisting: “I have said before that we do not have any hostility against Israeli people and I still say the same thing proudly. Not all Israeli people are wearing [military] boots on the street.”

The 200 parliamentarians suggested he was ignorant. “Mr Mashaie probably does not know that those he calls people [Israelis] are the same occupiers of houses of millions of Palestinians,” their statement said. “These people have created the illegitimate Zionist regime … we do not recognise a land called Israel let alone recognise its people.”

It is unclear whether Mr Mashaie conferred with the president before speaking out. The two men are not only close politically: their families are linked by marriage. Mr Ahmadinejad’s son married Mr Mashaie’s daughter this year.

Mr Ahmadinejad, who has branded Israel a “stinking corpse” and called for it to be relocated to Europe, Canada or Alaska, has recently moderated his hardline rhetoric against the Jewish state.

He declared last month there was no possibility of war between Iran and Israel or the United States and said the Islamic Republic had no intention of attacking Israel. He spoke following a display of missile-firepower that Iranian military commanders argued was purely defensive in nature.

Mr Ahmadinejad’s pragmatic conservative opponents have no affection for Israel, but have long made clear that the president’s intemperate rhetoric against the Jewish state has been deeply damaging for the Islamic republic.

The backlash against Mr Mashaie was led by Ali Larijani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament and a powerful conservative rival of the president, who was apparently alluding to Mr Ahmadinejad when he said on Monday: “Iranian officials should be careful to make wise comments on international issues in order to avoid harming Iran’s global status and help the country overcome the current complicated situation.”

But Mr Larijani was equally unhappy with Mr Mashaie for seemingly going too far in the opposite direction. His “comments do not represent Iran’s stance. It is wrong to say we are friends with the Israeli people,” Mr Larijani said.

Iranian analysts see the squabble as domestic political infighting where the president’s opponents have seized on an opportunity to undermine him on a highly sensitive issue.

“On Monday Larijani was saying ‘we need to have better diplomacy and less aggressive rhetoric.’ Now he’s criticising one of Mr Ahmadinejad’s allies for saying ‘we can be friendly with the Israeli people’,” said Trita Parsi, author of Treacherous Alliance – The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States.

Shortly after coming to power in 2005, Mr Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”. The call provoked international outrage, heightened western concerns about Iran’s cherished nuclear programme and made it easier for Israel to portray the Islamic Republic as an existential threat.

But some Farsi language experts insist the Iranian president was incorrectly translated: his infamous remark would be rendered more accurately as predicting that Israel would “vanish from the pages of time” – an old slogan often used by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, father of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The latter translation suggests that Israel is an unviable state, such as the Soviet Union, that would disappear on its own rather than be destroyed by an outside power. To counter charges that he is anti-Semitic, Mr Ahmadinejad has often claimed his invective against Israel is directed against the state and not the Jewish people.

But he did little to reassure Iran’s Jewish community by hosting a conference in Dec 2006 where infamous Holocaust-deniers from around the world questioned whether Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews.

About 20,000 Jews live in Iran, forming the biggest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel. Their rights, like those of Iran’s Christians, are protected by the constitution because they are considered “People of the Book”.

Mr Ahmadinejad told an audience at Columbia University in New York last year: “We love all nations. We are friends with the Jewish people. There are many Jews in Iran, living peacefully, with security.”

mtheodoulou@thenational.ae