COUNTERPUNCH: Putting Words in Ahmadinejad's Mouth

[Poll_Blind]

From COUNTERPUNCH:

In this frightening mess in the Middle East, let's get one thing straight. Iran is not threatening Israel with destruction. Iran's president has not threatened any action against Israel. Over and over, we hear that Iran is clearly "committed to annihilating Israel" because the "mad" or "reckless" or "hard-line" President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel But every supposed quote, every supposed instance of his doing so, is wrong.

The most infamous quote, "Israel must be wiped off the map", is the most glaringly wrong. In his October 2005 speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad never used the word "map" or the term "wiped off". According to Farsi-language experts like Juan Cole and even right-wing services like MEMRI, what he actually said was "this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

What did he mean? In this speech to an annual anti-Zionist conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad was being prophetic, not threatening. He was citing Imam Khomeini, who said this line in the 1980s (a period when Israel was actually selling arms to Iran, so apparently it was not viewed as so ghastly then). Mr. Ahmadinejad had just reminded his audience that the Shah's regime, the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein had all seemed enormously powerful and immovable, yet the first two had vanished almost beyond recall and the third now languished in prison. So, too, the "occupying regime" in Jerusalem would someday be gone. His message was, in essence, "This too shall pass."

But what about his other "threats" against Israel? The blathersphere made great hay from his supposed comment later in the same speech, "There is no doubt: the new wave of assaults in Palestine will erase the stigma in countenance of the Islamic world." "Stigma" was interpreted as "Israel" and "wave of assaults" was ominous. But what he actually said was, "I have no doubt that the new movement taking place in our dear Palestine is a wave of morality which is spanning the entire Islamic world and which will soon remove this stain of disgrace from the Islamic world." "Wave of morality" is not "wave of assaults." The preceding sentence had made clear that the "stain of disgrace" was the Muslim world's failure to eliminate the "occupying regime".

--snip--

PB

[dsc]

1. Oh please

and I assume the letter to Germany's PM really isn't his either. The man is a loon who hates Jews.

[Poll_Blind]

3. How's YOUR Farsi? These translations are from Juan Cole and MEMRI,

...among others. Those are two pretty amazingly different sources, from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. When their translations agree, I tend to put their collective translations over yours.

  How is your Farsi, by the way?

PB

[dsc]

4. Yes, the poor, poor, misunderstood man

Every time he is simply misquoted. He really does believe the Holocost happended even though he has written repeatedly that it didn't. I am not saying we should invade Iran but we shouldn't lie about what this man believes either. He has repeatedly, as in over and over and over and over and over again, been caught making boldly anti semitic statements. I simply refuse to believe that he is being mistranslated over and over and over and over again.

[Poll_Blind]

7. No, really, how IS your Farsi? Because if you don't know Farsi, maybe...

...what you've latched on to as fact is more spin that truth. It's something you may like to believe is so, but that doesn't make it true. I am continually surprised by the number of folks who are critical of the mainstream media until, that is, they are able to latch on to something that they agree with- even when there is real, scholarly, evidence supporting evidence otherwise.

  So please...provide whatever sources you are using which, in your mind, trump these translations which, as I said, are coming from different political viewpoints but which support the same information.

  When organizations and experts of different political ideologies (in this case, quite different) support each other, doesn't that warrant special consideration in the eyes of someone really looking for the truth? Because it doesn't happen often and it lends weight to those agreed-upon bits of information which have been translated.

PB

[poverlay]

8. For the record, can you cite these "over and over again" examples of

which you speak. I have no doubt that many Iranians would love to see Israel gone(They view them as terrorists), but then again I would love to see the BFEE gone. I have no intention of working to bring that about in any way other than a peaceful one. Even though, at times, my rhetoric has been "fiery" to say the least...

I am not necessarily disputing you. I simply want more proof than the word of the Israeli or American government.

[dsc]

9. Here is the latest example of him denying the Holocost

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2149241,00.html

This is from Germany.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has told German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the Holocaust may have been invented by the victorious Allied powers in World War II to embarrass Germany.


The remarks by the outspoken Iranian president, who has repeatedly questioned the veracity of the Holocaust, came in a letter sent to Merkel in July whose contents have not been disclosed until now, according to the news agency Mehr as reported by AFP.



"Is it not a reasonable possibility that some countries that had won the war made up this excuse to constantly embarrass the defeated people ... to bar their progress," Ahmadinejad said in the letter.

end of quote

I really don't have time now to provide others but here is one example. I am signing off and hitting the sack. We teachers have to get up early in the morning.

[Poll_Blind]

11. Your source is (surprise!) using a distorted translation. Interestingly..

...this exact letter is covered in this current thread on DU.

PB

[LittleClarkie]

12. Counterpunch? Distorting the facts, you say? I'm shocked. SHOCKED.

Goodness what IS the world coming to.

[Poll_Blind]

14. Not even bothering to read the posts before replying, eh?

PB

[LittleClarkie]

15. Nah, saves time that way.

oops.

[yodermon]

20. What she meant to say was

"Counterpunch is a known anti-Semetic rag, so any article that comes from there is automatically laughable".

[Poll_Blind]

21. And are the numerous Jews who write for it self-loathing, then, in...

...your opinion?

PB

[geek tragedy]

34. Some, like Gilad Atzmon, clearly are.

Counterpunch is both anti-semitic and a Stalinist shitrag.

[Andromeda]

32. Bwhahahahahahaaha.....

:rofl:

[poverlay]

22. Looks like everyone else debunked that one pretty quick. You mentioned

something about "over and over and over and over", so you must have multiple other examples. Please provide...

[geek tragedy]

35. Read it and weep for your hero, Ahmadinejad.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x146467#146489

[breakaleg]

31. That's been debunked. There is another thread here where

more of the text is shown and that is not at all what he said, or intended to say.

[geek tragedy]

36. Only the gullible believe he isn't a Holocaust denier.

Any Jew-baiting freak gets a free pass from members of the anti-Israel crowd around here. It's disgusting.

Read all about it:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x146467#146489

[BushOut06]

5. Jews occupy positions of power in Iran

There are Jews that are members of the Iranian government. If Iran's president is so anti-Jewish that he wants to wipe Israel off the map, dontcha think he'd clean out his own house first?

[dsc]

6. There is one Jew in Parliment

and he is there due to a law passed which predates the current President. I would hardly call that Jews in positions of power. We all know Bush hates blacks but he hasn't wiped them out yet either.

[Poll_Blind]

10. Iran Pop. ~68 mil. Iranian Jew pop. ~25k. How many Jews do you...

...require in the Iranian parliament in order for you to consider their government philo-Semitic? Since there are only about 25 thousand Jews in Iran, and each MK in the Iranian parliament represents about 230,000 non-Jewish Iranians, I think the Jewish community is getting a fairer-than-equal representation in parliament.

  But the real question here, facts aside, is what would make you happy?

PB

[dsc]

17. a non nut heading Iran would be nice

The law requiring the one Jew predates the man. But you said Jews not Jew. So the other thing that would be nice if you didn't exaggerate.

[AlamoDemoc]

2. I thought of posting this article earlier this afternoon

but I was at work and didn't have the time...thanks.

[FlavaKreemSnak]

13. He needs to have said something that will make Americans mad

Because some of the polls have been saying that people are not as much in favor of invading Iraq as they used to be, so maybe some of them wonder if we will be in favor of invading Iran even though they defied America and are against not only us occupying Iraq but really they are against us or Israel occupying anybody, which makes them terrorists. But they wonder if that will be enough because we will have to make so many sacrifices for that part of the war on terror because if you look at a map, Iran is like huge. Plus it has like a ton of people in it and it doesn't seem like very many of them really want us to invade them. So they will probably fight back which would mean even more sacrifices.

So they really need for the president there to say the things that we will think are the most awful things anybody could say, and because he always says it in a foreign language they can make sure that as far as we are concerned he said certain things, and anybody who speaks that language who says he said anything else they can say is a terror supporter who is also an anti-Semite who has an agenda of anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda, so most people who speak that language are just going to keep their mouth shut, which because of so many touchy subjects with Muslims here is what it seems like a lot of people do because they don't want to get detained or have other problems.

[theanarch]

16. if you doubt the power of the M$M to...

...deliberate misinterpret a public personage's statements/speeches/etc. to slime them, just look at the hatchet job they did to Gore (and he was speaking plain English) re: "inventing" the internet, "discovering" Love Canal and being the model for the protagonist for "Love Story" (Gore never said it, the author--Eric Segal--did). I can guarantee that more people remember and believe the lies told about Gore than the truth. Hell, how many still believe the Iranian parliment passed a law that forces Iranian Jews to wear ID badges (a la Hitler's Germany or Nazi-occupied countries), when the story was invented whole cloth by a DC-based PR firm on retainer to some US-funded exile group with a vested interest in producing "intelligence" that promotes their agenda...and the neo-con's? When both Juan Cole (a fluent Farsi speaker/reader/writer) and MIMRI (a Likud-Right think tank) agree that Ahmedinejad is being deliberately misinterpreted, we should pay closer attention.

[cali]

18. The desperate

attempt by some to paint Ahmadinejad as this misunderstood man is most amusing.

[burythehatchet]

19. I am so glad someone is doing some actual reporting

as the propoganda machine revs up to full power in the march to Tehran its helpful that someone is trying to bring some legitimate information to the matter.

And although all the IDF Blogger Brigades knows the "heart of the man", their loose grip on reality leaves me yearning for some truth.

Evil is as Evil does.

[donsu]

23. kicking

nt

[Phx_Dem]

24. Al jazeera quotes

Iran: Eliminate Israel to end conflict
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said the solution to end the conflict in Lebanon was the "elimination of the Zionist regime".

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4CC21D25-66EA-45BC-B627-168C47D936CF.htm

Ahmadinejad on Israel, again
"The Zionist regime is a part of Europe, which was broken away from Europe, and is anti-Islamic in nature."

Ahmadinejad, an ultra-conservative whose election victory in June took many observers by surprise, has previously labelled the Jewish state as a "tumour" that should be "wiped off the map" or moved out of the Middle East, perhaps to Alaska.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/374EC486-CA69-43C0-9313-C1057E17BDC2.htm

Ahmadinejad, who in October said arch-enemy Israel should be "wiped off the map", said last week that if Germany and Austria believed Jews were massacred during the second world war, a state of Israel should be established on their soil.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/882BF23B-0D16-4C1F-9983-3428DDB96A18.htm

Ahmadinejad: Wipe Israel off map
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has openly called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/15E6BF77-6F91-46EE-A4B5-A3CE0E9957EA.htm

[Englander]

25. They're not 'al-Jazeera' quotes.

They're 'Agencies', 'AFP', 'AFP', 'Agencies' respectively, quotes.

Those articles weren't written by al-Jazeera, they're taken from the various news agencies.

[Phx_Dem]

26. so what

[Englander]

27. Bubble, burst. n/t

[ShawnGreen]

28. Why Does Ahmadinejad Always Wear The Same Members Only Jacket?

He must fetishize the 70s.

[geek tragedy]

29. He is a Holocaust-denying bigoted piece of filth.

A few links compiled here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x146467#146489

NOTE: All links are from the Iranian state-owned News Agency.

[Igel]

30. In other words, if Olmert

or * were to say that "the regime in Iran must vanish from the pages of time" it would be taken as a mere suggestion that he may harbor a suspicion that at some point in the future the regime will disappear?

Does anybody really expect me to think that's how Iran would take it?

In other words, the issue has been that a literal translation of the Farsi doesn't yield 'wipe off the map'; absent has been any discussion as to what the phrase means to a native speaker of Farsi.

[geek tragedy]

33. Olmert isn't an enemy of Bush, therefore he is not entitled

to a whitewashing and various other apologia.

[Spinoza]

37. I am sure its only a coincidence.

But I remember my mother telling me about the many 'Family' meetings held in their home in Hamburg all thru the 30s. Dozens of people would be present, relatives and some close friends--all Jews. With increasing anxiety they would discuss the ominous events unfolding around them and whether they should flee the country. However, my grandfather, (and a few others) would pull out Hitler's and Goebbels speeches and analyze them word by word. He would 'prove', with a great deal of subtlety and intelligence, that words that appeared at face-value to mean one thing (e.g. 'solving' the Jewish problem) actually meant something else and what appeared 'obvious' was wrong. He showed how Hitler's rants were repeatedly misinterpreted.

With the exception of my mother and himself his entire family died at Dachau in the 40s.. He was beaten to death in 1938 during Krystal Nacht.

Again, I'm sure its only a coincidence.