luke warm, on Jan 31 2007, 02:55 PM, said:
>you seem to have established a trend whereby you are willing to lend
>credence to a view that makes america's enemies look good (or less bad)
Obviously, I am speaking for myself here and not Winston (however, I would hope that he and most of the rest of the members of this list would agree)
From my perspective there is a difference between analysis and propaganda. I would argue that the most important goal should be ensuring the accuracy of our description, not worrying whether or not the facts happen to make America's enemy's look "good / less bad". Some of us still believe that there is something to the whole notion of a "reality-based community".
>winston, why do you seem so willing to believe something like that? that
>the comment has been discredited as a bad translation? that just is not true...
>from the BBC:
There is a fair amount of debate about the precise meaning of Ahmadinejad's statement. Personally, I'm not a Farsi speaker so I'm not going to weigh in directly. I'll simple point folks over to the Wikipedia and quote part of their entry
http://en.wikipedia....ejad_and_Israel
Translation of phrase "wiped off the map"
Many news sources have presented one of Ahmadinejad's phrases in Persian as a statement that "Israel must be wiped off the map"[4][5][6], an English idiom which means to cause a place to stop existing[7].
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, translates the Persian phrase as:
The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).[8]
According to Cole, "Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian" and "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse."[1]
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translates the phrase similarly:
[T]his regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.[9]
On 20 February 2006, Iran’s foreign minister denied that Tehran wanted to see Israel “wiped off the map,” saying Ahmadinejad had been misunderstood. "Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference, speaking in English, after addressing the European Parliament. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognise legally this regime," he said. [10][11][12]
In a June 11, 2006 analysis of the translation controversy, New York Times deputy foreign editor Ethan Bronner concluded that Ahmadinejad had in fact said that Israel was to be wiped off the map. After noting the objections of critics such as Cole and Steele, Bronner said: "But translators in Tehran who work for the president's office and the foreign ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement, including a description of it on his Web site (www.president.ir/eng/), refer to wiping Israel away." Bronner stated: "So did Iran's president call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question." [2]
On June 15, 2006 The Guardian columnist and foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele cites several Persian speakers and translators who state that the phrase in question is more accurately translated as "eliminated" or "wiped off" or "wiped away" from "the page of time" or "the pages of history", rather than "wiped off the map". [13]
A synopsis of Mr Ahmadinejad's speech on the Iranian Presidential website states:
He further expressed his firm belief that the new wave of confrontations generated in Palestine and the growing turmoil in the Islamic world would in no time wipe Israel away. [14]
[edit] Interpretation of speech as call for genocide
The speech was interpreted by some as a call for genocide. For example, Canada's then Prime Minister Paul Martin said, "this threat to Israel's existence, this call for genocide coupled with Iran's obvious nuclear ambitions is a matter that the world cannot ignore."[15]
Cole interprets the speech as a call for the end of Jewish rule of Israel, but not necessarily for the removal of Jewish people:
His statements were morally outrageous and historically ignorant, but he did not actually call for mass murder (Ariel Sharon made the "occupation regime" in Gaza "vanish" last summer[sic]) or for the expulsion of the Israeli Jews to Europe.[16]
In the speech, Ahmadinejad gave the examples of Iran under the Shah, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq as examples of apparently invincible regimes that ceased to exist. Ahmadinejad used these examples to justify his belief that the United States and the State of Israel can also be defeated claiming, "they say it is not possible to have a world without the United States and Zionism. But you know that this is a possible goal and slogan."[1]
In April 2006, Iran's ambassador was asked directly about Ahmadinejad's position towards Israel by CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer:[17]
BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?
SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.
But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.