Have they stopped repeating this LIE? I keep hearing it repeated. This far along, after soundly being refuted, this repetition is a conscious LIE, the most serious of all (besides the whole "they're building nukes!!" hoax ...)

Lost in translation

Experts confirm that Iran's president did not call for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'. Reports that he did serve to strengthen western hawks.
Jonathan Steele

My recent comment piece explaining how Iran's president was badly misquoted when he allegedly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" has caused a welcome little storm. The phrase has been seized on by western and Israeli hawks to re-double suspicions of the Iranian government's intentions, so it is important to get the truth of what he really said.

I took my translation - "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" - from the indefatigable Professor Juan Cole's website where it has been for several weeks.

But it seems to be mainly thanks to the Guardian giving it prominence that the New York Times, which was one of the first papers to misquote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came out on Sunday with a defensive piece attempting to justify its reporter's original "wiped off the map" translation. (By the way, for Farsi speakers the original version is available here.)

Joining the "off the map" crowd is David Aaronovitch, a columnist on the Times (of London), who attacked my analysis yesterday. I won't waste time on him since his knowledge of Farsi is as minimal as that of his Latin. The poor man thinks the plural of casus belli is casi belli, unaware that casus is fourth declension with the plural casus (long u).

The New York Times's Ethan Bronner and Nazila Fathi, one of the paper's Tehran staff, make a more serious case. They consulted several sources in Tehran. "Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran's most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say 'wipe off' or 'wipe away' is more accurate than 'vanish' because the Persian verb is active and transitive," Bronner writes.

The New York Times goes on: "The second translation issue concerns the word 'map'. Khomeini's words were abstract: 'Sahneh roozgar.' Sahneh means scene or stage, and roozgar means time. The phrase was widely interpreted as 'map', and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not 'Sahneh roozgar' but 'Safheh roozgar', meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word 'map' again."

This, in my view, is the crucial point and I'm glad the NYT accepts that the word "map" was not used by Ahmadinejad. (By the way, the Wikipedia entry on the controversy gets the NYT wrong, claiming falsely that Ethan Bronner "concluded that Ahmadinejad had in fact said that Israel was to be wiped off the map".)

If the Iranian president made a mistake and used "safheh" rather than "sahneh", that is of little moment. A native English speaker could equally confuse "stage of history" with "page of history". The significant issue is that both phrases refer to time rather than place. As I wrote in my original post, the Iranian president was expressing a vague wish for the future. He was not threatening an Iranian-initiated war to remove Israeli control over Jerusalem.

Two other well-established translation sources confirm that Ahmadinejad was referring to time, not place. The version of the October 26 2005 speech put out by the Middle East Media Research Institute, based on the Farsi text released by the official Iranian Students News Agency, says: "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history." (NB: not "wiped". I accept that "eliminated" is almost the same, indeed some might argue it is more sinister than "wiped", though it is a bit more of a mouthful if you are trying to find four catchy and easily memorable words with which to incite anger against Iran.)

MEMRI (its text of the speech is available here) is headed by a former Isareli military intelligence officer and has sometimes been attacked for alleged distortion of Farsi and Arabic quotations for the benefit of Israeli foreign policy. On this occasion they supported the doveish view of what Ahmadinejad said.

Finally we come to the BBC monitoring service which every day puts out hundreds of highly respected English translations of broadcasts from all round the globe to their subscribers - mainly governments, intelligence services, thinktanks and other specialists. I approached them this week about the controversy and a spokesperson for the monitoring service's marketing unit, who did not want his name used, told me their original version of the Ahmadinejad quote was "eliminated from the map of the world".

As a result of my inquiry and the controversy generated, they had gone back to the native Farsi-speakers who had translated the speech from a voice recording made available by Iranian TV on October 29 2005. Here is what the spokesman told me about the "off the map" section: "The monitor has checked again. It's a difficult expression to translate. They're under time pressure to produce a translation quickly and they were searching for the right phrase. With more time to reflect they would say the translation should be "eliminated from the page of history".

Would the BBC put out a correction, given that the issue had become so controversial, I asked. "It would be a long time after the original version", came the reply. I interpret that as "probably not", but let's see.

Finally, I approached Iradj Bagherzade, the Iranian-born founder and chairman of the renowned publishing house, IB Tauris. He thought hard about the word "roozgar". "History" was not the right word, he said, but he could not decide between several better alternatives "this day and age", "these times", "our times", "time".

So there we have it. Starting with Juan Cole, and going via the New York Times' experts through MEMRI to the BBC's monitors, the consensus is that Ahmadinejad did not talk about any maps. He was, as I insisted in my original piece, offering a vague wish for the future.

A very last point. The fact that he compared his desired option - the elimination of "the regime occupying Jerusalem" - with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran makes it crystal clear that he is talking about regime change, not the end of Israel. As a schoolboy opponent of the Shah in the 1970's he surely did not favour Iran's removal from the page of time. He just wanted the Shah out.

The same with regard to Israel. The Iranian president is undeniably an opponent of Zionism or, if you prefer the phrase, the Zionist regime. But so are substantial numbers of Israeli citizens, Jews as well as Arabs. The anti-Zionist and non-Zionist traditions in Israel are not insignificant. So we should not demonise Ahmadinejad on those grounds alone.

Does this quibbling over phrases matter? Yes, of course. Within days of the Ahmadinejad speech the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was calling for Iran to be expelled from the United Nations. Other foreign leaders have quoted the map phrase. The United States is piling pressure on its allies to be tough with Iran.

Let me give the last word to Juan Cole, with whom I began. "I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities would lead to a military attack, and whether therefore pre-emptive warfare is prescribed. I am saying no, and the boring philology is part of the reason for the no."

 http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_steele/2006/06/post_155.html

The Threat from Iran Is to Israel:
Bush Spins His Iran Attack Plans
by Gary Leupp
www.dissidentvoice.org
May 10, 2006

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I read again in this morning’s Boston Globe a matter of fact reference to Iran’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map.” This echoes the repeated allegation by President Bush and other top administration officials that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has issued such a call. “We are talking about a specific threat on a partner of the U.S. and Germany,” Bush told the German newspaper Bild last week. But is this not just more neocon disinformation, designed to inspire fear that Iran’s nuclear program, which heads the long list of Washington’s charges against Iran, is really designed to annihilate Israel?

It turns out that Ahmadinejad never said what is being routinely attributed to him. Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at University of Michigan who reads Persian, explains that he actually stated (quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini): “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).”

Now, some might say, “So he didn’t say, ‘wipe off the map,’ he said ‘erase from the page.’ What’s the difference? Anyway he’s saying he wants to get rid of Israel.” But Cole explains why the mistranslation significantly distorts the Iranian leader’s words. “Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope -- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah’s government. Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that ‘Israel must be wiped off the map’ with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.”

How would it sound if Bush kept repeating: “The Iranian president has quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, who died seventeen years ago, as saying ‘the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time’”? Pretty lame huh. Or if he were to say, “In ten years, Iran might be able to build a nuclear weapon to use against Israel, which itself has had a couple hundred nukes for quite awhile?” Pretty lame too. You can be sure that employees in the current incarnation of the Office of Special Plans aren’t being paid to churn out that kind of stuff. They’re paid to produce effective propaganda to justify the planned attack on Iran.

“This is how we’ll spin it,” some wise neocon must have suggested as soon as the Iranian leader made his statement. “We’ll say Ahmadinejad has stated publicly that he wants to wipe Israel off the map, and since we know that Iran is trying to produce nuclear weapons, clearly Iran plans to nuke Israel at the earliest opportunity. People will say, ‘That’s crazy, Israel would respond to an attack by destroying Iran.’ But we’ll say, ‘Ahmadinejad is indeed crazy. And he’s as bad as Hitler!’”

There are risks in this spin. In the build-up to war on Iraq, the security of Israel was only referenced marginally. The suggestion that the war was “for Israel” was roundly pooh-poohed and those arguing this were and are tarred with the brush of anti-Semitism. But here the president is all but declaring that he will attack Iran rather than allow the country to acquire the ability to produce nuclear weapons which might someday be deployed against nuclear Israel. On March 20 Bush declared specifically, “The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That’s a threat, a serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace. I made it clear, and I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.” Not, “One of the threats from Iran,” but “The threat from Iran.” The problem with Iran (which has never in modern times attacked another country) is that it threatens, not the U.S., but Israel! That’s the pretty clearly stated position of the administration. And if it’s actually unlikely that Iran plans military action against Israel, the administration will doctor the intelligence as it has in the past, and ensure that the press hypes the threat. “Vanish from the page of time” becomes “wipe off the map.” Ahmadinejad becomes Hitler. A legal nuclear program once promoted by U.S. administrations becomes a cause of inherent suspicion because Iran with all its oil has no reason for nuclear power. A design on a stolen laptop becomes confirmation of a military nuclear program. Iran’s withdrawal from a voluntary non-binding agreement between Europe and Iran becomes a violation of international law. The U.S. eager to effect regime change in Iran becomes the “international community” supposedly “losing patience” with Iran.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that the real reason behind the manufactured “crisis” is Washington’s concern about the state of Israel. It may be the primary concern of some of the neocons who have played key roles during the last few years; Douglas Feith, for example, seems to view the invasion of Iraq (which his OSP marketed before the war) as the “answer to the Holocaust.” But Israel isn’t the reason that Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice have embraced the neocon program.

The war planners can hype any slight shred of evidence for Tehran-al Qaeda contact, emphasizing reports that some Taliban fighters fleeing Afghanistan were given safe passage through Iran. But anyone paying attention knows that Iran almost went to war with the Taliban, supported the Northern Alliance, and as a Shiite nation is despised by bin Laden and his crowd. Iran has close ties with the Shiite political parties in Iraq. So “for bureaucratic reasons” as Wolfowitz would say, the administration’s selling its regime change plans for Iran as a response to a nuclear program threatening the Jewish state (and hence “world peace”).

Surely there are risks in saying, “The real threat is to Israel, and we will use military force to protect Israel.” True, AIPAC has Congress in its pocket, the Christian Zionist contingent can be counted on to support military action against Iran, and those asking questions may be silenced by the charge of anti-Semitism. Even so people will ask, “Why don’t we let the Israelis take care of themselves? Why our boys instead of theirs?” And there could be a big ugly backlash against “the Lobby” as ongoing legal investigations and scandals proceed. But what’s the alternative to making Israel the issue, as the president has done?

They could say, honestly, “This has more to do with acquiring geopolitical control over Southwest Asia and encircling rising China than fighting terrorism or establishing the security of the Jewish state.” But they can’t say that without validating chapter and verse Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and calling into question the whole logic of the system. So they lie, make up quotes, plant scary stories in the press, doing so more recklessly as the president’s poll figures drop. All so they can wipe their enemies off the map, using their own nukes to do so.

Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at:  gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.

 http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May06/Leupp10.htm

Can you tell me how to complain to the Iran state TV puppets who lied constantly during their coverage?

People in glass houses............

So what dot is saying here is that since Iranian tv lies all the time (I dont know they do but you obviously know best) then its ok for the BBc and in that case all other western 'democratic' channels to lie. Thats Brilliant. Its people like you who show the rest of us what 'democracy' really means.

Thank you

No I am simply highlighting the differences in western media and the iranian 'media', if i object to a bbc report I can complain, can the same be said of their iranian counterparts?

But thanks for your abject interpretation of my post.

The following is from the letters section of the April edition of seldom controversial, geek rag MicroMart. In terms of MicroMart, this unusual stuff:

Mapping

As you dealt with mapping in issue 945 , I thought that the following may be of interest, regarding the Iranian hostages and the capability of the technology you discuss on a weekly basis.

On the BBC news, the position of the RN RINs, working close to the Iraqi/Iranian border, was displayed on a handheld GPS by RN personnel.

This to imply that the boats knew where they were at all times, and it was explained that there was an Operational limit, west of the disputed border, in order to ensure Iraqi-side operations.

Using the 'freeze' on our digital TV, the GPS could be read as N 12deg 50.174 E 048 deg 43.544. The latitude and longitude in decimal degrees translates to N 29.836233 E 48.725733. My ordinary Google Maps accepted the latter reading. Google also offers the land border and if this is extended into the sea using common-sense to construct a line running along the 'mid-gulf' direction, it seemed to me that the position could easily be contentious. If HMS Cornwall wanted to play it safe, she would remain safely to the West, well out of harm's way. Apparently she was!

Not to be political, but these tools allow a member of the public of the public to research a little more deeply into the information so easily handed out, and for us to judge the integrity of our leaders, each for ourselves.

Des D'Arcy