Words Not Said

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is often credited with the blustery threat to “wipe Israel off the map”. Though the mainstream press is pleased as punch to press this citation into service again and again, in myriad forms, it was noted in more responsible circles quite some time ago that the president of Iran had said no such thing. As meticulously documented in ’Wiped off the Map’ – The Rumor of the Century by Arash Norouzi (AntiWar.com), the statement he made, translated directly and faithfully from the Farsi, was:

“The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

The Imam, in this case, refers to “the late Ayatollah Khomenei, the father of the Islamic Revolution”, who had uttered it many years ago. The phrasing “wipe out” or any other connotation of taking violent action to eradicate anything does not appear in Ahmadinejad’s speech (it is not mentioned whether the Ayatollah explicated further on how he felt this “vanishing” was to occur). The speaker, in either case, seems quite clearly to be expressing a wish that the regime—or ruling body, not the people—would be gone in such a way that no one would even remember it had existed, as with a bad dream. Considering the treatment of Palestinian Arabs by the ruling Zionist regime in Israel (“occupying Jerusalem”), that’s not exactly an odd sentiment. Further reading of the actual speech reveals that the oft-misquoted sentence fragment lies in the midst of an analysis of the history of other imposed regimes with influence in the region, including the former Soviet Union and even that in Iran itself, which was ruled by the US-imposed Shah for three decades.

In light of the actual translation and the inclusion of the Soviet Union as a comparison, it’s not unreasonable to interpret the “threat” instead as a fervent wish that the current rulers of Israel would just go away, leaving their regime to other, less fanatical elements. Ahmadinejad himself has made zero effort to answer requests for clarification, instead letting the misquote hang out there, incriminating him further. No one ever said he wasn’t an idiot. This only lets those who want a war with Iran use the misquote as one of the loudest drums to bang in the runup to the next war.