Stop the March to Iran
For quite some time, I’ve believed the Iraq War was set up as a launch pad for the real conquest the neocons are after: Iran. Today, Juan Cole wrote:
I was talking to two otherwise well-informed Israeli historians a couple of weeks ago, and they expressed the conviction that Ahmadinejad had threatened to nuke Israel. I was taken aback. First of all, Iran doesn’t have a nuke. Second, there is no proof that Iran even has a nuclear weapons program. Third, Ahmadinejad has denied wanting a bomb. Fourth, Ahmadinejad has never threatened any sort of direct Iranian military action against Israel. In other words, that is a pretty dramatic fear for educated persons to feel, on the basis of . . . nothing.
I renew my call to readers to write protest letters to newspapers and other media every time they hear it alleged that Ahmadinejad (or “Iran”!) has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” There is no such idiom in Persian and it is not what he said, and the mistranslation gives entirely the wrong impression. Wars can start over bad translations.
It was apparently some Western wire service that mistranslated the phrase as ‘wipe Israel off the map’, which sounds rather more violent than calling for regime change. Since then, Iranian media working in English have themselves depended on that translation. One of the tricks of Right-Zionist propagandists is to substitute these English texts for Ahmadinejad’s own Persian text. (Ethan Bronner at the New York Times tried to pull this, and more recently Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute.) But good scholarship requires that you go to the original Persian text in search of the meaning of a phrase. Bronner and Rubin are guilty of disregarding philological scholarship in favor of mere propagandizing.
These propaganda efforts against Iran and Ahmadinejad also depend on declining to enter into evidence anything else he has ever said– like that it would be wrong to kill Jews! They also ignore that Ahmadinejad is not even the commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces.
Anyone who reads this column knows that I deeply disagree with Ahmadinejad’s policies and am not interested in defending him on most things. I profoundly disagree with his characterization of Israel, which is a legitimate United Nations member state, and find his Holocaust denial monstrous. But this quite false charge that he is genocidal is being promoted by Right-Zionists in and out of Congress as a preparatory step to getting up a US war against Iran on false pretences. I don’t want to see my country destroyed by being further embroiled in the Middle East for the wrong reasons. If the Israeli hardliners and their American amen corner want a war with Iran, let them fight it themselves and leave young 18 year old Americans alone.
I echo Professor Cole’s call to actively engage your local press on the topic of Iran. The Bush administration has been backing itself increasingly into a corner, where it’s refusing oversight and the available evidence suggests they’re destroying evidence in violation of several laws, rather than disclose more monstrous law violations more likely to outrage the public.
They cannot continue to hold that position. Calls for greater scrutiny will continue to increase. The pressure to withdraw troops from Iraq will only grow. Backed into a corner, most animals become more dangerous and an administration with the record this one has not only has already demonstrated its threat to the country, but has to ward off investigations that could lead to their prosecution for war crimes.
It is likely to demonstrate further viciousness, as most cornered animals do.
Which leads back to Iran. Trumping up a fresh war, with rising reports of Iran’s involvement in the War on Iraq, remains their most obvious out. Getting the country fired up against Iran is not so hard to do, as many Americans have lingering resentments dating back to the 1970s hostage crisis. Making Iran the big new scapegoat can restore that part of Bush’s base that has been eroding, distract the country and dissuade scrutiny of the executive branch during yet another wartime initiative.
Elected GOP members of the House and Senate will welcome that, as it offers a way to blunt the current attention being paid to Cheney and Bush’s debacles, foreign and domestic, which threatens their party’s election chances. But it can only occur if there appears to be solid evidence that Iran has acted aggressively against US troops (as oppsed to actual evidence.)
Already the rumors occurring intermittently about Iran are designed to condition us into believing Iran has committed acts of war. It’s been so effective that, as Cole notes, scholars have been bamboozled into viewing Iran as ready to commit genocide against Israel. How easy is it to convince less studious eyes when polls show 40+% of Americans think Iraq was involved in the 9-11 attacks?
To my peers in the blogging world, I advise eternal vigilance and a persistent counter-effort in the media, to prevent the propagandizing going on about Iran. Be cognizant that, as the noose tightens around this lawless band of war criminals within the Bush administration, it’s not a time to relish their discomfort but to be ready for bold acts of desperation and head them off.
One only needs to consider who the longterm Middle East allies have been in our nation’s effort to control oil supplies. Sunni Saudis, Sunni Egyptians, Sunni Kuwaitis, Sunni Kurds, even Sunni Saddam and Osama, before they turned rogue.
The neocons long ago decided that the Shias were the fly in the ointment. They left Saddam in power in the first Gulf War because they didn’t want the Shia majority taking over and when the Shia uprising came in that postwar period, the Bushies offerred no support and Saddam slaughtered them.
And all the recent reports indicate our generals are negotiating with Sunni insurgent leaders now, while maintaining a distance from Iraq’s most popular leader, Moqtada al-Sadr. The only Shias Bush has engaged are elitist puppets like al-Maliki, a weak unpopular leader that Iraq’s majority Shias shun.
The war against Shia Iran is coming. The only way to stop it is to ramp up efforts to debunk all the rumored transgressions of Iran’s leaders CONSTANTLY. Between August this year and September 2008 is the most likely window for this administration’s offensive against Iran. Strategically, they can pull this off despite our overstretched military because it will be an air war: Iran’s ground forces are too numerous for us to engage directly.
Say hello to a worse misstep against the largest nation we’ve faced since Vietnam. Say hello to $4/gallon gasoline -at least - with Bush’s cronies reaping even more record profits from that.
Their danger increases (and their greed as well) as the Democratic Congress bores in to pursue the truth.
Can we prevent it? I don’t know. But we should do our damnedest to try.
June 27th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
thank you kevin. i don’t know why this isn’t one of the week’s most important stories.
June 27th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
[…] And Ahmedinjad did not say Israel should be wiped off the map. He stated thats what the Imam said. Of course, where does he get his direction from?? "As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem" to "vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed. ( Wampum has more; as does the American Street)." Juan Cole Quote: […]
June 28th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
[…] As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem” to “vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed. (Wampum has more; as does the American Street). […]
June 28th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
[…] As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem” to “vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed. (Wampum has more; as does the American Street). […]
July 1st, 2007 at 7:44 am
[…] As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem” to “vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed. (Wampum has more; as does the American Street). […]
July 4th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
[…] As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem” to “vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed. (Wampum has more; as does the American Street). […]
July 20th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
[…] Originally Posted by Khayembii Communique You apparently don’t get it. This is a very simple and straightforward translation. Your argument is comparable to arguing that "anos" means "years" in Spanish. Let me again post the Cole piece posted in the other thread where we discussed this: "As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem" to "vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed. ( Wampum has more; as does the American Street). If Ahmadinejad is a genocidal maniac who just wants to kill Jews, then why are there 20,000 Jews in Iran with a member of parliament in Tehran? Couldn’t he start at home if that was what he is really about? … I renew my call to readers to write protest letters to newspapers and other media every time they hear it alleged that Ahmadinejad (or "Iran"!) has threatened to "wipe Israel off the map." There is no such idiom in Persian and it is not what he said, and the mistranslation gives entirely the wrong impression. Wars can start over bad translations. It was apparently some Western wire service that mistranslated the phrase as ‘wipe Israel off the map’, which sounds rather more violent than calling for regime change. Since then, Iranian media working in English have themselves depended on that translation. One of the tricks of Right-Zionist propagandists is to substitute these English texts for Ahmadinejad’s own Persian text. (Ethan Bronner at the New York Times tried to pull this, and more recently Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute.) But good scholarship requires that you go to the original Persian text in search of the meaning of a phrase. Bronner and Rubin are guilty disregarding philological scholarship in favor of mere propagandizing. These propaganda efforts against Iran and Ahmadinejad also depend on declining to enter into evidence anything else he has ever said– like that it would be wrong to kill Jews! They also ignore that Ahmadinejad is not even the commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces." Juan Cole When I asked him about it this was his reply: "That is incorrect. Mahv shudan is intransitive. Therefore "to vanish" is more accurate. to make it transitive, as "wipe out" is, you would have to have a verb with "kardan"." As for the map part, that was debunked by your own NYT article: "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 article goes on: "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". … 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." So there it is. If you still don’t believe it then find someone that speaks Farsi and ask them; they won’t mention a map at all. We had this same discussion weeks ago on that other thread. You believe Cole and Co., and I believe my sources. You can keep on repeating what he’s said over and over, but it’s not going to convince me that he’s any more authoritative. __________________ People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. […]
September 17th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
[…] Informed Comment As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem” to “vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed. (Wampum has more; as does the American Street).If Ahmadinejad is a genocidal maniac who just wants to kill Jews, then why are there 20,000 Jews in Iran with a member of parliament in Tehran? Couldn’t he start at home if that was what he is really about? […]