On 'Wiping Israel Off the Map'...

So I've decided to take a few events/stories that have been getting a lot of press in the recent past and attempt to deal with them from a critical perspective. This post will be centred on the biggest baddie currently stealing the spotlight - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad has been hitting the headlines ever since he was lucky enough to make the cut for the now infamous Axis of Evil. Virtually every time he is referred to in the mainstream media, there is mention of his vowing to 'destroy Israel', or to 'wipe Israel off the map'. No doubt, if this was actually what he said, it would be cause for much alarm. However, no matter how many times Wolf Blitzer or Sean Hannity, or for that matter any of the BBC staff, repeat their convenient little sound bite, Ahmadinejad will still not have actually threatened to 'wipe Israel off the map'. In fact, the words 'wipe', 'Israel', 'off', and 'map' are missing from the actual translation.

Arash Norouzi, Iranian and co-founder of 'The Mossadegh Project', and certainly no apologist for the tyranny of the Iranian regime, refers to the buzz caused by this misquotation as 'the rumour of the century'. After explaining to the reader that the original words were, in fact, not Ahmadinejad's, but actually the late Ayatollah Khomeini's (the credit, or blame, for the quote has been successfully transferred to Ahmadinejad by the mainstream media), Norouzi reveals to us a direct translation of Ahmadinejad's words:

Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).

Norouzi, quite effectively, breaks this down for us:

Ahmadinejad did not refer to Israel the country or Israel the land mass, but the Israeli regime. This is a vastly significant distinction, as one cannot wipe a regime off the map... The Persian word for map, "nagsheh", is not contained anywhere in his original farsi quote, or, for that matter, anywhere in his entire speech. Nor was the western phrase "wipe out" ever said.

And thus we've been "led to believe that Iran's President threatened to 'wipe Israel off the map', despite having never uttered the words 'map', 'wipe out' or even 'Israel'". The quote, in full, is, 'The Imam said this regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time'. Norouzi also maintains that it is vital to place the quote in its context within the speech, which was delivered at a gathering dubbed 'A World Without Zionism':

In his speech, Ahmadinejad declares that Zionism is the West's apparatus of political oppression against Muslims. He says the "Zionist regime" was imposed on the Islamic world as a strategic bridgehead to ensure domination of the region and its assets. Palestine, he insists, is the frontline of the Islamic world's struggle with American hegemony, and its fate will have repercussions for the entire Middle East.

It is important to note here, that whether one agrees or disagrees with Ahmadinejad's perception of events has no bearing on the validity of the mistranslation. What's important is to come:

He then proceeds to list three such regimes that have collapsed, crumbled or vanished, all within the last 30 years:

(1) The Shah of Iran- the U.S. installed monarch

(2) The Soviet Union

(3) Iran's former arch-enemy, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein...

By measure of comparison, Ahmadinejad would seem to be calling for regime change, not war.

Norouzi's conclusion, it appears, is reasonable. In any case, to conclude that he was calling for the wiping of Israel off the map, or as often reported, the destruction of Israel, is quite a stretch, to say the least. I'm sure that the leaders of the United States secretly wish that the post-'79 Iranian regime would 'vanish from the page of time'. This is not an uncommon sentiment between states uncomfortable around each another - especially states with such histories as bitterly intertwined as Iran's and the United States', and, by extension, Israel.

Strangely enough, it appears as though the misquote first appeared not in the Western media, but was poorly translated into English on Iran's own state controlled Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA)! However, as Norouzi explains:

International media including the BBC, Al Jazeera, Time magazine and countless others picked up the IRNA quote and made headlines out of it without verifying its accuracy, and rarely referring to the source.

Doubtless, a gift for Western heads of state so determined to demonize. The media jumped all over this supposedly sensational remark, evidently not wasting time consulting a resident Farsi-speaker. The fault lies in the attributing of the quote directly to Ahmadinejad, and not, as it should have been, to the IRNA. Furthermore, Norouzi points out that the IRNA actually came up with multiple variations of the same statement, which should be "evidence enough of the unreliability of the source, particularly when transcribing their news from Farsi into the English language". The lack of any investigative rigour present in the reports from Western media outlets, raises the possibility that either the misquote was too sensational and attractive to pass up to, or that its continuing use and proliferation is strictly deliberate. Neither possibility can be discounted when we're dealing with The Axis (especially after so much time has passed without clarification or correction)...

So at what point did things start getting out of hand? Norouzi tells us that two write-ups were published in the Israeli newspapers Ha'aretz and the Jerusalem Post, both of which drew heavily from articles published a day before in the wire services, the Associated Press and Reuters... which in turn, drew information from the IRNA's botched translation job. But more damning, Norouzi presents evidence that Ahmadinejad's quote was further skewed, in the transition that it made from the IRNA report to the aforementioned AP article:

There you will discover the actual IRNA quote was:

"As the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be liberated".

Compare this to the alleged IRNA quote reported by the Associated Press:

"The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom".

Norouzi thus concludes:

The AP deliberately alters an IRNA quote to sound more threatening. The Israeli media not only repeats the fake quote but also steals the original authors' words. The unsuspecting public reads this, forms an opinion and supports unnecessary wars of aggression, presented as self defense, based on the misinformation.

It couldn't have been put any more clearly. Ahmadinejad's misquote appears to be the result of a combination of mangled translation and a plausible malign intent to mislead.

While the Iranian regime most definitely has blood on its hands, and is guilty of morally indefensible action taken against its own citizens, the media has failed miserably here to present the public with an accurate and fair depiction of the regime's intentions. The degree to which Western media outlets have either ignored alternate translations/explanations, or due to lack of investigative rigour, have yet to find these alternate sources, is inexcusable.

I realize I've used but one source for this, which would be Arash Norouzi's excellent article. If my summary didn't quite do it for you, I'd urge you to read the article yourself. Some more sources that deal with the misquote include an article by Jonathan Steele at The Guardian's 'Comment Is Free...' page, an article by Journalist Arzu Celalifer of 'The Journal of Turkish Weekly Opinion' (HORRIBLY translated, but well-reasoned...), and an editorial-esque piece by President of the Global Americana Institute and University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, amongst others. Also of worth is a piece by Ethan Bronner, who, responding to Cole and Steele, argues that Ahmadinejad was quoted correctly, but leaves the question open as to whether he was calling for war.