I may address the other portions of your post, either later tonight or tomorrow...
BUT, for now... Let's address the Ahmadinejad quote shall we:
[FIRST, you must remember that if you read an article in Farsi and it was printed by a publication IN Iran, you are not getting un-biased factual information. The media is COMPLETELY controlled by Ahmadinejad and his government. There is no independent media, so you cannot trust what they print there, at all almost in regards to ANYTHING!]
According to an article on Aljazeera.net (an anti-Zionist publication, I believe...) here is what Ahmadinejad said:
So, I don't know what your Farsi-language source is, but AlJazeera.net is not exactly known for being un-kind to anti-Zionist factions, and that is how they quoted Ahmadinejad...
Again, I may decide to address the rest of your post later. But, I'm not sure if it's even worth my time...
~~ Tangeloper
PS -- I'm going to copy this response to the lie charge in the other thread as well.
Tangeloper, may I ask, have you ever investigated this to find out if what was reported in AlJazeera was really accurate?
I mean, did you just take what was said at face value?
Is this because it is much more convenient to believe this lie because it fits the image Israel and the US want the world to have of Iran than the truth does?
Do you know this has been thoroughly debunked, but no one in dispensationalist/zionist/pro-Israel circles wants to listen as it is far more fun to demonize someone than to promote the truth, which is rather quite boring and doesn't fit the plans of Israel or the US?
This was debunked over a year ago, thoroughly.
Are you willing to take an honest look at this? It is easily done by doing a simple internet search.
Let's look at it:
6/14/06
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.
.......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....
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.
Finally we come to the
BBC monitoring service .......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.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13641.htm
More:
The Actual Quote:
So what did Ahmadinejad actually say? To quote his exact words in Farsi:
"Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad."
That passage will mean nothing to most people, but one word might ring a bell:
rezhim-e. It is the word "
regime." pronounced just like the English word with an extra "eh" sound at the end.
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.
Ahmadinejad does not even refer to Israel by name, he instead uses the specific phrase
"rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods" (regime occupying Jerusalem).
So this raises the question.. what exactly did he want "wiped from the map"? The answer is:
nothing. That's because the word "map" was never used. 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. Yet we are led to believe that Iran's president threatened to "wipe Israel off the map." despite never having uttered the words "map." "wipe out" or even "Israel."
The Origin:
One may wonder:
where did this false interpretation originate? Who is responsible for the translation that has sparked such worldwide controversy? The answer is surprising.
The inflammatory "wiped off the map" quote was first disseminated not by Iran's enemies, but by Iran itself.
The Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran's official propaganda arm, used this phrasing in the English version
of some of their news releases covering the World Without Zionism conference. 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. Iran's Foreign Minister soon attempted to clarify the statement, but
the quote had a life of its own. Though the IRNA wording was inaccurate and misleading, the media
assumed it was true, and besides,
it made great copy.
.....
The Israeli government has milked every drop of the spurious quote to its supposed advantage. In her September 2006 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni accused Iran of working to nuke Israel and bully the world. "They speak proudly and openly of their desire to 'wipe Israel off the map.' And now, by their actions, they pursue the weapons to achieve this objective to imperil the region and threaten the world." Addressing the threat in December, a fervent Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
inadvertently disclosed that his country already possesses nuclear weapons: "We have never threatened any nation with annihilation. Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"
The misquotes didn't end there, they continued. He is quoted to have said this:
"The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom,"
But actually said this:
"As the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be liberated."
In the IRNA's actual report, the Zionist regime will vanish just as the Soviet Union disappeared. Vanish. Disappear. In the dishonest AP version, the Zionist regime will be "wiped out." And how will it be wiped out? "The same way the Soviet Union was."
Rather than imply a military threat or escalation in rhetoric, this reference to Russia actually validates the intended meaning of Ahmadinejad's previous misinterpreted anti-Zionist statements.
What has just been demonstrated is irrefutable proof of media manipulation and propaganda in action. 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.
....Iran's president has written two rather philosophical letters to America. In his first letter, he pointed out that
"History shows us that oppressive and cruel governments do not survive." With this statement,
Ahmadinejad has also projected the outcome of his own backwards regime, which will likewise "vanish from the page of time."
'Wiped off the Map' The Rumor of the Century
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/norouzi.php?articleid=11025
Shall we continue?
.
