“Wipe Israel Off the Map”:  Neo-Con Propaganda Requires More than Ad Hoc Answers

by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane

  President Bush is right that we are in a war against evil, but the battle front consists in defining what evil is and in identifying its perpetrators. 

  The propaganda run-up toward a possible attack on Iran, is a good case in point.  The “warners” against such a venture lack both overall perspective and readily available factual analysis.  For example, Abdallah Schleifer has a simple request as Washington Bureau Chief of the leading Arabic news medium, Al Arabiya.  He wants to consult a literate Persian capable of authoritatively exposing the malicious distortion of President Ahmadinejad’s statement about the need for internal change in Israeli and American politics.  A correct translation was widely available on the internet almost immediately before MEMRI established the official American version, so most Muslims dismissed this “Wipe Israel off the map” bit as simply “more of the same.” 

  In retrospect, however, it would be good to get an analysis by an objective Persian scholar.  Unfortunately, the most objective, like Syed Hossein Nasr, might not lower himself to get involved in such a stupid affair.  It is understandable that Muslims think it is beneath their dignity to defend themselves against professional Muslim baiters.  Under normal circumstances it would be at best a waste of time to lower oneself to their level.  At worst, at least in most of the cultures of the world, the mere act of defending oneself at this level implies guilt and therefore is an act of injustice to oneself and others. 

  Muslims are advised by the Qur’an to reply to attacks by simplistic distorters of the truth with a simple phrase, “Peace be with you.”  But, this, in my view, does not apply to political situations where the lives of millions of people may depend on exposing falsehoods. 

  We should distinguish between strategy and tactics.  The major strategic effort should focus on exposing the evil nature of entire paradigms of thought, rather than merely on the mendacious attacks that ideologues mount against those who expose their lies.  I follow the efforts of CAIR and others to debunk such attacks, but frankly I find this defensive mission quite boring.  The sophisticated and diabolical reversal of fact and fiction at the paradigmatic level by such brilliant hate-mongers as the Neo-Con, Bishop John Neuhaus of First Things, is totally ignored by Muslims, and its rebuttal is beyond the competence of most non-Muslims, despite the fact that this is where evil gets its real leverage. 

  In order to reduce the vulnerability of American policy makers to their own propaganda, however, the tactical level should not be ignored.  There is a clear need to counter such specific distortions of simple fact as we have seen in recent days by the disinformation about Ahmadinejad’s alleged genocidal policies and about a supportive Nazi mentality pervading both the Iranian parliament and by implication the entire Iranian people.   

  Actually, for those who could stomach the work, which would be like digging maggots out of a boil, it might be good to establish a little think-tank specifically to expose the malicious bias on which all U.S. policy is based by re-translating and annotating everything that MEMRI supplies on a daily basis to the U.S. government.  An important criterion for objectivity would be an equal openness to expose the extremism that emanates both from fringe groups among Muslims and from official Muslim circles, since there is often more than a grain of truth in what MEMRI reports.  Then those who want to find out what actually has been said and its background would have a ready source to distinguish fact from fiction.

  Such a service might even be a useful project for a Global Center for Peace through Justice, though perhaps such a negative focus on injustice would merely distract attention from the much more important work of proactively promoting justice, which is the missing paradigmatic dimension in American foreign policy.

UPDATE 6/10/2010

In a new article by Dr. Robert D. Crane Free Speech and Political Spin: The Cases of Helen Thomas and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad he adds details about this mis-translation:

...  Politics trumps free speech practically everywhere, and America is no exception.  The most flagrant example of media perversion is President Ahmadinehad’s statement in October five years ago calling for “rezhim change” in Israel and America, which was immediately translated (even by the first version in the Iranian media) as “Israel should be wiped off the map”.

  Ahmadinejad’s phrase was ” بايد از صفحه روزگار محو شود ” according to the text published on the President’s Office’s website, and was a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini.  The statement “wiped off the map” was never made.  Ahmadinejad did not refer to the nation or land mass of Israel, but to the “regime occupying Jerusalem”. In his own words in Persian he said: “Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.”

  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.  And he clearly did not mean that America should be wiped off the map, since he was referring only to replacing the Bush regime.  Ahmadinejad does not even refer to Israel by name, he instead uses the specific phrase “rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods” (regime occupying Jerusalem).  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”

  Imam Khomeini’s statement, quoted by Ahmadinejad, reads: Een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).  A direct English translation reads: “This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”.

  It is ironic that perhaps the majority of the Jews in the world, especially the younger generation, agree with this statement.

UPDATE 6/10/2012

TAM Editors Note:  Steve Rendall of FAIR has published Lost in Translation: Iran never threatened to wipe Israel off the map which does an excellent job of detailing the history of how this mis-translation has taken on a life of its own:

The menacing threat has been repeated endlessly in U.S. corporate media in recent years: Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” “Iran,” “Israel” and “wipe” in one form or another occur together in more than 17,000 articles in the Nexis news database over the last seven years. It plays a critical role in the case for pre-emptive war against Iran. There’s just one problem: It never happened.

Mideast expert and blogger Juan Cole (Informed Comment, 5/3/06) noted long ago that Iranian leaders never called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” but a recent admission by an Israeli official to that effect suggests that there is hope this information might finally penetrate the corporate media bubble.

On Al Jazeera English (4/14/12), Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor agreed with interviewer Teymoor Nabili’s suggestion that the supposed remarks were never actually made. Iranian leaders, Meridor said,

come basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say “we’ll wipe it out,” you are right, but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed.

The Persian phrase Meridor was asked about was used by Ahmadinejad in a 2005 speech in which neither maps nor wiping were mentioned. As Cole explained (Informed Comment, 5/3/06):

The actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all…. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that “the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time.” It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks.

Even the right-wing pro-Israel translation service MEMRI translated the Ahmadine-jad comment as “this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” (CounterPunch, 8/28/06).

The “cancerous tumor” reference is to remarks made about the Israeli state by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini in a public forum in 2000, in which Khameini also suggested an alternative to the present Israeli government (CNN .com, 12/15/00): “Palestinian refugees should return and Muslims, Christians and Jews could choose a government for themselves, excluding immigrant Jews.”

Hostile words, to be sure, but a far cry from the nuclear annihilation suggested by “wiping Israel off the map.”

The fact that the U.S. and Israel have repeatedly threatened Iran with attack, and suggested that they might even use nuclear weapons, is an irony lost on media that seem to take their cues from Orwell’s 1984.

A New York Times blog (Lede, 4/18/12) wrote up the Al Jazeera interview (“Israeli Minister Agrees Ahmadinejad Never Said Israel ‘Must Be Wiped Off the Map’”). Though the Lede’s lede was somewhat grudging, suggesting Iran’s language was partly to blame for the confusion (“Persian rhetoric is not always easy for English-speakers to interpret”), it nevertheless indicated a break from earlier media insistence that the threatening remarks, coupled with a supposed Iranian nuclear weapons program, posed an existential threat to Israel. “There is general agreement now among translators and scholars that Mr. Ahmadinejad did not commit his country to the project of destroying the state of Israel in that 2005 speech,” the Times acknowledged.

The Times has used the shopworn Ahmadinejad canard on several occasions. “Wipe Israel ‘Off the Map,’ Iranian Says,” was the paper’s October 27, 2005 headline; a January 19, 2010 report stated matter-of-factly: “The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. He has also denied the Holocaust and called for Israel to be wiped off the map.”

Other Times stories (e.g., 1/8/11) have acknowledged doubts about the claim, but the paper has never conclusively established the context and meaning of the remarks, despite the fact that Jonathan Steele, an Iranian expert who writes for the London Guardian, tried to explain it to Times reporter Ethan Bronner (6/11/06):

The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,” just as the Shah’s regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The “page of time” phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon.

 

Other media outlets have expressed even less doubt that Iran is hell-bent for Israel’s annihilation. “Iran’s president unleashes another warning to Israel, declaring once again that the Jewish state will be wiped off the map, and soon,” remarked CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer (Situation Room, 6/2/08). A recent Washington Post op-ed (4/1/12) by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky asserted, “Israel is the only country that Iran has repeatedly threatened to wipe off the map.” “Since Ahmadinejad took office four years ago,” announced CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric (9/23/09), “he’s built a reputation as a provocateur, saying Israel should be wiped off the map.”

CBS Sunday Morning (4/8/12) provided a platform for actor and pundit Ben Stein to make a case for war against Iran based in part on the nonexistent threat:

Now, Israel is threatened with another Holocaust as Iran races towards building a nuclear bomb and missiles to deliver it to Israel. The mullahs and other men who rule Iran have explicitly promised to wipe Israel off the map. Israel is a tiny country, and one nuclear bomb detonated over Tel Aviv would indeed make another Holocaust.

Stein squarely hit two key claims that have sustained hostility toward Iran in official circles and corporate media alike: that Iran is attempting to manufacture nuclear weapons, and that it wants to wipe Israel off the map.

The first claim, though now contradicted by American officials and the CIA, who say there’s no proof Iran is currently working on nuclear weapons, nevertheless survives in the media as an apparently unkillable zombie lie (Extra!, 1/12). That doesn’t bode well for the dispelling of the second.

UPDATE 4/17/2012

Robert Mackey in the NYT has published Israeli Minister Agrees Ahmadinejad Never Said Israel ‘Must Be Wiped Off the Map’ in which he notes “In a reminder that Persian rhetoric is not always easy for English-speakers to interpret, a senior Israeli official has acknowledged that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, never actually said that Israel “must be wiped off the map.”   He includes a Video of an Al Jazeera interview with Dan Meridor, a deputy prime minister of Israel.

UPDATE 8/4/2013

This week we are still seeing mis-translations from Farsi, and with the same purpose.  It’s Official, Hasan Rouhani Was Misquoted by Sheila Musaji details this latest incident regarding the new President of Iran. 

Last month, Philip Weiss reported Hamas and Iran have vowed ‘to wipe out the Jews’ just as Nazis did, AIPAC says.  He gives details and comments that: AIPAC sent out a fundraising letter today saying that Hamas and Iran “are vowing to wipe out the Jews” and are no different from Nazis. The only difference between then and now is that now AIPAC is standing up for the Jews and it can get meetings with the president and Congress, as Jews could not do during the Holocaust.

First published 5/26/2006