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Med tanke på det propaganda krig som nu pågår mot Iran är det inte förvånande att amerikanska kongressen nu stämmer in. Med tanke på att Ahmadinejad enligt Juan Cole inte ens sagt att Israel ska förintas är det ironiskt att amerikanarna nu vill dra honom inför en domstol som dom själva inte ens erkänner. Eller att Israel rättfärdigar tanken på ett Iran anfall just med att Ahmadinejad hotat utplåna staten Israel.

Vad som mest förvånar mig är alla de exil iranier som verkar stödja tanken på ett amerikanskt anfall mot Iran. Har dom överhuvudtaget läst de amerikansk planera på hur bombanfallet ska gå till? I princip hela Irans ekonomiska infrastruktur ska bombas sönder inklusive hela oljeindustrin. Kommer det sedan att få bort regimen? Knappast. Vad ska USA och dess allierad göra sedan?

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?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 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.