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VanIslander
Joined: 18 Aug 2003
Location: Geoje, Hadong, Tongyeong,... now in a small coastal island town outside Gyeongsangnamdo!
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 Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 6:59 pm Post subject: |
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| igotthisguitar wrote: |
| ... anti-Zionist rabbis circulated their ideas against Israel. ��We came to Teheran to clarify that Israel does not represent all Jews,' said one of visiting rabbis |
This is very true.
Anti-Zionist doesn't necessarily mean anti-semitic. In fact, most Jewish people were anti-zionist up until the second world war. Hitler indirectly changed all that.
I lived in Toronto for a year, on the edge of a Jewish neighbourhood (a few blocks northeast of Bathurst & St. Clair), and heard Jewish guys openly criticize Israel. "They cause more problems than they solve for us." To quote one comment I recall.
It takes a Bush-like mentality to think in terms of stark contrasts. Jewish=Israeli=pro-American. Anti-zionist=anti-semitic=anti-american. |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2006 7:18 am Post subject: |
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Ah an conspriacy site that uses the American free Press.
anyone notice the connections to the David Irving stuff
case closed- was along time ago |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Sun Jun 18, 2006 3:41 am Post subject: |
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Ahmadinejad: Investigate the Holocaust
By JPOST.COM STAFF
Jun. 16, 2006
"I think we have sufficiently talked about this matter and these Holocaust events need to be further investigated by independent and impartial parties," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at a news conference on Friday following a meeting with China's president.
"An event that has influenced so many diplomatic and political equations of the world needs to investigated and researched by impartial and independent groups," he said.
Speaking in Shanghai, China, he added that Jews, Christians and Muslims all had the "right to be respected."
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1150355506362&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Sun Jun 18, 2006 8:37 am Post subject: |
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Interesting article from the N.Y. Times about how Ahmadinejad's comments about Israel might have been mistranslated. Read for yourself. It in no way apologizes for what I believe is indeed his inflammatory and politically expedient rhetoric . Still, it shows how the media machine spins in motion and uses words to drive policy/response in governments....
| Quote: |
Iran's leader and Israel: What did he say, and what did he mean?
By Ethan Bronner The New York Times
Published: June 11, 2006
Ever since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news agencies at the time, it was that Israel "should be wiped off the map."
The Iranian nuclear program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to the infamous map remark.
Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, recently: "Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or should live with a nuclear Iran."
But is that what Ahmadinejad said? And if so, was it a threat of war?
For months, a debate among Iran specialists over both questions has been intensifying. It starts as a dispute over translating Persian, but quickly turns on whether the United States (with help from Israel) is doing to Iran what some believe it did to Iraq - building a case for military action predicated on a faulty premise.
"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map, because no such idiom exists in Persian," remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and a critic of U.S. policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted.
"He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse." Since Iran has not "attacked another country aggressively for over a century," he said in an e-mail exchange, "I smell the whiff of war propaganda."
Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently laid out the case this way: "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."
Steele added that neither Khomeini nor Ahmadinejad suggested that Israel's "vanishing" was imminent or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.
"But the propaganda damage was done," he wrote, "and Western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews."
If Steele and Cole are right, not one word of the quotation - Israel should be wiped off the map - is accurate.
But translators in Tehran who work for the president's office and the Foreign Ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Ahmadinejad's statement, including a description of it on his Web site, www.president.ir/eng/, refer to wiping Israel away.
Sohrab Mahdavi, one of the most prominent Iranian translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say "wipe off" or "wipe away" is more accurate than "vanish" because the Persian verb is active and transitive.
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 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.
Ahmad Zeidabadi, a professor of political science in Tehran whose specialty is Iranian-Israeli relations, explained: "It seems that in the early days of the revolution the word 'map' was used because it appeared to be the best meaningful translation for what he said. The words 'sahneh roozgar' are metaphorical and do not refer to anything specific.
"Maybe it was interpreted as 'book of countries,' and the closest thing to that was a map. Since then, we have often heard 'Israel bayad az naghshe jographya mahv gardad' - Israel must be wiped off the geographical map. Hard-liners have used it in their speeches."
The final translation issue is Ahmadinejad's use of "occupying regime of Jerusalem" rather than "Israel."
To some analysts, this means he is calling for regime change, not war, and therefore it need not be regarded as a call for military action.
Cole, for example, says: "I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities would lead to a military attack, and whether therefore pre-emptive warfare is prescribed. I am saying no, and the boring philology is part of the reason for the no."
But to others, "occupying regime" signals more than opposition to a certain government; the phrase indicates the depth of Ahmadinejad's rejection of a Jewish state in the Middle East because he refuses even to utter the name Israel.
He has said that the Palestinian issue "does not lend itself to a partial territorial solution" and has called Israel "a stain" on Islam that must be erased. By contrast, Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, said that if the Palestinians accepted Israel's existence, Iran would go along.
When combined with the longstanding Iranian support for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Hezbollah of Lebanon, two groups that have killed numerous Israelis, and Ahmadinejad's refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust, it is hard to argue that, from the Israeli point of view, Ahmadinejad poses no threat.
Still, it is true that he has never specifically threatened war against Israel.
So did he call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question.
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article.
Ever since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news agencies at the time, it was that Israel "should be wiped off the map."
The Iranian nuclear program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to the infamous map remark.
Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, recently: "Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or should live with a nuclear Iran."
But is that what Ahmadinejad said? And if so, was it a threat of war?
For months, a debate among Iran specialists over both questions has been intensifying. It starts as a dispute over translating Persian, but quickly turns on whether the United States (with help from Israel) is doing to Iran what some believe it did to Iraq - building a case for military action predicated on a faulty premise.
"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map, because no such idiom exists in Persian," remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and a critic of U.S. policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted.
"He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse." Since Iran has not "attacked another country aggressively for over a century," he said in an e-mail exchange, "I smell the whiff of war propaganda."
Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently laid out the case this way: "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."
Steele added that neither Khomeini nor Ahmadinejad suggested that Israel's "vanishing" was imminent or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.
"But the propaganda damage was done," he wrote, "and Western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews."
If Steele and Cole are right, not one word of the quotation - Israel should be wiped off the map - is accurate.
But translators in Tehran who work for the president's office and the Foreign Ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Ahmadinejad's statement, including a description of it on his Web site, www.president.ir/eng/, refer to wiping Israel away.
Sohrab Mahdavi, one of the most prominent Iranian translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say "wipe off" or "wipe away" is more accurate than "vanish" because the Persian verb is active and transitive.
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 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.
Ahmad Zeidabadi, a professor of political science in Tehran whose specialty is Iranian-Israeli relations, explained: "It seems that in the early days of the revolution the word 'map' was used because it appeared to be the best meaningful translation for what he said. The words 'sahneh roozgar' are metaphorical and do not refer to anything specific.
"Maybe it was interpreted as 'book of countries,' and the closest thing to that was a map. Since then, we have often heard 'Israel bayad az naghshe jographya mahv gardad' - Israel must be wiped off the geographical map. Hard-liners have used it in their speeches."
The final translation issue is Ahmadinejad's use of "occupying regime of Jerusalem" rather than "Israel."
To some analysts, this means he is calling for regime change, not war, and therefore it need not be regarded as a call for military action.
Cole, for example, says: "I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities would lead to a military attack, and whether therefore pre-emptive warfare is prescribed. I am saying no, and the boring philology is part of the reason for the no."
But to others, "occupying regime" signals more than opposition to a certain government; the phrase indicates the depth of Ahmadinejad's rejection of a Jewish state in the Middle East because he refuses even to utter the name Israel.
He has said that the Palestinian issue "does not lend itself to a partial territorial solution" and has called Israel "a stain" on Islam that must be erased. By contrast, Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, said that if the Palestinians accepted Israel's existence, Iran would go along.
When combined with the longstanding Iranian support for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Hezbollah of Lebanon, two groups that have killed numerous Israelis, and Ahmadinejad's refusal to acknowledge the Holocaust, it is hard to argue that, from the Israeli point of view, Ahmadinejad poses no threat.
Still, it is true that he has never specifically threatened war against Israel.
So did he call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question.
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article.
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2007 4:10 am Post subject: |
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| VanIslander wrote: |
| igotthisguitar wrote: |
| ... anti-Zionist rabbis circulated their ideas against Israel. ��We came to Teheran to clarify that Israel does not represent all Jews,' said one of visiting rabbis |
This is very true.
Anti-Zionist doesn't necessarily mean anti-semitic. In fact, most Jewish people were anti-zionist up until the second world war. Hitler indirectly changed all that.
I lived in Toronto for a year, on the edge of a Jewish neighbourhood (a few blocks northeast of Bathurst & St. Clair), and heard Jewish guys openly criticize Israel. "They cause more problems than they solve for us." To quote one comment I recall.
It takes a Bush-like mentality to think in terms of stark contrasts. Jewish=Israeli=pro-American. Anti-zionist=anti-semitic=anti-american. |
In Ahmadinejad's Iran, Jews Still Find A Space 
By Scott Peterson, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Fri Apr 27, 4:00 AM ET
TEHRAN, Iran - Enmity runs deep between arch-foes Iran and Israel. And that confrontation complicates the lives of Iranian Jews, who make up the largest community of Jews in the Middle East outside the Jewish state.
Iran's Jews are buffeted by inflammatory rhetoric from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about "wiping Israel off the map" and denying the Holocaust, and a politically charged environment that often equates all Jews with Israel and routinely witnesses the burning of the "enemy" flag.
But despite what appears to be a dwindling minority under constant threat of persecution, Iranian Jews say they live in relative freedom in the Islamic Republic, remain loyal to the land of their birth, and are striving to separate politics from religion.
They caution against comparing Iran's official and visceral opposition to the creation of Israel and Zionism with the regime's acceptance of Jews and Judaism itself.
"If you think Judaism and Zionism are one, it is like thinking Islam and the Taliban are the same, and they are not," says Ciamak Moresadegh, chairman of the Tehran Jewish Committee. "We have common problems with Iranian Muslims. If a war were to start, we would also be a target. When a missile lands, it does not ask if you are a Muslim or a Jew. It lands."
The continuous Jewish presence in Iran predates Islam by more than a millennium. One wave came when Jews sought to escape Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar II around 680 BC; others were freed from slavery by Cyrus the Great with the conquest of Babylon some 140 years later.
Anti-Semitism historically 'rare'
CONT'D ...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070427/wl_csm/oiranjews (ETC) |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2007 11:20 am Post subject: |
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| Why are several here so willing and eager to find a way to let Tehran off the hook for saying and indeed doing something so unaccaptable -- that is, to defend Tehran's interests...? |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2007 4:42 pm Post subject: |
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Fighting words
The Cole Report
When it comes to Iran, he distorts, you decide.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, May 2, 2006, at 4:26 PM ET
In some ways, the continuing row over his call for the complete destruction of Israel must baffle Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. All he did, after all, was to turn up at a routine anti-Zionist event and repeat the standard line�laid down by the Ayatollah Khomeini and thus considered by some to be beyond repeal�that the state of Israel is illegitimate and must be obliterated. There's nothing new in that. In the early '90s, I can remember seeing, in the areas around Baalbek in Lebanon that were dominated by Hezbollah and Amal, large posters of the by-then-late Khomeini embellished (in English) with the slogan, "Israel Must Be Completely Destroyed!" And I have twice been to Friday prayers in Tehran itself, addressed by leading mullahs and by former President Rafsanjani, where the more terse version (Marg bar Esrail�"Death to Israel") is chanted as a matter of routine; sometimes as an applause line to an especially deft clerical thrust.
No, what worries me more about Ahmadinejad is his devout belief in the return of the "occulted" or 12th imam and his related belief that, when he himself spoke recently at the United Nations, the whole scene was suffused with a sublime green light that held all his audience in a state of suspended animation. This uncultured jerk is, of course, only a puppet figure with no real power, but this choice of puppet by the theocracy is unsettling in itself. So is Iran's complete lack of embarrassment at being caught, time and again, with nuclear enrichment facilities that have never been declared to the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
However, words and details and nuances do matter in all this, so I was not surprised to see professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan denying that Ahmadinejad, or indeed Khomeini, had ever made this call for the removal of Israel from the map. Cole is a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community. At one point, there was a danger that he would become a go-to person for quotes in New York Times articles (a sort of Shiite fellow-traveling version of Norman Ornstein, if such an alarming phenomenon can be imagined), but this crisis appears to have passed.
Cole continues to present himself as an expert on Shiism and on the Persian, Arabic, and Urdu tongues. Let us see how his claim vindicates itself in practice. Here is what he wrote on the "Gulf 2000" e-mail chat-list on April 22:
It bears repeating as long as the accusation is made. Ahmadinejad did not "threaten" to "wipe Israel off the map." I'm not sure there is even such an idiom in Persian. He quoted Khomeini to the effect that "the Occupation regime must end" (ehtelal bayad az bayn berad). And, no, it is not the same thing. It is about what sort of regime people live under, not whether they exist at all. Ariel Sharon, after all, made the Occupation regime in Gaza end.
There are two separate but related matters here. For a start, let us look at the now-famous speech that Ahmadinejad actually gave at the Interior Ministry on Oct. 26, 2005. (I am using the translation made by Nazila Fathi of the New York Times Tehran bureau, whose Persian is probably the equal of Professor Cole's.) The relevant portions read:
Our dear Imam [Khomeini] said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. � Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. � For over fifty years the world oppressor tried to give legitimacy to the occupying regime, and it has taken measures in this direction to stabilize it.
Ahmadinejad then denounced the recent Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over Gaza as a sellout and added, "If we get through this brief period successfully, the path of eliminating the occupying regime will be easy and down-hill."
Not even Professor Cole will dispute that, in the above passages, the term "occupying regime" means Israel and the term "world oppressor" stands for the United States. (The title of the conference, incidentally, was The World Without Zionism.) In fact, Khomeini's injunctions are referred to twice. Quite possibly, "wiped off the map" is slightly too free a translation of what he originally said, and what it is mandatory for his followers to repeat. So, I give it below, in Persian and in English, and let you be the judge:
Esrail ghiyam-e mossalahaane bar zed-e mamaalek-e eslami nemoodeh ast va bar doval va mamaalek-eeslami ghal-o-gham aan lazem ast.
My source here is none other than a volume published by the Institute for Imam Khomeini. Here is the translation:
Israel has declared armed struggle against Islamic countries and its destruction is a must for all governments and nations of Islam.
This is especially important, and is also the reason for the wide currency given to the statement: It is making something into a matter of religious duty. The term "ghal-o-gham" is an extremely strong and unambivalent one, of which a close equivalent rendering would be "annihilate."
Professor Cole has completely missed or omitted the first reference in last October's speech, skipped to the second one, and flatly misunderstood the third. (The fourth one, about "eliminating the occupying regime," I would say speaks for itself.) He evidently thinks that by "occupation," Khomeini and Ahmadinejad were referring to the Israeli seizure of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. But if this were true, it would not have been going on for "more than fifty years" now, would it? The 50th anniversary of 1967 falls in 2017, which is a while off. What could be clearer than that "occupation regime" is a direct reference to Israel itself?
One might have thought that, if the map-wiping charge were to have been inaccurate or unfair, Ahmadinejad would have denied it. But he presumably knew what he had said and had meant to say. In any case, he has an apologist to do what he does not choose to do for himself. But this apologist, who affects such expertise in Persian, cannot decipher the plain meaning of a celebrated statement and is, furthermore, in need of a remedial course in English.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2140947/ |
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