Propaganda in translation

Currently one of the most dugg political news items on Digg: "Wiped off the Map - The Rumor of the Century." It links to an article on Antiwar.com that details the dangers of heresay in foreign policy.

Somehow our media turned Ahmedinijad's benign statement "As the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be liberated." into the menacing "Israel will be wiped out". Our media also conveniently ignored the statement by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that "We will never start a war."

I first heard this challenge to hawks' manufactured conventional wisdom on Iran last May at a forum organized by a friend in UCSB's Center for Middle East Studies. Panelists said the phrase "wipe off the map" doesn't even exist in Farsi. They cited Professor Juan Cole, who'd previously called attention to how this statement had been seized upon by neocons drumming up support for launching attacks on Iran:

The phrase is almost metaphysical...It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks.

Prof. Cole also debunked the myth of Ahamdinejad's clout:

Of course Ahamdinejad does wish Israel would disappear, but he is not commander of the armed forces and could not attack it even if he wanted to, which he denies.

Guardian columnist Jonathan Steele joined Prof. Cole in disputing the dubious translation:

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.

Good to see the story has regained some traction--too many still take it as a matter of fact. The only reason it remains at all controversial a year later is that intellectually lazy anchors and conservative pundits can't seem to mention Ahmadinejad without this catch phrase in the same breath. In doing so, they persistently reinforce the false notion that the Iranian president is politically powerful and poses a threat, framing talk of preemptive attack.