"Hi As'ad. This is unreal. Or rather I'm astounded, but I shouldn't be. we had a story last night on Ahmadinejad in Qatar. I heard the Arabic in passing on TV and it said he said Israel should be destroyed siyasiyyan. I come in today and find, as I feared, [] story misquoting him: Any Israeli attack against Iran means the elimination of the Zionist entity from the world map. no mentioned of "politically"
So I check the Farsi on IRNA. He says: هر اقدامي عليه ايران به معناي پاك شدن رژيم صهيونيستي از جغرافياي سياسي است
i.e. he does NOT say 'map' and he says the Zionist 'regime', as well as 'political geography'; i.e. he means that as a political entity it would cease, not that it's people would be destroyed. the rest you probably know: the original quote from 2005. I got curious and checked it (I read at time it was questioned but I didn't know Farsi then). [] ran him saying "israel should be wiped off the map", baldly; no other words of context. as far as I'm aware, it was this story that provoked the world reaction. but he actually said: imam goft een regime -e ishghalgar -e quds bayad az safheh -ye ruzgar mahv shavad, the Imam said this regime that occupies Jerusalem should be effaced from the page of time. i.e. he's talking about the political entity. I'm not defending him one bit, but he's making a point about the state of Israel, not that the population therein should be exterminated as the Nazis did. and look how successful this propaganda has been: the phrase has become so well-known that someone translating automatically jumped to these phrases "wiped off" and "map" when translating what Ahmadinejad said in Doha last night, fitting his words into this linguistic cast pre-prepared by media, without realising the distortion involved. (or not so successful this time: i caught it.. but not after the story was translated into every [] language service you can imagine)".
