What Ahmadinejad really said

June 8th, 2006 at 17:33 Björn Hallberg

Anyone who is reasonable aware will already have realized that Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad specifically are subject to an elaborate defamation and disinformation campaign. Similarly, one ought to also have realized by now that Ahmadinejad is attributed quotes that he never uttered. Jonathan Steele, reporting for the Guardian, reminds us of this and points to the poignant historical precedence.

It is 50 years since the greatest misquotation of the cold war. At a Kremlin reception for western ambassadors in 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced: “We will bury you.” Those four words were seized on by American hawks as proof of aggressive Soviet intent.

Doves who pointed out that the full quotation gave a less threatening message were drowned out. Khrushchev had actually said: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” It was a harmless boast about socialism’s eventual victory in the ideological competition with capitalism. He was not talking about war.

Now we face a similar propaganda distortion of remarks by Iran’s president. Ask anyone in Washington, London or Tel Aviv if they can cite any phrase uttered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the chances are high they will say he wants Israel “wiped off the map”.

Again it is four short words, though the distortion is worse than in the Khrushchev case. The remarks are not out of context. They are wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was mistranslated. 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. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.

Yet, a day doesn’t pass that we don’t hear this nonsense repeated by Zionists and US war criminals and shamelessly parroted by their apologists.

Entry 566 filed under: Middle East. This entry was posted 2 years, 7 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.