Ahmadinejad: “I am not anti-Semitic”

By Juan Cole

Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul continue to show themselves among the few in Congress with any integrity and backbone. They declined to go along with a resolution charging Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad with incitement to genocide, given his alleged call for Israel to be ‘wiped off the face of the map.’

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. (more…)

Ron Paul on Immigration and Iowa

From time to time, I’m going to send you my thoughts during this campaign. Your support is so important to me, and I want you to know what’s happening.

Today, we had good news from the US Senate—not exactly a normal occurrence—when the president’s immigration bill went down in flames.

Here we had a vastly expensive piece of legislation that would have made the immigration problem worse, and put more controls on the economy. So naturally, the entire establishment was behind it. It was a slam-dunk, or so they thought. Then the American people got riled up, and despite all the special interests, the pressure, the media, and the money, scared the politicians enough to vote the right way.

If our campaign succeeds, this will happen on a whole range of issues. The politicians will hear from the people on foreign wars, high taxes, Fed inflation, and all the other plagues visited on us by DC. And listen they will.

And speaking of our campaign, I am very excited by the Iowa rally this Saturday (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=16OCg4C1fq5W47gNJo_2bDHw_3d_3d). This is an historic moment. Of course, the Iowa Christian Alliance and Iowans for Tax Relief had the right to exclude the most pro-life, anti-tax candidate in the race. But when they did so, people rose up. So we are holding a rally that will reverberate around this country. Our campaign goes from strength to strength, but I am convinced that this Saturday will be very important in the fight for a free, peaceful, and prosperous America. (more…)