Don’t Bomb Iran

Israeli Minister Agrees Ahmadinejad Never Said Israel Must Be Wiped Off the Map – NYTimes.com. April 17, 2012, 7:11 PM

By ROBERT MACKEYVideo of an Al Jazeera interview with Dan Meridor, a deputy prime minister of Israel. In a reminder that Persian rhetoric is not always easy for English-speakers to interpret, a senior Israeli official has acknowledged that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, never actually said that Israel “must be wiped off the map.”

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ast week, Teymoor Nabili of Al Jazeera suggested during an interview with Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister of intelligence and atomic energy, that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s rhetorical flourish had been misinterpreted. “This idea that Iran wants to wipe Israel out,” Mr. Nabili said, “now that’s a common trope that is put about by a lot of people in Israel, a lot of people in the United States, but as we know Ahmadinejad didn’t say that he plans to exterminate Israel, nor did he say that Iran’s policy is to exterminate Israel.”

In response, Mr. Meridor said that Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iran’s ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had said repeatedly “that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right, but, ‘It will not survive.’ ”

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Although there is general agreement now among translators and scholars that Mr. Ahmadinejad did not commit his country to the project of destroying the state of Israel in that 2005 speech, the phrase that was wrongly attributed to him then remains so firmly rooted in the popular imagination that it is frequently used as evidence of Iran’s genocidal intentions.

During a visit to the White House last month, on the eve of the Jewish festival of Purim, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel presented President Obama with a copy of the Book of Esther, which recounts the tale of a Persian leader who wanted to annihilate the Jews. “Then, too, they wanted to wipe us out,” Mr. Netanyahu told the president.

In January, Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, told a New York Times Magazine writer: “The Iranians are, after all, a nation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map.”

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Tags: Iran, wipe off map