As the Bush Administration beats the drums for another war of choice with another country that had nothing to do with 9/11, they are using another series of fabricated facts to indoctrinate the American people into thinking that Iran poses a serious threat to our security. At the core of these fabrications is the claim that on October 25, 2005, during a speech at the Ministry of Interior conference hall, the then newly-elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remarked that "Israel must be wiped off the map." As someone who was born in Tehran, lived there for seventeen years and is a native Farsi speaker, I have read the original transcripts of the speech in Farsi and want to inform you that Ahmadinejad never said "Israel must be wiped off the map," but rather, his statement was grossly mistranslated and taken out of context, perhaps to help make a case for military action against Iran.
Let's analyze what Ahmadinejad said. His exact words in Farsi were as follows: "Emam goft een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzegar mahv shavad."
The correct translation of the statement is as follows: "Imam said this occupying regime in Jerusalem must vanish from the page of times."
And the word-to-word translation of the statement is as follows: Emam: Imam (Khomeini, leader of the 1979 revolution); Goft: said; Een: this; Rezhim-e eshghalgar: occupying regime; Qods: Jorusalem; Bayad: must; Az: from; Safheye: page of; Ruzegar: times; Mahv shaved: vanish.
There are several important points to understand about this quote:
1) The original transcript does not contain the words "Israel," "wipe off" or "map."
2) Ahmadinejad in fact misquoted Imam Khomeini who really said "sahneyeh roozegar," or "stage of times," not "safheyeh roozegar."
3) "Occupying regime in Jerusalem " does not refer to the state of Israel because the word "regime" does not mean "state" or "country." Merriam-Webster defines the term "regime" as a "mode of rule or management" or "a government in power." Furthermore, the terms "stage of times" or "page of times" both are highly abstract and metaphorical terms and cannot possibly be translated to "map," which is a real object illustrating countries with defined political borders. To translate "page of times" to "map" shows a conscious effort to give people the idea that Ahmadinejad's statement was not a metaphorical expression of discontent but a real foreign policy declaration. This effort becomes even clearer when one learns that Ahmadinejad used the verb "vanish" - not "wiped off" - to describe what he wished would happen to the regime in Israel. Vanish is a transitive verb, meaning "to disappear." By definition, disappearance is something that an object does to itself or naturally happens to it without an outside party's intervention. "Wipe off," on the other hand, has a strong emphasis on the party that does the wiping off. In other words, as opposed to vanishing, things can't wipe themselves off; they require some external force to do the wiping off. By translating "mahv shavad" to "wiped off" instead of the correct translation "vanish," the translators consciously framed Ahmadinejad as implying that an outside party - i.e. Iran, by implication - should have a role in wiping off the regime in Israel while he was merely wishing an outcome on a regime he did not agree with. He could have said "wiped off" or "Iran will (or shall) wipe Israel (or the regime in Israel) off the map," but he did not. The U.S.'s official translation of his statement misrepresents what Ahmadinejad said or meant.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-sedaei/the-biggest-lie-told-to-t_b_70248.html