Brazil Officially Starts First Uranium Enrichment Facility

have you not seen and/or read all the articles i posted in which the head of the iaea is talking about iran or are you just coming here to yell? the iaea doesn't seem concerned and i trust them more than you, especially since you're a vernon maxwell hater

 

Unless you're the president of Iran. Then, what you say isn't important.

 

i think your statement is especially applicable to what you post

 

i think your statement is especially applicable to what you post

 

There is no one "truth", just individual perspectives of the truth. People's perception of what is true is derived from their cognative influences since birth. American's are America-centric. We believe democracy and expressions of free will are the highest goals of humankind, provided of course that those expressions are within a judeo-christian ethical framework. We believe that freedom from autocratic or monotheistic regimes is worth fighting wars over.

As a whole though we rarely question the real limits of our democracy or whether being able driving our Hummer to Walmart is a worthy societal goal, but at least the discussion of such things is allowed and candidates who offer alternantives can run in our elections.

So Creepy, keep fighting the good fight, it takes radical views a lot of effort to move the great mass of the conventional view. Just don't get hung up on your own self rightiousness.The Mullahs that run Iran are not utopians and living under the Sharia doesn't sound like much fun to me. Nobody's all right or all wrong and it is always a good exercise to consider things from the other guys point of view. Maybe you should think about if your views were the polar opposite and you lived inside Iran.

 

I'm not sure I understand. Is this sarcasm?

 

No

Good Post

 

ooohh wait, I think you may have missed the sarcasm in my post.

I was referring to an earlier post of yours, CreepyFloyd when FranchiseBlade finally got you to possibly consider that the president of Iran shouldn't vocally advocate wiping another country out:

you responded

You avoid altogether admitting that he shouldn't say it by saying 'actions mean more than words.'

Thus my post: what we say matters, unless you're the president of Iran.

Get it now?

By the way, is it a good thing or a bad thing if "actions on the ground and iranian actions demonstrate the opposite" of something the president says?

 

the iranian president's words were mistranslated (See the other posts in this thread for more info)

 

For a Fount of Pure Anadulterated Truth, you're pretty slippery.

1) You didn't know the 'correct' translation at the time. If you did, why would you say "iranian actions demonstrate the opposite of the quote ahmadinejad used?"

I wonder where glynch's 'correct' quote came from. I'm searching for it and can't find it. I did find this from Aljazeera, though. Who does their translations?

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/15E6BF77-6F91-46EE-A4B5-A3CE0E9957EA.htm

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has openly called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

"The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world," the president told a conference in Tehran on Wednesday, entitled The World without Zionism.

"The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land," he said.

"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," said Ahmadinejad, referring to Iran's revolutionary leader Ayat Allah Khomeini.

His comments were the first time in years that such a high-ranking Iranian official has called for Israel's eradication, even though such slogans are still regularly used at government rallies.

 

This is so arrogant it's ridiculous.

 

I guess a better campaign slogan would be:

We are powerless against the oppressors of Islam

That wouldn't really rally the people to your side would it.

 

read my posts, i had suspected that the quote was mistranslated all along and i brought up problematic translation issues in the other iran thread....juan cole, prof. at u of mich., an authority on the middle east and islam, and somebody who speaks persian, provided the correct translation....he even provided a link to juancole.com and the date

 

The Cole Report
When it comes to Iran, he distorts, you decide.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, May 2, 2006, at 4:26 PM ET

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

In some ways, the continuing row over his call for the complete destruction of Israel must baffle Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. All he did, after all, was to turn up at a routine anti-Zionist event and repeat the standard line—laid down by the Ayatollah Khomeini and thus considered by some to be beyond repeal—that the state of Israel is illegitimate and must be obliterated. There's nothing new in that. In the early '90s, I can remember seeing, in the areas around Baalbek in Lebanon that were dominated by Hezbollah and Amal, large posters of the by-then-late Khomeini embellished (in English) with the slogan, "Israel Must Be Completely Destroyed!" And I have twice been to Friday prayers in Tehran itself, addressed by leading mullahs and by former President Rafsanjani, where the more terse version (Marg bar Esrail—"Death to Israel") is chanted as a matter of routine; sometimes as an applause line to an especially deft clerical thrust.

No, what worries me more about Ahmadinejad is his devout belief in the return of the "occulted" or 12th imam and his related belief that, when he himself spoke recently at the United Nations, the whole scene was suffused with a sublime green light that held all his audience in a state of suspended animation. This uncultured jerk is, of course, only a puppet figure with no real power, but this choice of puppet by the theocracy is unsettling in itself. So is Iran's complete lack of embarrassment at being caught, time and again, with nuclear enrichment facilities that have never been declared to the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

However, words and details and nuances do matter in all this, so I was not surprised to see professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan denying that Ahmadinejad, or indeed Khomeini, had ever made this call for the removal of Israel from the map. Cole is a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community. At one point, there was a danger that he would become a go-to person for quotes in New York Times articles (a sort of Shiite fellow-traveling version of Norman Ornstein, if such an alarming phenomenon can be imagined), but this crisis appears to have passed.

Cole continues to present himself as an expert on Shiism and on the Persian, Arabic, and Urdu tongues. Let us see how his claim vindicates itself in practice. Here is what he wrote on the "Gulf 2000" e-mail chat-list on April 22:

It bears repeating as long as the accusation is made. Ahmadinejad did not "threaten" to "wipe Israel off the map." I'm not sure there is even such an idiom in Persian. He quoted Khomeini to the effect that "the Occupation regime must end" (ehtelal bayad az bayn berad). And, no, it is not the same thing. It is about what sort of regime people live under, not whether they exist at all. Ariel Sharon, after all, made the Occupation regime in Gaza end.

There are two separate but related matters here. For a start, let us look at the now-famous speech that Ahmadinejad actually gave at the Interior Ministry on Oct. 26, 2005. (I am using the translation made by Nazila Fathi of the New York Times Tehran bureau, whose Persian is probably the equal of Professor Cole's.) The relevant portions read:

Our dear Imam [Khomeini] said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. … Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. … For over fifty years the world oppressor tried to give legitimacy to the occupying regime, and it has taken measures in this direction to stabilize it.

Ahmadinejad then denounced the recent Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over Gaza as a sellout and added, "If we get through this brief period successfully, the path of eliminating the occupying regime will be easy and down-hill."

Not even Professor Cole will dispute that, in the above passages, the term "occupying regime" means Israel and the term "world oppressor" stands for the United States. (The title of the conference, incidentally, was The World Without Zionism.) In fact, Khomeini's injunctions are referred to twice. Quite possibly, "wiped off the map" is slightly too free a translation of what he originally said, and what it is mandatory for his followers to repeat. So, I give it below, in Persian and in English, and let you be the judge:

Esrail ghiyam-e mossalahaane bar zed-e mamaalek-e eslami nemoodeh ast va bar doval va mamaalek-eeslami ghal-o-gham aan lazem ast.

My source here is none other than a volume published by the Institute for Imam Khomeini. Here is the translation:

Israel has declared armed struggle against Islamic countries and its destruction is a must for all governments and nations of Islam.

This is especially important, and is also the reason for the wide currency given to the statement: It is making something into a matter of religious duty. The term "ghal-o-gham" is an extremely strong and unambivalent one, of which a close equivalent rendering would be "annihilate."

Professor Cole has completely missed or omitted the first reference in last October's speech, skipped to the second one, and flatly misunderstood the third. (The fourth one, about "eliminating the occupying regime," I would say speaks for itself.) He evidently thinks that by "occupation," Khomeini and Ahmadinejad were referring to the Israeli seizure of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. But if this were true, it would not have been going on for "more than fifty years" now, would it? The 50th anniversary of 1967 falls in 2017, which is a while off. What could be clearer than that "occupation regime" is a direct reference to Israel itself?

One might have thought that, if the map-wiping charge were to have been inaccurate or unfair, Ahmadinejad would have denied it. But he presumably knew what he had said and had meant to say. In any case, he has an apologist to do what he does not choose to do for himself. But this apologist, who affects such expertise in Persian, cannot decipher the plain meaning of a celebrated statement and is, furthermore, in need of a remedial course in English.

 

the ex-troskyite christopher hitchens is now an 'expert' on the middle east and iran

this guy with his blind support of bush's illegal invasion and occupation of iraq has no credibility while juan cole has credibility in both academic and policy circles and he even speaks persian and has done field work in the region while hitchens has done, well, nothing

 

It's considered an act of war.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

btw, juan cole's translation of ahmadinejad's words are completely accurate....i verified it with a professor of persian language and literature at ut

 

Thanks HayesStreet. Nice find.

 

Sure. Hitchens certainly has his own agenda, and from what I've seen of him in interviews - a drunk. But he substantiates his assertions - more than I can say for some people. Cole himself has abandoned academic scholarship for blogdom and it can hardly be claimed not to have his own bias and agenda. His expertise is in 18 & 19th century history and I've not seen any verification of 'field work' to his credit. It is also interesting to note that someone would dismiss Hitchens points out of hand with a word to his politics, yet accept Cole's points at face value because of his, lol.

 

here is the actual speech in persian in which cole's tranlsation was verified by a ut professor of persian language and literature:

http://www.president.ir/farsi/ahmadinejad/speeches/1384/aban-84/840804sahyonizm.htm

here is another article with links glaore that backs up cole's translation:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-scher/the-importance-of-cole-v_b_20350.html

here is what cole says about it:

Bill Scher: The Importance of Cole v. Hitchens
And, a Suggestion

Bill Scher nails it.

He also points out the MEMRI's translation is close to my own.

So, I have a suggestion for my readers. Every time you see a newspaper article that alleges that Ahmadinejad said that Israel should be wiped off the face of the map, please write the editor. Say that this idiom does not exist in Persian, and that what Ahmadinejad actually said was, "This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." And you can cite me.

If enough people do this often enough, the press will get tired of the propaganda line they are carrying, which is intended to whip up a manufactured war, and drop it. And that would be the most fitting response to Hitchens and his Neocon puppeteers.

http://www.juancole.com/2006_05_01_juancole_archive.html

and then juan cole completely discredits hitchens and his piece of 'journalism' that hayes has posted for us:

http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html

can somebody say pwned???