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Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Iran: If we can have a war over fake WMD claims, why not have one over a bad translation?

I've posted here before the concern that Juan Cole has expressed about a bad translation combining with a misinterpretation from Iranian President Ahmadinejad about Israel having become a standard part of the Iran hawks rhetoric justifying an American preventive war against Iran.

He returns to the subject in his 05/03/06 post Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist And, "We don't Want Your Stinking War!

... I object to the characterization of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having "threatened to wipe Israel off the map." I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that he wants to play Hitler to Israel's Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people.

But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks.

He refers to this in response to an article by Christopher Hitchens at Slate: The Cole Report: When it comes to Iran, he distorts, you decide 05/02/03. I recommend in this case reading Cole's blog post first, because he raises an important issue about the ethics of Hitchens' practice of journalism. (Hitchens is notorious for sloppy work for a number of reasons.)

Cole includes a link to the original Ahmadinejad speech in Persian and includes some further comments of his own:

[Ahmadinejad] made an analogy to Khomeini's determination and success in getting rid of the Shah's government, which Khomeini had said "must go" (az bain bayad berad). Then Ahmadinejad defined Zionism not as an Arabi-Israeli national struggle but as a Western plot to divide the world of Islam with Israel as the pivot of this plan.

The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

Again, Ariel Sharon erased the occupation regime over Gaza from the page of time.

There are plenty of real reasons for the United States to have significant issues with Iran. A bad translation should not be one of them.

Cole's long post is also worth reading for some of the background he gives there on relations because the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel over the years.

He is also emphatic about the need to be realistic about the level of influence Ahmadinejad has over Iranian policies:

As for the matter at issue, Ahmadinejad is a non-entity. The Iranian "president" is mostly powerless. The commander of the armed forces is the Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei. Worrying about Ahmadinejad's antics is like worrying that the US military will act on the orders of the secretary of the interior. Ahmadinejad cannot declare war on anyone, or mobilize a military. So it doesn't matter what speeches he gives.

posted at 4:27:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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