The madness of the neoconservatives fantasies

[theroc5156]

OUR intelligence agencies have found this out??

[TnHilltopper]

Originally Posted by bily4

Dude is still carrying on about it. Like a little kid stomping his feet and whining trying to get attention, because the adults have stopped paying attention to him at the dinner table.

Can someone please send him to his room without dessert??

Let him out next November?

What is most interesting is that the Podehertz and clan crowd that are jumping up and down are now calling for a congressional investigation into whether this evidence presented by the NIE wasn't massaged. I say LET THEM do it because now it allows any questions relating to intelligence gathering methods, even those used during Iraq and I am willing to bet they won't like the results.

[saganista]

Originally Posted by mhouse2001

What you guys are saying about Ahmadinejad is incorrect. He never said what you wrote in quotes and he never said he'd wipe Israel off the map. Do some research. One misquote is repeated (like so much propaganda) until it becomes 'true'. You don't think the media WANTS you to believe he said those things? C'mon, wise up.

It isn't so much a misquote as a deliberately deceptive translation into idiom done by the Middle East Media Research Institute. MEMRI is the source of a very large chunk of (free) Arabic and Farsi translations for the (profit-maximizing) western media. MEMRI was founded by an arch-conservative former member of the IDF intelligence service in partnerhsip with an equally right-wing scholar now with the Hudson Institute. MEMRI has been repeatedly charged with anti-Arab bias, both in translations themselves, and in the choice of what to translate. There are a number of alternate translations from experienced and unbiased scholars who would put the original remark into the same category as pointing out that the Ottoman Empire no longer appears on maps, nor does Hitler's Germany or the Soviet Union. But those don't get very far in the US media, and particularly not in the disinformation media, so the rot simply rolls on and on...

[Yeledaf]

Originally Posted by saganista

It isn't so much a misquote as a deliberately deceptive translation into idiom done by the Middle East Media Research Institute. MEMRI is the source of a very large chunk of (free) Arabic and Farsi translations for the (profit-maximizing) western media. MEMRI was founded by an arch-conservative former member of the IDF intelligence service in partnerhsip with an equally right-wing scholar now with the Hudson Institute. MEMRI has been repeatedly charged with anti-Arab bias, both in translations themselves, and in the choice of what to translate. There are a number of alternate translations from experienced and unbiased scholars who would put the original remark into the same category as pointing out that the Ottoman Empire no longer appears on maps, nor does Hitler's Germany or the Soviet Union. But those don't get very far in the US media, and particularly not in the disinformation media, so the rot simply rolls on and on...

Actually, the original source of the translation was the Iranian government itself. From Wikipedia:

Many news sources have presented one of Ahmadinejad's phrases in Persian as a statement that "Israel must be wiped off the map",[5][6][7] an English idiom which means to "cause a place to stop to exist",[8] or to "obliterate totally",[9] or "destroy completely".[10]

Ahmadinejad's phrase was " بايد از صفحه روزگار محو شود " according to the text published on the President's Office's website.[11]

The translation presented by IRIB has been challenged by Mr. Arash Norouzi, who proposes that the statement "wiped off the map" was never made and that Ahmadinejad did not refer to the nation or land mass of Israel, but to the "regime occupying Jerusalem". He says that the Iranian government News Agency IRIB/IRNA translation is the source of the myth:

One may wonder: where did this false interpretation originate? Who is responsible for the translation that has sparked such worldwide controversy? The answer is surprising. The inflammatory 'wiped off the map' quote was first disseminated not by Iran's enemies, but by Iran itself. The Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran's official propaganda arm, used this phrasing in the English version of some of their news releases covering the World Without Zionism conference. International media including the BBC, Al Jazeera, Time magazine and countless others picked up the IRNA quote and made headlines out of it without verifying its accuracy, and rarely referring to the source. Iran's Foreign Minister soon attempted to clarify the statement, but the quote had a life of its own. Though the IRNA wording was inaccurate and misleading, the media assumed it was true, and besides, it made great copy.

[saganista]

Oops. My bad on that one. Should have double-checked, rather than posting from memory [no pun intended]. MEMRI did have the 'wiped off the map' passage as 'eliminated from the pages of history', which is much closer to what was actually said (which would more literally be translated as 'vanish from the leaves of times'). Their faults in translating this speech were limited to serial omissions that serve to obscure Ahmadinejad's context, and to eliminate references to any role the US might have played in events through its support of the Shah's brutal regime and then of Saddam Hussein's brutal war.

Apologies then for having conflated the nature of MEMRI's distortions in this case. No apologies for having pointed out that those who claim Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map' are entirely in error, a fact that media around the world seem themselves only too slowly to be recognizing.