“Are you sure the Islamic Republic/Ahmadinejad have asked for Israel to be wiped off the map?” This is the question I have been asked by so many people over the course of the last few years. While I became more and more concerned why so many people kept asking the same question, I kept describing it, quite diligently, to whoever asked the question that “Israel is described as the tumor of the region by the former leader of the Islamic Republic and it is quite common to see slogans which ask for the destruction of Israel in military marches and such”.
Because the people who asked the question were more or less identifiable as belonging to the so-called “left”, I convinced myself that people are trying to negate the Bush administration’s perspective through saving the face of the Islamic Republic. When I was asked the same question for the last time by another friend a few days ago, however, I realized that the Iranian call for the “wiping off” of Israel might in fact be not about a “second Holocaust”.
A few days ago, I was asked the same question, this time by a friend who works for an institute some people accuse of leaning towards the “right”. When my friend Mark (name is fake) asked me the same question, I gave him the same answer, quite like playing a sound track I had stored somewhere in my brain. He refused to accept and sent me the link to the page on Wikipedia which talks about Ahmadinejad’s remarks about Israel. That was when I started doing a bit of research on the Persian sentence Ahmadinejad used in his speech at the “World without Zionism” conference on October 2005. Based on my knowledge of the Persian language, which I speak as my mother tongue, the translation given by Juan Cole, whose political viewpoints might be point of debate but his scholar weight in the field is irrefutable, and also given the translation published by MEMRI, which has no intention of apologizing for Ahmadinejad, I think the president of the Islamic Republic did not in fact ask for the “wiping-off” of the Jewish state. What he asked for, not that I find it legitimate, was the removal of the current regime in Israel.
Maybe this will make the issue more clear. My understanding of the average Iranian, and I am not referring to the super-ideological Armageddon-lover hardcore members of Basij, is that while they are mad at Israel because of its continuous portrayal as the “regime which has occupied Qods” in the national television, there is no strong anti-semitic sentiment in the Iranian public. I would compare that with what I have perceived in some of my Arab friends and how hateful some of them are when we talk about Israel. Without making any judgment about any person, I argue that in the Iranian case, even if Ahmadinejad does ask for the a second Holocaust, I do doubt that he would be able to gather an army who would fight for his “cause”.
I remember talking to a veteran of the Iraq war and he angrily remembered Iranian soldiers refusing to attend the fight when Iran started occupying land in Iraq. “The soldiers said they were not allowed to pray in occupied land”, he said. Although living under a hateful regime, the Iranian public is still very conscious when it comes to committing hate-inspired actions such as what Ahmadinejad is accused of having asked for.
The important question is, who should be blamed for the wipe-off misunderstanding. Is it the Western media which “took advantage of a vague remark”, as the following video seems to suggest? I think not. The number one person to blame is no one but Ahmadinejad, for being talkative and vague. He lacks the basic skills a politician, let alone a human being, has to possess, and that is spending more time thinking than giving speeches. He, whatever idiotic ideology he subscribes to, would have been told not to mention such a vague sentence, given he had asked for an advice before uttering his infamous “wipe-off” speech. The second place, in the list of people/entities to be blamed for in this misunderstanding, is IRIB (the state-run television), which started the use of the idiom in their English translation of the speech, without knowing what it exactly meant in English.
The fact is, as shown numerously on this blog and elsewhere, the English-language state-run media sources in Iran are hasty and irresponsible. They make such silly mistakes (see: Press TV’s Latest, and Funniest, Mistake) that I sometimes ask myself if, for example, the “prestigious” Press TV is taken seriously even by its own staff (see:Video of the Day: A very up-to-date PressTV Anchor).
The “wipe-off” sentence has been referred to in the media over and over and has become another “proof” that “Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler”. While I am not sure if he does not daydream about that, the Iran I used to live in was not a country he would be able to produce a genocidal army out of.
By the way, happy 60-th anniversary to all Israeli friends.