The Warped Mirror: Ahmadinejad on Purim

It was back in October 2005, during a "conference" in Teheran that was organized to propagate the Iranian regime's cherished vision of "The world without Zionism", when the keynote speaker, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, issued a straightforward call for Israel to be "wiped off the face of the earth". The context of Ahmadinejad's speech (which can be read in full at the website of Iran Focus ) leaves no doubt whatsoever that this is exactly what he meant; yet, ever since, for more than two years, a controversy has been raging about how best to translate what Ahmadinejad said.

An illustration of the continuing controversy was provided on Saturday when The Guardian published an article in its "Face to Faith" series in which Rabbi Danny Rich interpreted Purim as "a timely reminder of past persecution of the Jews and the fragility of Israel". Referring to Ahmadinejad's "notorious speech of 2005", Rabbi Rich wrote that in this speech, Ahmadinejad "quoted the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s statement that 'the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time'." Readers reacting to the article on the newspaper's website were quick to pick up on this formulation: one criticized that this was not really what Ahmadinejad said, while another commended Rabbi Rich for correctly quoting Ahmadinejad.

In an early attempt to settle the controversy about the correct translation of Ahmadinejad's statement, a New York Times article in June 2006 pointed out that left-wing commentators trying to downplay what Ahmadinejad had said were on shaky ground, noting that "translators in Teheran who work for the president's office and the foreign ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement, including a description of it on his Website (http://www.president.ir/eng/), refer to wiping Israel away. Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran's most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Teheran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say 'wipe off' or 'wipe away' is more accurate than 'vanish'".

In addition, the New York Times article emphasized that Ahmad Zeidabadi, a professor of political science in Teheran whose specialty is Iran-Israel relations, noted that following Khomeini's statement, "we have often heard ‘'srael bayad az naghshe jographya mahv gardad - Israel must be wiped off the geographical map. Hard-liners have used it in their speeches."

That Professor Zeidabadi was indeed right was recently illustrated by photos featured on the blog "Harry's Place" that documented an anti-Israel rally in Teheran on March 9: In order to make the lives of translators and pundits easier, banners and posters declared in plain English "Israel must be wiped off the map".

But even if there was any reason to question the exact translation of this specific statement, Ahmadinejad's keynote address to the audience assembled for "The world without Zionism" hardly allowed any doubt about what he had in mind:

"The creation of the regime occupying Al-Qods (Jerusalem) was a heavy move by the globally dominant system and Global Arrogance against the Islamic world. There is a historic battle going on between the Oppressor World and the Islamic world and the roots of this conflict goes back hundreds of years. [...] In the past one hundred years, the last trenches of the Islamic world fell and the Oppressor World created the regime occupying Al-Qods as the bridgehead for its domination of the Islamic world. Bridgehead is a military term in warfare. [...] The occupying state (Israel) is the bridgehead of the Oppressor World in the heart of the Islamic world. They have built a base to expand their domination to the entire Islamic world. There is no other raison d'etre for this entity without this objective. The battle that is going on in Palestine today, therefore, is the frontline of the conflict between the Islamic world and the Oppressor World [...] the Islamic nation does not allow this historical enemy to exist at the heart of the Islamic world."

And it is by no means "only" Iran's president who openly calls for the annihilation of Israel: a recent Jerusalem Post editorial listed some of the blood-curdling statements by Iranian military leaders after the assassination of Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mugniyeh. The editorial also quoted a statement by the late US Congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, who had asked his daughter to read out his words at a UN event to commemorate the Holocaust in January: "Just as an earlier dictator pledged to destroy the Jews of Europe, so a new one is threatening to destroy the Jewish state. It is the responsibility of the entire world community...to prevent another Holocaust".

But Ahmadinejad is clearly not alone when he dreams of a "world without Zionism", and the popularity of his "vision" is not restricted to extremists in the Muslim world.  

Indeed, anti-Zionism has become outright fashionable in certain circles in the West, which proclaim loudly that their desire to do away with the Jewish state has nothing whatsoever to do with anti-Semitism. The question is: What does it take to ignore that visions of a "world without Zionism" mean a world without Israel, and what does it take to pretend that this could be accomplished without another Holocaust?