Iran’s president-elect Hassan Rouhani made comments about Jerusalem the other day at a pro-Palestinian rally in Tehran that were then mistranslated and got global attention. The Guardian:
Iran’s semi-official Isna news agency misreported Rouhani’s quotes, which were then widely disseminated by western news agencies and prompted Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to react to remarks that the Iranian president never made.
Isna initially quoted Rouhani as saying: “The Zionist regime has been a wound on the body of the Islamic world for years and the wound should be removed.”
In fact, Rouhani said: “In our region, a sore has been on the body of the Islamic world for many years in the shadow of the occupation of the holy land of Palestine and the dear Quds.”….
Rouhani did not mention the word Israel, nor that it should be “removed”. The agency has now amended its article to reflect the true quotes but the falsified ones have already been doing the rounds.
Netanyahu responded in this manner:
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “The real face of Rouhani has been exposed earlier than expected.”
Moderate Iranian president: “The Zionist regime is a wound that has sat on the body of the Muslim world for years and needs to be removed.”
“Quds day, which is in memorial of Imam [Khomeini], is a day that people present the unity of Islam against any type of oppression or aggression. And in any case, in our region, it is an old wound that has been sitting on the body of the Islamic world, in the shadow of the occupation of the holy land of Palestine and the dear Quds. And this day, in fact, is a remembrance that Muslim people will not forget this historical right and will always stand against oppression and aggression.”
specialists such as Juan Cole of the University of Michigan and Arash Norouzi of the Mossadegh Project pointed out that the original statement in Persian did not say that Israel should be wiped from the map, but instead that it would collapse.
Goldberg: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?Obama: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable.
Goldberg himself has yet to delete the Tweet he posted with the debunked translation in it. Considering his experience interviewing Obama, one would think such language wouldn’t alarm him so much.
Another thing to note may be that, in 1988, the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission Justice and Peace issued a report called ‘The Church and Racism: Toward a More Fraternal Society’, which condemned doctrines of superiority, lamenting that “in sharp contrast to this growing awareness of human dignity, racism still exists and continually reappears in different forms. It is a wound in humanity’s side that mysteriously remains open.”
Shibley Telhami, scholar at the University of Maryland and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, used very similar language recently in Foreign Policy:
They are so eager to turn the new Iranian president into the old one. A moderate Iranian president who does not speak to inflame, and is on campaign record as seeking to join hands with the US in mutual concerns, is a major concern to the Zionists. They would much prefer a carpet-chewing Hitler as speaker for Iran, the quicker to cox Dick and Jane to spend their treasure and blood in behalf the chosen ones. Let’s look at how the US mainstream media paints this new Iranian President and his aims. Get ready to puke.
A wound in normal English is ‘healed’ rather than ‘removed’. Still, the translation had the authority of the official news agency and was at very least an absolutely epic blunder in PR terms. Surely the agency has fluent English speakers on its staff and surely Iranian politicians know the importance of saying what you mean in the world’s most prevalent language and checking what is published at least if it’s in a crucially significant speech. If you play into Netanyahu’s hands like that you must expect what you get. He’ll exploit it for years and it will bring him rich rewards. If and when the Kerry talks break down he will mention it seven times.
””What we have done is, by concessions, not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.”
This is what all the smart people (smart equaling some common sense) said about the zionist plan for a Israel in Palestine from the beginning.
Not only did it start a running sore in the East, but zionism has become a running sore in the US and other countries whose governments it has inserted itself into.
In all the conversations I have had over 12 years on I/P-US-Isr with fellow tarheels I met who arent well informed on the issue, I ask them one thing …..would you have been willing for the US to give the Jews North Carolina as their Jewish ruled state and homeland as compensation for their Nazi holocaust?…the answer is always No, that wouldnt be ‘fair’ to us who live here.
I dont even have to mention that a number of us would have had to be run out to ensure a Jewish majority, leaving behind any property we owned without any compensation and become refugees in another state.
The answer is always No.
It looks like Israel has been downgraded from a “cancer” to a “sore”.
The occasion for the new Iranian president’s statement was the annual march under the slogan of “Death to Israel”, a slogan which leaves no room for misunderstanding.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/world/middleeast/iran-israel.html?ref=world&_r=0