Maybe not.
From http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12949.htm
It was October last year when we
came home, flicked on the radio and listened aghast to the news
that the Iranian president denied the Holocaust had happened and
said the state of Israel should be wiped off the map. ‘Christ,’
we thought, ‘this nut job’s playing into their hands with this
kind of rhetoric.’ Since then “the Cuban missile crisis in slow
motion” as one US academic has described the Iran/US imbroglio
has ratcheted up to high alert with Seymour Hersch of the New
Yorker
reporting that the White House is all prepared for nuclear
strikes. It would take just 12 hours to deploy nuclear
weapons for a bunker busting strike that would kill a million
Iranians according to conservative estimates commissioned by the
Pentagon. Nuclear armed planes are now on constant alert and
public opinion has been framed around those mad, mad statements
on Israel by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But what if the pronouncements by Ahmadinejad that cast him as
this season’s baddie incarnate had been a) mistranslated and b)
taken out of context?
When
properly translated the Iranian president actually calls for
the removal of the regimes that are in power in Israel and in
the USA as a goal for the future. Nowhere does he demand the
elimination or annihilation of Israel. He called for greater
governance for Palestine. The word map does not even feature.
And the president makes plain that the Holocaust happened, but,
he argues western powers have exploited the memory of the
Holocaust for their own imperialistic purposes. What the
mainstream ran with is complete deception.
The deception has been aided by the fact that much of the media
use an ‘independent’ company called
Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri) for translating
Middle Eastern languages.
Memri just happens to be owned by two right-wing neo-con
Israelis:
Meyrav Wurmser, the wife of one of Dick Cheney’s aides (and
ex-special assistant to ‘Strap-on’ John Bolton),
David Wurmser and former(?) Israeli Military Intelligence
officer, Colonel
Yigal Carmon. Indeed a look at Wikipedia’ s incomplete staff
list seems to suggest a heavy Israeli bias in staffing and at
least two more ex-Israeli Military Intelligence people. Still
the little red email is sure
that’s just a coincidence, as is the fact that the Israeli army
(presumably military intelligence) has
also used this mistranslation tactic in the past.
And once Ahmadinejad had been brushed with the wacko Jew
destroyer tag, it was a short hop, skip and ein Sprung before he
was alongside Adolf Hitler in the pantheon of baddies. Like
Milosevic and Hussein before him, Ahmadinejad’s Hitler
comparison is as sure a sign war is imminent.
Unlike Hitler though Ahmadinejad doesn’t rule Iran, nor does he
control its foreign or military policy. The man in charge of all
that is Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran is a theocracy, and Khamenei is the theocrat-in-chief. To
give you an idea of where Ahmadinejad lies in Iran’s political
hierarchy, note that no one can even run for the presidency in
the first place without the approval of Khamenei and the
Guardian Council, a group of six clerics and six conservative
jurists that are selected by Khamenei.
Ahmadinejad serves the purpose of being a believable bogeyman.
He’ll find his Ph.D. in civil engineering and being a founding
member of the Iran Tunnel Society useful if Seymour Hersch’s
bunker-busting nuke allegations come true.
No comments:
Post a Comment