Ahmadinejad Censored, Distorted in US Media

Ahmadinejad Censored, Distorted in US Media

60 Minutes Interviewed Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad a couple of years ago. They cut some key passages out of the interview.

I've made the same point at Informed Comment in the past.

It is legitimate to decry his positions, and I decry a lot of them. It is not legitimate to misrepresent what he has said.

By the way, Nazila Fathi at the NYT again today attributed to Ahmadinejad the phrase "wipe Israel off the face of the map." He didn't say it, and spoke of the regime. He quoted Khomeini saying, "This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." (Een rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Quds bayad az safhih-i ruzgar mahv shavad; the verb construction mahv shodan is intransitive). (Khomeini had said 'vanish from the arena of time.') He has explained that he meant that the Zionist regime would collapse just as the Soviet one did. He didn't threaten to wipe anything off anything.

Fathi and her editors know all this.

Fathi is either a liar or was forced into this falsification by an editor who is a liar.

The Iranian press has acknowledged that I am right on this issue.

See also Jonathan Steele.


Do write the NYT complaining about this wilful and dangerous mistranslation.

posted by Juan Cole @ 9/20/2008 12:02:00 AM