Craig Murray here complains about the "shamelessness" of Brown's speech to the Knesset today. He also has a go at of his former colleagues at the FCO who were responsible for drafting such a "tendentious and warmongering" piece. But unusually Craig is too kind!
One part of the piece, and you can hear it in all its mendacity here on the BBC website, is the bit where Brown asserts this:
"And to those who believe that threatening statements fall upon indifferent ears we say in one voice: that it is totally abhorrent for the President of Iran to call for Israel to be wiped from the map of the world."
Now I'm pretty sure those guys in Foreign Office know perfectly well how just contentious this extract is.
After all, it is now beyond doubt that the original translation published in the New York Times was just plain wrong.The bit that reads " "wiped from the map of the world"should be translated as " "wiped from the page of history". You can read the importance of this mistranslation and the historical context in a comment piece by The Guardian's Jonathan Steele.
And for those who want to see the sparks flying between Professor Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog ought to be compulsory reading by those in the Foreign Office who profess to know about the Middle East and a Farsi speaker to boot, and Christopher Hitchens, over this very issue can find it here. Needless to say young Christopher looses out big style!
Tony,
A lot of things get lost in translation. As a translator myself, I know full well that no translation can ever possibly be perfect: there are words in every language that express concepts that may not exist in the same form, or even may not exist at all, in others. To that extent the row is artificial. Anyway, dictators are not on oath when they make public statements, and all politicians are judged by their actions not by their words.
Whether or not Ahmadinejad spoke of wiping Israel from the map, his actions in developing his nuclear programme, and his apparent total lack of desire to deny that interpretation of his words, lead me to suppose that that is exactly what he has in mind. Or at least that he doesn't object to people thinking that it is what he has in mind.
To suggest, as Jonathan Steele does, that the words "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" refer merely to the present Israeli government, and that all the man wants is a bit of Bush-style regime change brought about by a bit of illiberal intervention to produce a different Israeli government run by a different lot of Jews, is ingenuous at best. What the man wants – and all the evidence points that way – is the destruction of the State of Israel so that his own regime can run things there, as part of a renewed Persian Empire of the Middle East. Ahmadinejad is, remarkably, doing something that I have thought quite impossible for the last 26 years: he is making me feel just the tiniest bit kindly towards the Saudis. They too are in range of Iran's nuclear ambitions. When push comes to shove, they won't make too much fuss about bringing Ahmadinejad down and getting a comparatively sane government in Iran. Though they will want some say in running it.
And what on earth is this about 'vanishing from the page of time'? I can't see how anything can vanish from the page of time if it does not first vanish materially from the present. Then and only then can the dictators set about making it vanish from the history books. Or indeed making the books themselves vanish.
I have stated my view of Ahmadinejad and his proposals for the Jews here, with a fact that has not, as far as I know, been reported in Britain. There is a slight glimmer of hope from the meeting in Geneva the other day. If the man is willing to make concessions – and that is far from clear – let us not get bogged down in futile arguments about semantics. But if my reading of the man is true, isn't it convenient for him that this controversy has surfaced in the British media at this precise time!
Posted by: Peter Harvey | 27 July 2008 at 03:10 PM