19 June 2006

Doing for the natives what they won't do for themselves

[source, source]

EVER since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news agencies at the time, it was that Israel “should be wiped off the map.” Iran’s nuclear program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to the infamous map remark.

Well, yes, because it seems like a rather significant statement, especially for a theocracy that is trying to build the nuclear weapons with which to do that.

But is that what Mr. Ahmadinejad said? And if so, was it a threat of war? For months, a debate among Iran specialists over both questions has been intensifying. It starts as a dispute over translating Persian but quickly turns on whether the United States (with help from Israel) is doing to Iran what some believe it did to Iraq — building a case for military action predicated on a faulty premise.

I.e., losing the debate on the facts, the appeasers (such as the NY Times) decided to debate the political implications instead, which lets them presume the “faulty premise” instead of providing evidence.

“Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian,” remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted. “He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse.” Since Iran has not “attacked another country aggressively for over a century,” he said in an e-mail exchange, “I smell the whiff of war propaganda.”

Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently laid out the case this way: “The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that ‘this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,’ just as the Shah’s regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The ‘page of time’ phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon.”

If one wants to have a fact free debate, Juan Cole is a good choice and any columnist for the Guardian is a good bet as well. Just look at his ability to call things said by Ayatollah Khomeini “ancient statements”. Cole is no slouch either, managing to elide the fact that he doesn’t speak Persian and so can’t be an authority for a translation.

The NY Times tries to have it both ways, however, by burying some key facts at the end of the article.

But translators in Tehran 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 Web site (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 Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say “wipe off” or “wipe away” is more accurate than “vanish” because the Persian verb is active and transitive.

So, we have translators and bilingual experts working directly for Ahmadinejad and the Iranian government who consider the translation in question completely accurate, in contrast to a professor and a columnist who don’t speak the language. It’s clear which pair the NY Times considers more (politically) reliable.

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Limits of tolerance

[source]

She knew her speech as valedictorian of Foothill High School would be cut short, but Brittany McComb was determined to tell her fellow graduates what was on her mind and in her heart.

But before she could get to the word in her speech that meant the most to her — Christ — her microphone went dead.

The decision to cut short McComb’s commencement speech Thursday at The Orleans drew jeers from the nearly 400 graduates and their families that went on for several minutes.

However, Clark County School District officials and an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday that cutting McComb’s mic was the right call. […]

In other words, the government, backed by the ACLU, censored speech based upon its content. Had McComb’s speech praised Fidel Castro and proselytized for Commmunism, the ACLU would have defended her rights vociferously, had it occurred to the school district to protest.

Yes, the ACLU is fine with defending Nazis, Communists, and enemy sympathizers, but Christ — that’s just unacceptable.

P.S. When I was faced with a similar situation (graduation speech, hostile administration), I was lucky to have a small enough class that I didn’t need a microphone so I couldn’t be cut off.

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Proof of innocence

[source, source]

While sticking to its demand for the establishment of an independent inquiry into a blast on a Gaza beach 10 days ago that killed seven Palestinian civilians, the Human Rights Watch conceded Monday night for the first time since the incident that it could not contradict the IDF’s exonerating findings.

Note carefully that HRW isn’t trying to discover the truth, but trying to contradict Israel’s evidence. That tells you what you want to know about HRW’s agenda / bias. HRW also says it wants an independent inquiry, but it’s Hamas that’s erased all the evidence. Not at all unexpectedly, HRW doesn’t seem to give voice to any concerns about that.

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Still plenty of cash for the important things

[source, source]

As the international community wails about the desperate plight of the “cash-starved” Palestinian people, arms dealers in the PA can’t keep up with the demand for tools of violence

A Palestinian arms dealer in Ramallah, who wished to remain anonymous as he offered to sell NEWSWEEK an unsolicited MP5 submachine gun, says that the price of a U.S.-made M-16 on the black market has doubled, from $5,000 to $10,000, since Hamas took power. “Hamas is buying like crazy,” the dealer says.

About what you’d expect from this earlier report. There are those who claim that having to govern will cause Hamas to turn from its thuggish ways to a Westernized political party, but so far I haven’t seen any sign of that.

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