Mennonite Weekly Review

In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev’s statement, “We will bury you,” impressed upon Americans the threat that the Soviet Union represented. Later, Russian language experts noted that the phrase could also mean, “We will outlast you.”

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

For people doing simultaneous translation, capturing idioms such as these on the spur of the moment is difficult. (In college, I spent a semester studying in Colombia; at the end of our term, a Colombian Mennonite leader who can simultaneously translate from Spanish to English with astonishing proficiency was interpreting for musicians describing traditional Andean music. Despite his fluency in English and Spanish, he still translated flautas de Pan as “bread flutes” instead of “panpipes.”)

Simultaneous translation does not appear to be at fault, however, for the widely quoted 2005 comment of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel must be “wiped off the map.”

Given that he delivered the speech at a “World Without Zionism” conference, his views on Israel were already clear. However, he never said the phrase that the press and policy makers have relentlessly repeated. He said, in Farsi, “The imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

The imam in question was Ayatollah Khomeini. Ahmadinejad noted that Khomeini had predicted that other empires and regimes — such as those governed by the Shah of Iran, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein — would fall, and they had (the latter two without Iran’s help). A similar fate would befall Israeli and Western powers controlling the Middle East.

So how did the rumor start that Ahmadinejad had said Israel would be “wiped off the map”? The Iranian government’s propaganda outlet, the Islamic Republic News Agency, inserted the quotation into its coverage of the conference. Al-Jazeera, the BBC and other major media picked up on it, and by the time the Iranian foreign minister tried to clarify what Ahmadinejad actually said, the quotation had taken on a life of its own and handed hawkish governments a reason to threaten invading or bombing Iran.

Even people opposed to bombing Iran, such as former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, cited the misquotation.

Ahmadinejad did not help matters. When U.S. reporters such as Mike Wallace and Anderson Cooper asked whether he was serious about wiping out Israel, he avoided the direct questions and instead talked about Palestinian rights.

Arash Norouzi of the Mossadegh Project — named after the democratically elected Iranian prime minister overthrown in a 1953 CIA-sponsored coup — notes that even if every media outlet retracted the mistranslated quotation tomorrow, the damage has been done. People are scared of Iran. Furthermore, he believes the quotation will be used to justify a U.S. invasion of Iran, as the Bush administration used misinformation to justify the invasion of Iraq.

At the close of his article on the propagation of the false quotation, Norouzi — no friend of Iranian regimes that succeeded Mossadegh — cites an actual phrase Ahmadinejad used in one of the Iranian leader’s letters to America: “History shows us that oppressive and cruel governments do not survive.”

“With this statement,” Norouzi writes, “Ahmadinejad has also projected the outcome of his own backwards regime, which will likewise ‘vanish from the page of time.’ ” Whether we bomb Iran or not.