Virginia Tilley
Counterpunch, 28 August 2006
Johannesburg, South Africa
In this frightening mess in the Middle East,
let’s get one thing straight. Iran
is not threatening Israel
with destruction. Iran’s
president has not threatened any action against Israel. Over and over, we hear that
Iran is clearly “committed to annihilating Israel” because the “mad” or
“reckless” or “hard-line
flibbertigibbet” President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened to destroy
Israel. But every supposed quote, every supposed instance of his doing so, is
wrong.
The most
infamous quote, “Israel
must be wiped off the map”, is the most glaringly wrong. In his October 2005
speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad never used the word “map” or the term “wiped off”.
According to Farsi-language experts like Juan Cole and even right-wing services
like MEMRI, what he actually said was “this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from
the page of time.”[1]
What
did he mean? In this speech to an annual anti-Zionist conference, Mr.
Ahmadinejad was being prophetic, not threatening. He was citing Imam Khomeini,
who said this line in the
1980s (a period when Israel
was actually selling arms to Iran,
so apparently it was not viewed as so ghastly then). Mr. Ahmadinejad had
just reminded his audience that the Shah’s regime, the Soviet
Union, and Saddam Hussein had all seemed enormously powerful and immovable,
yet the first two had vanished almost beyond recall and the third now
languished in prison. So, too, the “occupying regime” in Jerusalem would someday be gone. His message
was, in essence, “This too shall pass.”
But
what about his other “threats” against Israel? The blogosphere made great
hay from his supposed comment later in the same speech, "There is no doubt: the
new wave of assaults in Palestine
will erase the stigma in [the] countenance of the Islamic world.” “Stigma” was
interpreted as “Israel”
and “wave of assaults” was ominous. But what he actually said was, "I have
no doubt that the new movement taking place in our dear Palestine is a wave of morality which is spanning the
entire Islamic world and which will soon remove this stain of disgrace from the
Islamic world." “Wave of morality” is not “wave of assaults.” The
preceding sentence had made clear that the “stain of disgrace” was the Muslim
world’s failure to eliminate the “occupying regime”.
For
months, experts like Cole and journalists like Jonathan Steele have been pointing
out these mistranslations while more and more appear: for example, Mr.
Ahmadinejad’s comments at the Organization of Islamic Countries meeting on 3
August 2006. Radio Free Europe reported that he said “that the ‘main cure’ for crisis in the
Middle East is the elimination of Israel.” “Elimination of Israel” implies
physical destruction: bombs, strafing, terror, throwing Jews into the sea. Tony
Blair denounced the translated statement as ""quite shocking". But
Mr. Ahmadinejad never said this. According to al-Jazeera, what he actually said was “The real cure for the
conflict is the elimination of the Zionist regime, but there should be an
immediate ceasefire first."[2]
Nefarious
agendas are evident in consistently translating “eliminating the occupation
regime” as “destruction of Israel”.
“Regime” refers to governance, not populations or cities. “Zionist regime” is
the government of Israel
and its system of laws, which have annexed Palestinian land and hold millions
of Palestinians under military occupation. Many mainstream human rights
activists believe that Israel’s
“regime” must indeed be transformed, although they disagree how. Some hope that
Israel
can be redeemed by a change of philosophy and government (regime) that would
allow a two-state solution. Others believe that Jewish statehood itself is
inherently unjust, as it embeds racist principles into state governance, and
call for its transformation into a secular democracy (change of regime). None
of these ideas about regime change signifies the expulsion of Jews into the sea
or the ravaging of their towns and cities. All signify profound political
change, necessary to creating a just peace.
Mr. Ahmadinejad
made other statements at the OIC that clearly indicated his understanding that Israel
must be treated within the framework of international law. For instance, he
recognized the reality of present borders when he said that "any aggressor
should go back to the Lebanese international border". He recognized the
authority of Israel
and the role of diplomacy in observing, "The circumstances should be
prepared for the return of the refugees and displaced people, and
prisoners should be exchanged." He also called for a boycott: “We also
propose that the Islamic nations immediately cut all their overt and covert
political and economic relations with the Zionist regime." A double bushel of major Jewish peace groups,
US church groups, and hordes of human rights organizations have said the same
things.[3]
A final
word is due about Mr. Ahmadinejad’s “Holocaust denial”. Holocaust denial is a
very sensitive issue in the West, where it notoriously serves anti-Semitism. Elsewhere
in the world, however, fogginess about the Holocaust traces more to a sheer
lack of information. One might think there is plenty of information about the
Holocaust worldwide, but this is a mistake. (Lest we be snooty, Americans show
the same startling insularity from general knowledge when, for example, they
live to late adulthood still not grasping that US forces killed a million
Vietnamese and believing that anyone who says so is anti-American. Most French
people have not yet accepted that their army slaughtered a million Arabs in Algeria.)
Skepticism about the Holocaust narrative has started to take hold in the Middle
East not because people hate Jews but because that narrative is deployed to
argue that Israel has a right to “defend itself” by attacking every country in
its vicinity. Middle East publics are so used
to western canards legitimizing colonial or imperial takeovers that some wonder
if the six-million-dead argument is just another myth or exaggerated tale. It
is dismal that Mr. Ahmadinejad seems to belong to this ill-educated sector, but
he has never been known for his sophisticated understanding of the West.
Still, Mr. Ahmadinejad did not say
what the US Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy reported that he said: ““They
have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God,
religions and the prophets.” He actually said, “In the name of the Holocaust
they have created a myth and regard it to be worthier than God, religion and
the prophets.” This language targets the myth of the Holocaust, not the
Holocaust itself — i.e., “myth” as “mystique”, or what has been done with the
Holocaust. Other writers, including important Jewish theologians, have criticized
the “cult” or “ghost” of the Holocaust without denying that it happened.[4]
In any case, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s main message has been that, if the Holocaust
happened as Europe says it did, then Europe,
and not the Muslim world, is responsible for it.
Why is Mr. Ahmadinejad being so
systematically misquoted and demonized? Need we ask? If the world believes that
Iran is preparing to attack Israel, then the US
or Israel can claim
justification in attacking Iran
first. On that agenda, the disinformation campaign about Mr. Ahmadinejad’s
statements has been bonded at the hip to a second set of lies: promoting Iran’s
(nonexistent) nuclear weapon programme.
The current fuss about Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme is playing
out so identically to US
canards about Iraq’s
WMD that we must wonder why it is not meeting only roaring international derision.
With multiple agendas regarding Iran
— oil, US hegemony, Israel, neocon fantasies of a “new Middle East”
— the Bush administration has raised a great international scare about Iran’s nuclear
enrichment program. (See Ray Close, Why Bush Will Choose War Against Iran.)
But, plowing through Iran’s
facilities and records, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have
found no evidence of a weapons program. The US intelligence community hasn’t
found anything, either. All experts concur that, even if Iran has such a
program, it is five to ten years away from having the enriched uranium necessary
for an actual weapon, so pre-emptive military action now is hardly necessary.
Even the recent report by the Republican-dominated Subcommittee on Intelligence
Policy, which pointed out that the US
government lacks the intelligence on Iran’s weapons program necessary to
thwart it, effectively confirms that the supposed “intelligence” is patchy and
inadequate.
The Bush administration casual neglect of North Korea’s
nuclear program indicates that nuclear weapons are not, in fact, the issue
here. The neocons are intent on changing the regime in Iran and so have
deployed their propagandists to promote the “nuclear weapons” scare just they
promoted the Iraqi WMD scare. Republican rhetoric and right-wing news
commentators have fallen into line, obediently repeating baseless assertions
that Iran has a “nuclear weapons program,” is threatening the world and
especially Israel with its “nuclear weapons program,” and must not be allowed
to complete its “nuclear weapons program.” Those who nervously point out that hard
evidence is actually lacking about any Iranian “nuclear weapons program” are
derided as naïve spineless patsies.
Worse, the Bush administration has brought
this snow-job to the UN, wrangling the Security Council into passing a
resolution (SC 1696) demanding that Iran cease nuclear enrichment by 31
August and warning of sanctions if it doesn’t. Combined with its abysmal
performance regarding Israel’s
assault on Lebanon,
the Security Council has crumbled into humiliating obsequious incompetence on
this one.
Like all phantasms, the nuclear-weapons
charge is hard to defeat because it cannot be entirely disproved. Maybe some Iranian
scientists, in some remote underground facility, are working on nuclear weapons
technology. Maybe feelers to North
Korea have explored the possibilities of getting
extra components. Maybe an alien spaceship once crashed in the Nevada desert. Normally,
just because something can’t be disproved does not make it true. But in the
neocon world, possibilities are realities, and a sloppy media is an easy dupe.
It doesn’t take much, through endless repetition of the term “possible nuclear
weapons program,” for the word “possible” to drop quietly away.
Evidence is, in any case, a mere piffle to
the Bush administration, for which the desire
for nuclear weapons is sufficient cause for a pre-emptive attack. In US debates
prior to invading Iraq,
people sometimes insisted that any real evidence of WMD was sorely lacking. The
White House would then insist that, because Saddam Hussein “wanted” such
weapons, he was likely to have them sometime in the future. Hence thought
crimes, even imaginary thought crimes, are now punishable by military invasion.
Will the US
really attack Iran?
US generals are rightly
alarmed that bombing Iran’s
nuclear facilities would unleash unprecedented attacks on US occupation forces
in Iraq,
as well as US bases in the Gulf. Iran could even block the Straits
of Hormuz, which carries 40 percent of the world’s oil. Spin-off terrorist
militancy would skyrocket. The potential damage to international security and
the world economy would be unfathomably dangerous. The Bush administration’s
necons seems capable of any rash idiocy, so none of this may matter to them.
But even the neocons must be taking pause since Israel
failed to knock out Hizbullah using the same bunker-busting techniques planned
for Iran.[5]
But Israel
can attack Iran,
and this may be the plan. Teaming up, the two countries could compensate for
each other’s strategic limitations. The US has been
contributing its superpower clout in the Security Council, setting the stage
for sanctions, knowing Iran
will not yield on its enrichment program. Having cultivated a (mistaken)
international belief that Iran
is threatening a direct attack on Israel, the Israeli government could
then claim the right of self-defence in taking unilateral pre-emptive action to
destroy the nuclear capacity of a state declared in breach of UN directives. Direct
retaliation by Iran against Israel is impossible because Israel is a nuclear power (and Iran is not) and because the US security umbrella would protect Israel. Regional
reaction against US targets might be curtailed by the (scant) confusion about indirect
US
complicity.
In that case, what
we are seeing now is the US creating
the international security context for Israel’s
unilateral strike and preparing to cover Israel’s back in the aftermath.
Is this really the
plan? Some evidence suggests that it is on the table. In recent years, Israel
has purchased new “bunker-busting” missiles, a fleet of F-16 jets, and three latest-technology
German Dolphin submarines (and ordered two more)— i.e., the appropriate
weaponry for striking Iran’s nuclear installations. In March 2005, the Times of London reported that Israel had constructed a mock-up of Iran’s Natanz
facility in the desert and was conducting practice bombing raids.[6]
In recent months, Israeli officials have openly stated that if the UN fails to
take action, Israel will
bomb Iran.
But Hizbullah, Iran’s
ally, still threatens Israel’s
flank. Hence attacking Hizbullah was more than a “demo” for attacking Iran, as Seymour Hersh reported; it was
necessary to attacking Iran.
Israel failed to crush
Hizbullah, but the outcome may be better for Israel now that Security Council
Resolution 1701 has made the entire international community responsible for
disarming Hizbullah. If the US-sponsored 1701 effort succeeds, the attack on Iran is a go.
As Israel and the
US try to make that (deeply flawed) plan work, we will doubtless continue to
read in every forum that Iran’s president — a hostile, irrational, Jew-hating,
Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map”
—is demonstrably irrational enough to commit national suicide by launching a
(nonexistent) nuclear weapon against Israel’s mighty nuclear arsenal. The
message is being hammered home: against this
media-created myth, Israel
must truly “defend itself.”
[1] MEMRI
has the wording as “this regime that is occupying [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages
of history”. Converting “must vanish” to “must be eliminated” is done by
reinterpreting a passive verb as a transitive one. See related articles listed on Juan Cole’s Informed Comment: e.g., at http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html;
for further discussion, see Jonathan Steele’s “If Iran is ready to talk, the US
must do so unconditionally” (Guardian,
2 June 2006, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1788542,00.html
and “Lost in Translation” (Guardian,
14 June 2006) at http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_steele/2006/06/post_155.html;
also Anneliese Fikentscher and Andreas Neumann, (Erik Appleby, tr.), “Analysis
of Media Rhetoric against Iran”, available at http://forum.truthout.org/blog/?op=displaystory;sid=2006/4/19/18633/1774.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] For example, Michael
Goldberg’s thoughtful call for Jewish religious revival, Why Should Jews Survive? Looking Past the Holocaust toward a Jewish
Future (Oxford, 1995); and Idith Zertal’s Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of
Nationhood (Cambridge,
2005).
[5] Seymour Hersh, “Last
Stand: The
Military’s Problem with the President’s Iran Policy”, The New
Yorker (10 July 2006); and “Watching Lebanon: Washington’s
Interests in Israel’s
War”, The New Yorker (21 August
2006).
[6] Uzi Mahnaimi, “Revealed:
Israel Plans Strike on
Iranian Nuclear Plant”, Times of London, 13 March 2005.
[2] MEMRI
has the wording as “this regime that is occupying [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages
of history”. Converting “must vanish” to “must be eliminated” is done by
reinterpreting a passive verb as a transitive one. See related articles listed on Juan Cole’s Informed Comment: e.g., at http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html;
for further discussion, see Jonathan Steele’s “If Iran is ready to talk, the US
must do so unconditionally” (Guardian,
2 June 2006, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1788542,00.html
and “Lost in Translation” (Guardian,
14 June 2006) at http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_steele/2006/06/post_155.html;
also Anneliese Fikentscher and Andreas Neumann, (Erik Appleby, tr.), “Analysis
of Media Rhetoric against Iran”, available at http://forum.truthout.org/blog/?op=displaystory;sid=2006/4/19/18633/1774.
[3] See Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, “Middle East: OIC
Leaders Demand Immediate Cease-Fire”, http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/08/038d00f5-918a-4114-ad8b-9d22ac5fd174.html
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] For example, Michael
Goldberg’s thoughtful call for Jewish religious revival, Why Should Jews Survive? Looking Past the Holocaust toward a Jewish
Future (Oxford, 1995); and Idith Zertal’s Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of
Nationhood (Cambridge,
2005).
[7] Seymour Hersh, “Last
Stand: The
Military’s Problem with the President’s Iran Policy”, The New
Yorker (10 July 2006); and “Watching Lebanon: Washington’s
Interests in Israel’s
War”, The New Yorker (21 August
2006).
[8] Uzi Mahnaimi, “Revealed:
Israel Plans Strike on
Iranian Nuclear Plant”, Times of London, 13 March 2005.
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