I’m generally pretty admiring of Josh Marshall; he’s an unabashed partisan but usually one with a fair respect for facts and sense.<\/p>\n
Today, not so much.<\/p>\n
First, he gets spun by Juan Cole’s mistranslation of the Iranian threat to Israel. Here’s Marshall citing Cole:<\/p>\n
According to Farsi-speaking commentators including Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, Ahmadinejad’s exact quote was, “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” Cole has written that Ahmadinejad was not calling for the “Nazi-style extermination of a people,” but was expressing the wish that the Israeli government would disappear just as the shah of Iran’s regime had collapsed in 1979.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
When Cole made his post, a commenter here at Winds<\/a> took him to school:<\/p>\n
I am Iranian, and I can tell you Cole is wrong.<\/p>\n
\nLet’s start with simple fact, that is not directly relevant. He writes that Khomaini said the Shah government “must go”. But “az bain bayad berad” does not mean “go”, it litterarly mean something like “must cease to exist”, and the most direct translation would be “must be destroyed”.<\/p>\n
\nNow to the latter part:<\/p>\n
\n“bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad”
\nThe translation is not perfect, the dear Professor is not convewing the action implyied the sentence, as I or any Iranian would read it.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo Cole errs, or lies, and somehow it becomes a part of the historical record…<\/p>\n