You've heard it hundreds of thousands of times on Fox News.
"Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map."
The trouble is that this quote has been butchered and turned into war propaganda.
It is repetitiously misquoted in order to bring acceptance to an offensive war against Iran in the near future.
The actual quote is, “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.”
It was uttered 30 years ago by a dead man, Ayatollah Khomeini.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad quoted the late Khomeini in a speech, and the warhawks took off with it in order to justify a fresh new war.
"Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map."
The trouble is that this quote has been butchered and turned into war propaganda.
It is repetitiously misquoted in order to bring acceptance to an offensive war against Iran in the near future.
The actual quote is, “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.”
It was uttered 30 years ago by a dead man, Ayatollah Khomeini.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad quoted the late Khomeini in a speech, and the warhawks took off with it in order to justify a fresh new war.
Did Ahmadinejad really say Israel should be "wiped off the map"? - The Washington Post
Then, specialists such as Juan Cole of the University of Michigan and Arash Norouzi of the Mossadegh Project pointed out that the original statement in Persian did not say that Israel should be wiped from the map, but instead that it would collapse.
Cole said this week that in the 1980s Khomeini gave a speech in which he said in Persian “Een rezhim-i eshghalgar-i Quds bayad az sahneh-i ruzgar mahv shaved.” This means, “This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.” But then anonymous wire service translators rendered Khomeini as saying that Israel “must be wiped off the face of the map,” which Cole and Nourouzi say is inaccurate.
Ahmadinejad slightly misquoted Khomeini, substituting “safheh-i ruzgar,” or “page of time" for "sahneh-i ruzgar" or “arena of time.” But in any case, the old translation was dug up and used again by the Iranian news agency, Cole says. In fact, that’s how it was presented for years on Ahmadinejad’s English-language Web site, as the Times noted in a somewhat defensive article on the translation debate.