POAC IV

Here's another in a series of "My talking point is better than your talking point" entries at the Project for an Old American Century's "Counterspin" page.

The talking point
Iranian President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel

The facts
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." His message was, in essence, "This too shall pass."
(POAC)

And the less infamous quotations are, I suppose, less glaringly wrong.
So let's examine the claim above.
The material comes from Virginia Tilley, a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Later in her article, Tilley uses Al Jazeera to provide translations of Ahmadinejad. Here's how Al Jazeera translated the speech in question:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has openly called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

"The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world," the president told a conference in Tehran on Wednesday, entitled The World without Zionism. "The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land," he said. "As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," said Ahmadinejad, referring to Iran's revolutionary leader Ayat Allah Khomeini. His comments were the first time in years that such a high-ranking Iranian official has called for Israel's eradication, even though such slogans are still regularly used at government
rallies.
(Al Jazeera)

Tilley might as well be saying that Al Jazeera got an entirely wrong impression of Ahmadinejad's speech. She must think the Arab news service is secretly in league with the Zionists in trying to make Ahmadinejad look like a saber-rattler.

Tilley relies on the translation of Juan Cole (University of Michigan).

Cole's interpretation of Ahmadinejad's intent is interesting, to say the least.

"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."
(New York Times)

Cole is a critic of American policy? You don't say!

Cole is doing a Clintonesque parsing of Ahmadinejad, where "wiping off the map" does not exist in Persian as an idiom. But what of the meaning of the idiom?

Also, wipe off the face of the earth. Eliminate completely, as in Some day we hope to wipe malaria off the map. This idiom uses wipe in the sense of "obliterate," and map and face of the earth in the sense of "everywhere."
(Answers.com)

Ahmadinejad does seem to have had in mind exactly that sort of fate for Israel.

Remember? The Israel that no Muslim country should acknowledge?

"'I hope that the Palestinians will maintain their wariness and intelligence, much as they have pursued their battles in the past 10 years. This will be a short period, and if we pass through it successfully, the process of the elimination of the Zionist regime will be smooth and simple.

"'I warn all the leaders of the Islamic world to be wary of Fitna: If someone is under the pressure of hegemonic power [i.e. the West] and understands that something is wrong, or he is naïve, or he is an egotist and his hedonism leads him to recognize the Zionist regime – he should know that he will burn in the fire of the Islamic Ummah [nation]…

"'The people who sit in closed rooms cannot decide on this matter. The Islamic people cannot allow this historical enemy to exist in the heart of the Islamic world.

(MEMRI version of Ahmadinejad's speech)

Cole had pointed to MEMRI's rendering of the "wipe Israel off the map" passage as accurate.

The text of Ahmadinejad's speech utterly rebukes Cole's fancifully positive interpretation. Far from simply having the "hope" that Israel will pass away over time, Ahmadinejad very plainly calls for active steps to obliterate the regime from the Middle East (granted, he proposes that Israel could relocate to Europe or even America, but that's just delaying the inevitable since Ahmadinejad's brand of Islam fancies itself as a world-dominating ideology).

Has Cole attempted to explain how Al Jazeera got caught up in spreading war propaganda for the West?

Bottom line, Ahmadinejad is actively working to eliminate Israel, and he probably seriously contemplates using nuclear weapons against Israel toward that end.

A passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, is revealing. "I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead--hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.
(Opinion Journal)

That's four stinkers in a row from the Project for an Old American Century.