Rasputin_Vol
"Slava Ukraina"
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- Aug 14, 2007
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Iran doesn’t recognize Israel as a state and, ever since 1979, Iranian ayatollahs, presidents and generals have called for Israel to be “destroyed,” “wiped off the map” or “eliminated.”
While that language can sound like threats of physical destruction, scrutiny of the full quotes almost invariably confirms the speakers are referring to the elimination of the State of Israel as a political entity. Western news outlets, politicians and propagandists, however, often omit the context that makes this distinction clear — if not misquoting the speaker altogether.
Anti-Iran propagandists’ all-time favorite citation springs from a 2005 speech by then-president Ahmadinejad, who was said to have declared that “Israel must be wiped off the face of the map.”
The quote became a staple of Iran-hawk rhetoric that’s still employed more than 18 years later — despite the fact that he actually said something quite different: “[Ayatollah Khomeini] said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”
In that same speech, titled “The World Without Zionism,” Ahmadinejad listed three other regimes that have ceased to exist — Iran’s own monarchy, the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq government.
