Keep telling a lie long enough, and it develops a kind of vampiric immortality; it can't be killed. So it is with the lie that we can see repeated by warmongers everywhere the nation of Iran is mentioned, as a diarist has done here today: "Iran's avowed intention of wiping the state of Israel off the map [along, unavoidably, with its inhabitants]."
The people who repeat this lie ignore the many statements to the contrary by Iranian officials, that they have no intention of attacking Israel. No matter how many times the Iranians repeat this, the warmongers are selectively deaf to their denials. All they can hear is the single statement by Iran's current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Israel will be "erased from the pages of history."
The assumption of the warmongers is that this means Iran intends to do the erasing itself, through violence. They insist that Iran consitutes an existential threat to Israel. They link Iran's attempt to develop nuclear energy to this threat to come up with the conclusion that Iran, any day now, is about to nuke Tel Aviv, and only a preemptive strike can save Israel from a second holocaust.
Or so the warmongers would have the world believe, as they assiduously spread this lie to justify what they will brand as a defensive measure, but which in reality will be naked aggression.
Since this entire campaign of propaganda seems to rest on this one statement by Ahmadinejad, experts like Juan Cole have pointed out that it doesn't mean at all what the warmongers are claiming it to mean. Says Cole:
But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks.
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The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."
Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.
Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.
But now Ahmadinejad has made another statement that makes clear his meaning and intent, and it is just as Cole as said: this is not a threat of military action against Israel, but the claim that Israel will not last forever, that its existence will be ended by nonviolent means.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday told delegates at an international conference questioning the Holocaust that Israel's days were numbered.
Ahmadinejad, who has sparked international outcry by referring to the systematic murder of six million Jews in World War II as a "myth" and calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map", launched another verbal attack on Israel.
"Thanks to people's wishes and God's will the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is [headed] downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want," he said.
"Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out," he added.
And as we all know, the Soviet Union has indeed been erased from the map, but in its place is not a radioactive crater but a group of nations named Russia, Georgia, and the Ukraine. The Russians, Georgians, and Ukrainians are still alive and citizens of the nations that once were incorporated into the old, now erased, Soviet Union. There was no nuclear attack, there were no armies of tanks roaring across the border, no missiles launched against it. There was not even a bloody revolutionary uprising [at least in comparison to the Soviet Union's founding]. Only the failing hand of power in the government and the will of the people to cry out against it. The Soviet Union was erased from the map by an act of democracy.
So too, Ahmadinejad claims, will Israel be erased. Not in a nuclear attack but by the process of political evolution - aided by the will of God.
Now this is not a prediction likely to rejoice the hearts of Israelis and their supporters. But it is not, clearly not a threat of aggression. When Ahmadinejad says that Israeli will be erased, he is not claiming that Iran intends to do the erasing.
Thus there can no longer be any excuse for Israel and its supporters to persist in their lie that Iran constitutes an existential threat, that it intends any kind of military assault. And thus there can be no more excuse for Israel's hysterial warmongering and its threats of preemptive military action. Any such action by Israel would be entirely unjustifiable, an act of aggressive war.
It is past time to drive a stake through the heart of this lie and pin it in its grave, where it belongs.