What did the Iranian president really say?
Not long ago, I said to a friend that one should always question translations like those of the Iranian president about Israel that seem to have been accepted unthinkingly by our mainstream press. Sure enough, those translations, in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is apparently calling for Israel to be wiped off the face of the map, have been challenged by U Mich's Juan Cole and others. (The former leftist writer who has turned into a rabid Iraq War supporter, Christopher Hitchens, has attacked Cole for criticizing the translation, which seems a bit funny if he has no knowledge of Persian, which appears to be the case.)
Everyone should read up on this, because those quotes are being used to drum up war fever. As Cole says, if we can just get mainstream journalists to question translations from other languages that are fed to them -- seems like a tall order for this crowd of gelded J-school graduates -- it will be a huge victory. When the translation is highly provocative and useful for enraging the American people, the demand for testing and confirming it should be more than obvious, but that appears not to matter.
From Liberal Oasis (http://www.liberaloasis.com/):
Also see this on the Cole-Hitchens dispute: http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html
Everyone should read up on this, because those quotes are being used to drum up war fever. As Cole says, if we can just get mainstream journalists to question translations from other languages that are fed to them -- seems like a tall order for this crowd of gelded J-school graduates -- it will be a huge victory. When the translation is highly provocative and useful for enraging the American people, the demand for testing and confirming it should be more than obvious, but that appears not to matter.
From Liberal Oasis (http://www.liberaloasis.com/):
And despite Hitchens’ argument that if the “wiped” translation was wrong, “Ahmadinejad would have denied it,” Iranian officials have on at least two occasions (Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh on CNN and Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki during a Feb. news conference) challenged the translation.
Now, if we can attract more attention to the substantive dispute of the Cole-Hitchens fight, we will also call attention to the fact that translations are tricky business.
And those with political agendas can selectively choose translations to obscure the big picture and manipulate the media.
If the media can be conditioned to understand that they should be extra careful with translations pushed by the neocons, we will have taken a big step to thwarting the White House agenda to dishonestly paint the Iranian government as irrational and fast-track us to war.
Also see this on the Cole-Hitchens dispute: http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html
posted by KISSWeb | 2:36 AM
2 Comments:
Juan Cole is usually an invaluable Blogger for Middle East issues. But, his frequent posts on this matter were excessive. His allegation that Hitchens wrote drunk or had a ghost-writer were inappropriate.
Reasoned responses are going to work in this debate. Off-the-handle does not.
I'm going to disagree with copy editor here. Yes, Juan probably overstepped a bit to go into Hitchens' personal faults, but he was pretty pissed off by the fact that Hitchens stole his private correspondence and published it in Slate. I'd be pissed off too.
Meanwhile, the whole point of Kissweb's post has nothing to do with the Cole-Hitchens debate. It has to do with the mis-translation of Ahmadinejad's remarks about Israel. That point certainly shouldn't be lost in this debate.
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