07
May
BTC News unearths another Ahmadinejad apologist
Slate columnist Christopher Hitchens on Tuesday called University of Michigan professor Juan Cole an apologist for Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The basis of the claim was that Cole, in an email to a colleague, deliberately misinterpreted a phrase in an Ahmadinejad speech to minimize the impact of it.
I wrote about the Hitchens column here; I think I failed to make clear two important points — the first being that the email Hitchens quoted was sent by Cole to a colleague on a private discussion list on April 22, while Hitchens filed and Slate published his column on May 2 — and completely misfired on a third.
The timing is significant because the quoted email was an early one in a discussion about the Ahmadinejad speech. In it, Cole mistakenly referenced another phrase, a lapse he corrected the next day, April 23, in a subsequent email to the group. So when Hitchens wrote his column, the error he attributed to poor scholarship and bad intentions had been acknowledged and corrected by Cole more than a week earlier.
It’s possible Hitchens wasn’t aware of this, since he isn’t a participant in the discussion list from which the email was lifted; in that case his guilt is limited to the lack of ethics he displayed in publishing the email without permission and in failing to contact Cole for a response before he filed the column, something that would likely have short-circuited the whole exercise. His decision to do the one and not the other is sufficient reason to brand him a malevolent hack.
What doesn’t seem possible, given the lapse between the time Cole wrote the offending email and the correction on the one hand and the time Hitchens filed his column on the other, is that whoever provided the email to Hitchens can have been unaware of the correction; if Hitchens wasn’t aware of it, then he was played by someone who deliberately set out to smear Cole and chose Hitchens as the most reliably useful idiot for the job.
In the best case, then, Hitchens is not only a malevolent hack but a gullible one as well. In the worst, if he was aware that Cole corrected himself a day after he sent the original email and more than a week before Hitchens published, he’s the knowing trigger man in the smear.
Before moving on to the second point, the question of Cole as Ahmadinejad apologist, I want to spare a moment for Andrew Sullivan, who weighed in on the affair because he was with Hitchens when the latter filed the column. Sullivan’s contribution included four elements: he decried Hitchens’ use of a private email; he scorned Cole for suggesting Hitchens was drunk when he wrote the column (a suggestion Cole retracted based on Sullivan’s testimony to the contrary); he applauded Hitchens’ literary and argumentative form, and he accused Cole of dishonesty for publishing the email in which Cole corrected the error he’d made in the earlier one, apparently on the assumption that, despite the April 23 date on the correction, it was written after the Hitchens assault was published rather than a week earlier. In Sullyland, it’s dishonest to point out that you corrected an error you made before you were attacked for making the error.
I assumed the motivation for this hatchet job was that Hitchens supports an attack on Iran while Cole insists an attack would be disastrous, and that Iran offers no existential threat to any country, let alone the US. If Hitchens were, in his own inimitable style, to paraphrase Cole’s position on the issue, it might sound a bit like this:
Assume that the Iranians are within measurable distance of nuclear status. Appearances sometimes to the contrary, they are not mad—or not clinically insane in the way that Saddam Hussein was and Kim Jong-il is. The recent fuss about the obliteration of Israel is largely bullshit: Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for this has been intoned pedantically and routinely ever since he first uttered it, and it only got attention this year because of the new phenomenon of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the scrofulous engineer who acts the part of civilian president for his clerical bosses. These people (who once bought weapons from Israel via Oliver North in order to fight Saddam Hussein) are cynical and corrupt. They know as well as you do what would happen if they tried to nuke Israel or the United States. They want the bomb as insurance against invasion and as a weapon of strategic ambiguity to shore up their position in the region.
We can be fairly sure the Hitchens take would sound something like that because Hitchens wrote it. The primary difference between Hitchens and Cole in this particular instance is that the harshest description of Ahmadinejad offered up by Hitchens is “scrofulous;” he’s accusing Ahmadinejad of suffering from a chronic enlargement and degeneration of the lymphatic glands, something I’m sure we can all agree constitutes an absolutely withering assault, and something that represents his entire consideration of Ahmadinejad, at least in Slate’s pages.
Cole, on the other hand, has written that “I personally despise everything Ahmadinejad stands for” (April 23, 2006, published May 2); that Ahmadinejad “has been particularly stupid in his pronouncements on Israel” (December 30, 2005); that Ahmadinejad “stole the Iranian election” (October 27, 2005); that Ahmadinejad’s remarks on the Holocaust reflect a “wilfull ignorance on a Himalayan scale” (January 4, 2006); that “Ahmadinejad is a very bad character, with a long history of essentially fascist activity in suppressing points of view other than those of the hardline Khomeinists” (June 18, 2005).
So let’s review our apologist scorecard. Hitchens on Ahmadinejad: “scrofulous.” Cole on Ahmadinejad: “despicable, ignorant, thieving, stupid, fascist.” The one point on which they agree, or did as recently as March of this year when Hitchens indicted Ahmadinejad for lymphatic excess, is that Ahmadinejad and Iran pose no serious threat to Israel or the US, and that a US attack on Iran would be at least stupid and probably disastrous.
If opposed views on Iran aren’t the issue, if Hitchens still adheres to what he wrote two months ago, which seems all but certain, then what on earth could have provoked his assault on Cole?
In retrospect, one alternative stands out: Hitchens is slavishly devoted to the war in Iraq, Cole is highly critical of it, and on the one occasion the two men met, Hitchens embarrassed himself. He wrote the column not because he advocates an attack on Iran, and not because he was drunk, but because in his mind, Cole, who mentioned the incident only in passing in his original response to Hitchens, humiliated him.
Hitchens is never shy about enumerating his perceived triumphs. That he didn’t mention the encounter with Cole should have tipped me to the nature of his grievance.
Which brings me, once again, to the man who saw fit to publish the screed: Slate editor Jacob Weisberg. Weisberg has no excuse for allowing one of his writers to attack someone in the manner Hitchens did without first making some effort to acquaint himself with the facts. He not only didn’t do that — in fact, I suspect he didn’t even read the column before publishing it; if Sullivan’s timeline for the day is accurate, the column must have been posted on Slate almost as soon as Hitchens filed it — but absolved Hitchens of any obligation to do so.
I’ve written before , in connection with the invasion of Iraq, about Weisberg’s inability to bring himself to account for his actions (along with his eagerness to blame others for his fractured logic and his insistence that he was wrong for the right reasons and that those who were right were right for the wrong reasons). That syndrome seems to be very much in evidence here, with the added fillip of a complete ethical meltdown. Send Weisberg an off-the-record email and if some residue of honor slows him from publication under his own byline, he can hand it off to a third party and absolve himself of all obligation.
The new editorial standard for Slate: if it’s legal, it’s ethical.
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You should look back through the material you are commenting about. I believe you have failed to take account of the fact that Hitchens takes account of Cole’s correction. At the very least the explanations and translations that Hitchens offers effectively rebut Cole, including the corrected version, whether Hitchens was privy to Cole’s correction or not.
If Professor Cole had something new to offer in the conversation about Ahmadinejad’s extremism, it surprises me that he did not offer it earlier and publicly, e.g. on his blog. By giving his revisionist opinion about Ahmadinejad’s intentions only in the private, limited circulation mailing list, he severely limited the number of people who would be willing and able to argue with him about it.
In that sense, Hitchens “outed” him, exposing what appears to be a very serious attempt at disinformation.
Ask yourself, objective journalist, why would someone who claims to have superior knowledge about what President Ahmadinejad really meant on October 26, 2005, keep that knowledge to himself until April 22/23, 2006, and then only share his knowledge in an environment that is, for him, protected and, for many others, vulnerable? Think about it? Fewer people to contradict him. Many of them not wanting to make unnecessary waves.
What do you think about that?
May 7th, 2006 at 8:32 amExcellent, and thanks for continuing to hold Weisberg’s feet to the fire, as he is certainly ultimately accountable as editor for continually waving Hitchens’ repetitively error-filled screeds into “print” (or its online equivalent), while Slate’s “Corrections” column is worse than useless, correcting only trivia like misspellings Spanish grammar while ignoring Hitchens’ substantive and thoroughly-documented errors.
May 7th, 2006 at 8:45 amJuan, Hitchens did no such thing. He quoted from and disputed only the April 22 email, which involved a completely separate phrase from the one Cole refers to in the second email. Hitchens was either unaware of or chose to ignore the correction; whichever, he didn’t address the phrase Cole references in the correction of April 23.
As for Cole’s timing on his Ahmadinejad comments: I linked to all of them, all of them are from his blog and the careful reader will note that all but one of the linked dates fall between June of last year and January of this year. I expect there are others, but I thought those sufficient to make the point.
Hitchens, on the other hand, has expressed scant concern until now, and what concern he does express in the current column is likely, I think, to reflect what his informant told him rather than any original thought of his own.
May 7th, 2006 at 9:49 am“Hitchens supports an attack on Iran while Cole insists an attack would be disastrous”
You’re wrong. Try reading some of Hitchens’ writing before you talk about it.
http://www.slate.com/id/2137560/
May 7th, 2006 at 5:11 pmWeldon, Cole only found a milder Khomeini phrase for his correction. Hitchens traced Ahmadinejad’s language back to his evocation of Khomeini and showed with translations of both Ahmadinejad and Khomeini that the language they are using is “morally outrageous”, which is how Cole characterised it in December. In October Cole said, “…Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who stole the Iranian election last June, talked about wiping Israel off the face of the earth. His (stupid and monstrous) speech underlined what kind of trouble Ariel Sharon’s…”.
How come Cole changed his mind in April, after the dust has settled, when no one else is paying much attention, and while speaking in a privileged situation where he was unlikely to be questioned about his unique interpretation of Ahmadinejad’s Farsi??
No, Professor Cole has shown himself to be a singularly untrustworthy scholar.
May 7th, 2006 at 5:31 pmI misread your column before I posted, and I see now that I mischaracterized your argument. My apologies.
May 7th, 2006 at 5:58 pmJuan, the “disinformation” theory sort of loses steam when you consider that Hitchens lifted the email from a private discussion group, don’t you think? And obviously Cole was questioned about the translation, by a Farsi speaker, or he wouldn’t have made the correction in another email to the same group a day later: this is not a group of ignoramuses, and neither is Cole so ignorant as to be unaware that the group hosted other Farsi speakers.
Further, disinformation to what effect? As I noted, Cole has been far more critical of Ahmadinejad than has Hitchens, and the two are in agreement that Iran is not an existential threat to Israel or the US. Cole has never argued that the ayatollahs are not hostile to Israel, or that they haven’t funded terrorists, or that Khomeini wasn’t an eliminationist asshole: he’s simply saying that a particular phrase in a speech the content of which, as you note, he has decried on several occasions, was widely mistranslated.
Still further, Cole made the same “must vanish” reference in a post last December; the October comment may well have come before he’d read the speech in the original, or before he’d had the opportunity to give it much study, since the speech was delivered only a few days before the post you cite.
That hardly speaks to a campaign of disinformation, it certainly doesn’t indicate that he’s changed his mind about Ahmadinejad, as he took pains to note in his followup email — which was written before the Hitchens piece, not in response to it — and it certainly doesn’t warrant labeling him “a singularly untrustworthy scholar;” quite the reverse, it suggests that he wanted to be sure of his position before making the case publicly, and he was using the discussion group for exactly the purpose it was intended: to discuss ideas.
May 7th, 2006 at 11:06 pmMicah, no problem: I actually did make that mistake in my previous post on the subject, so it’s only your timing that was off, not the criticism.
May 7th, 2006 at 11:08 pm“The primary difference between Hitchens and Cole in this particular instance is that the harshest description of Ahmadinejad offered up by Hitchens is “scrofulous;”
Please. You and Cole must think your readers are stupid. The difference is that Cole suggested - to informed colleagues - that Ahmadinejad and all the Iranians before him only want to remove the occupation of the territories taken in the ‘67 war. Hitchens says no, they’ve been talking about the destruction of Israel, but they don’t really mean it and wouldn’t nuke Israel as soon as they get a bomb. Big difference. Hitchens’s money quote
“He evidently thinks that by “occupation,” Khomeini and Ahmadinejad were referring to the Israeli seizure of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. But if this were true, it would not have been going on for “more than fifty years” now, would it? The 50th anniversary of 1967 falls in 2017, which is a while off. What could be clearer than that “occupation regime” is a direct reference to Israel itself?”
This is a central issue of the Middle East, no? How could Cole not know?
Hitchens thinks Cole is a “a sort of Shiite fellow-traveling version of Norman Ornstein” (i.e. biased) while Cole thinks Hitchens is part of the “War Machine” who doesn’t want a war with Iran. In fact at the time, Hitchens said Bush’s inclusion of Iran in the Axis of Evil was stupid.
May 8th, 2006 at 8:58 amPeter, I do get the occasional stupid reader, but I don’t count on it. In this instance, I think Hitchens misled and you and others followed.
Cole was concerned with a particular phrase in a particular speech that he thinks was mistranslated and is being used to portray a threat that doesn’t exist. As you know, he corrected his first email as soon as someone pointed out his error.
Even in the first email, he said nothing to indicate that he denies Khomeini or other Iranian leaders have explicitly threatened Israel, and I would be very surprised to find anything in his writings that indicates otherwise. If you can provide an example of such a statement, let me know.
As I understand it, his point here was that the phrase in question is more a metaphysical expression than a physical threat. He may be wrong; I don’t know. But to extrapolate from that a wholesale defense of the Iranian regime in the face of all the contradicting evidence is foolish.
As for Cole being a “Shiite fellow traveler,” it’s clear that anyone who levels that particular charge hasn’t read any of Cole’s comments on the behavior of Shiites in Iraq and Iran.
May 8th, 2006 at 11:11 amThere is absolutely nothing unethical about what Hitchens did.
Moreover, Cole never manages to defend his depiction (which he maintains to this day) that Ahmadinejad was merely suggesting that Israel should stop occupying Jerusalem, as opposed to wishing for Israel to cease to exist entirely. Hitchens absolutely nailed Cole on this point, and it is very telling that Cole — for all his verbiage — doesn’t even attempt a reply.
May 8th, 2006 at 11:20 amNiels,
I think you may be right about the ethics issue. But your second claim confuses me, as I don’t think that Cole ever took the position that you attribute to him. The nut graf of his second email, which he reprints on his blog, is this:
‘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.’
He is making an argument about the translation of Ahmedinejad’s speech; I don’t think he has ever attempted to explain exactly what Ahmadinejad meant in geopolitical terms, except to say that the phrase doesn’t imply “Nazi-style extermination of a people.” If you have evidence to the contrary, please provide it.
May 8th, 2006 at 12:25 pmCole asserted that the speech meant that “the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time,” just as “Ariel Sharon erased the occupation regime over Gaza from the page of time.”
In other words, Cole was attempting to suggest that Ahmadinejad merely wants Israel to abandon Jerusalem. Which is bad enough in itself. But Cole 1) ignores the fact that Ahmadinejad wasn’t just talking about Jerusalem; he was saying that the regime itself (i.e., Israel) should be “erased” such as if it had never existed; and 2) ignores the many other statements from Admadinejad calling for the destruction of Israel (Hitchens describes a few of these other statements, although Cole obviously can’t be bothered to answer on the merits).
In sum, Cole disingenuously attempted to whitewash what Ahmadinejad said, and ignored the rest of the context in which Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be driven out of existence. It may be true that Iran doesn’t plan another Holocaust. Whoop-de-do about that. That doesn’t excuse Cole’s behavior.
May 8th, 2006 at 12:37 pmHitchens is left on Slate as bread and circuses for the readers. This also provides fraysters fun in refuting him (or as shown here, defending him in holier than thou terms), some (such as frayster doodahman) doing a wicked job of it.
Ethical guidelines are quite important in the surely important online commentary universe, so this debate is of some value, even if there seems to be some core incestual “who gives a shit” flavor to some of it.
As to editorial decisions at Slate, the cottage industry (well stocked with examples) out there bashing a handful of their key contributors suggests Weldon Berger here is an example of how it is a bit surprising as much good comes from all of it as it does.
May 8th, 2006 at 2:42 pmEthics:
Hitchens was passed a private email attributed to Cole and filed it as news with comment without checking its accuracy with Cole or giving him a chance to respond or clarify as a news reporter would do. Publishing information stolen from someone’s file cabinet or secretly tape recorded under the dinner table may be necessary and possibly ethical if the subject is hiding information important to the public good. Here the whole writing and filing process of Hitchens was designed purely for attack, not for giving objective information or opinion based on available complete information. It is a straight forward unethical hack job.
Furthermore, who ever was the participant in the site who passed on the private email must have known this would have a chilling effect on free communication by those participating in the discussion group who reside and work under repressive Middle Eastern regimes. The whole process reeks of selfishness and sleaze, with the Slate editor giving his stamp of approval.
May 8th, 2006 at 8:58 pmWow, it’s really amazing how brainwashed some of these right wingnuts are. Their knee-jerk hostility to J. Cole is predictable, however their blind alleigance to Hitchens is stunning. Hitchens has long been a shill for the neocons, and his scholarship cannot hold a candle to that of professor J. Cole.
The Cole smear is like every other neocon smear. First, they target omeone who has made a well reasoned, forceful critique of their policy. Next, they search through the writings and public statements of said person for potential material. Personal scandals are preferred, but if none are found, they simply cherry pick a phrase or sentence to mischaracterize (always out of context). They put out the critique of this out of context fragment using the standard channels: media personalities/pundits, hate-radio jocks, and hacks like Hitchens. The public is then saturated with the disinformation, and the media dutifully fails to provide context or to give the smear target any chance for reasoned rebuttle. This method has proven time and again to be exquisitely effective in silencing Bush administration critics.
My favorite example the right’s illogic would have to be the standard issue dismissal of those who foresaw the disaster of Iraq: “they were against the war from the beginning, so they’re just bitter.” Using their logic, the critics who predicted failure in Iraq shouldn’t be given voice now, because they were against the war from the start.
30 years from now, Americans will look back on this as another age of national hysteria and paraanoia, regarding the myriad smears of Bush administration critics as analogous to the McCarthy witch hunts of the 50s. For now, I suppose we’ll just have to respond to the smears with what they deserve: derisive laughter.
May 8th, 2006 at 9:37 pm“As I understand it, his point here was that the phrase in question is more a metaphysical expression than a physical threat. He may be wrong; I don’t know. But to extrapolate from that a wholesale defense of the Iranian regime in the face of all the contradicting evidence is foolish.”
Well, Mr. Berger, I appreciate your desire to try to discuss the facts at the heart of the matter.
Hitchens doesn’t extrapolate. In fact in his attack, he explicitly says
“However, words and details and nuances do matter in all this, so I was not surprised to see professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan denying that Ahmadinejad, or indeed Khomeini, had ever made this call for the removal of Israel from the map.”
He quotes Cole as saying “Ahmadinejad did not “threaten” to “wipe Israel off the map.” I’m not sure there is even such an idiom in Persian. He quoted Khomeini to the effect that “the Occupation regime must end.”"
I guess Cole disavowed this not to long after writing it, but it is a fundematental issue to flip-flop on. Most people are aware that the Iranians are engaging in common anti-Israel rhetoric, which they won’t carry out, especially with America looming in the background.
But the content of their rhetoric is what it is.
And it’s quite possible the next Iranian regime will be much worse than this one. We went from Clinton to Bush after all, right?
May 9th, 2006 at 8:00 amPeter K. 80% of the Muslims throughout the Middle East, Norht Africa and South Asia engage in “common anti-Israel rhetoric.” Cole doesn’t deny that this is so. My understanding is that he is merely critiquing an analysis of Amaajama’s (sp?) words that concludes Iran intends to attack and and attempt to destroy Israel which he views as an attempt to incite a larger % of Americans to support an air strike or to believe that those opposing an air strike can’t defend American. Hitchens’ quote mining is just the kind of use of words out of context to achieve a purely political end.
The right is laughing at Hitchens. To them he’s a pathetic buffoon they can point to as a “reformed” lefty.
May 9th, 2006 at 8:28 am“80% of the Muslims throughout the Middle East, Norht Africa and South Asia engage in “common anti-Israel rhetoric.” Cole doesn’t deny that this is so.”
Never said he did.
“My understanding is that he is merely critiquing an analysis of Amaajama’s (sp?) words that concludes Iran intends to attack and and attempt to destroy Israel which he views as an attempt to incite a larger % of Americans to support an air strike or to believe that those opposing an air strike can’t defend American. Hitchens’ quote mining is just the kind of use of words out of context to achieve a purely political end”
Your understanding is wrong. Completely. 100%
Ahmadinejad is repeating the threat to destroy Israel. Even “reformed” lefty Hitchens doubts they will follow through on this threat.
Juan Cole was preening about his expertise in things Iranian and argued what Ahmadinejad said was less threatening than it was in order to stave off another war or “air strikes” that will never come anyway.
Hitchens merely pointed out how this scholar was wrong (again). And for this Cole flew into hysterics.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:21 amPeter: you “guess” Cole “disavowed?” I’m beginning to think you’ve been more than a bit sloppy in your reading.
What Cole said was that one phrase in an Ahmadinejad speech had been mistranslated and seized upon to drum up anti-Iran sentiment. He acknowledged the next day, ten days before Hitchens published, that he’d referenced the wrong phrase.
Here’s what Hitchens quoted:
It is quite, quite clear that Cole is referring to a specific phrase, not to Ahmadinejad’s or Khomeini’s entire ouvre; in no sense is Cole “denying that Ahmadinejad, or indeed Khomeini, had ever made this call for the removal of Israel from the map” other than in the very narrow ones that the phrase in question never called for it and that the particular idiom might not even exist.
No: Hitchens took Cole’s objection to that single phrase — the wrong one, in the email Hitchens quoted, something I will again reiterate that Cole recognized and corrected long before Hitchens published — and either did indeed extrapolate from that to reach the conclusion you quoted, or worded that conclusion so carefully as to sucker readers such as you into thinking that he had done (his use of “this call” rather than “a call” or “any call” suggests he was tailoring his accusation much more narrowly than you interpret it). Either way, the accusation rests upon that single phrase.
And I reiterate again: Cole did not “flip-flop.” He quoted the wrong phrase in his original email, someone in the private discussion group pointed it out to him and he corrected it the next day, which was, again, ten days before Hitchens filed the column and Slate published it. He didn’t alter his stance, but rather acknowledged that he had referenced the wrong quote. That’s hardly the renunciation of a fundamental principle.
Your comment seems to indicate that you haven’t read Cole’s response to Hitchens, which includes the corrective email, or anything else Cole has written on the Iranian regime. Don’t you think that’s a prerequisite for any discussion of this issue and Cole’s attitude toward the regime?
Two points in response to the question of subsequent Iranian regimes. First, the Iranian president, no matter how scrofulous, has little real power and particularly so in the realm of foreign policy, which would include, for instance, nuking Israel and inviting the destruction of Iran. That power resides with the clerics, who are either contemporaries of Khomeini or the subsequent generation of Khomeinists. Barring a clerical revolution that installs a group to the right of the hard right, Iran’s policies won’t change much.
The second point is that the threat, however distant, of an even more repressive, fundamentalist regime is exactly why the US should be reaching out to Iran rather than attempting to isolate it still further. Before some charismatic cleric comes along and persuades the country that the clerical council is a corrupt and religiously impure organization interested only in perpetuating its own power — which is at least as likely as the idea that Iranians will tire of isolation, to the extent they may be isolated, and usher in a more liberal regime — we should probably look at ways of minimizing the perception that we intend to destroy their country.
May 9th, 2006 at 10:19 am“In no sense is Cole “denying that Ahmadinejad, or indeed Khomeini, had ever made this call for the removal of Israel from the map” other than in the very narrow ones that the phrase in question never called for it and that the particular idiom might not even exist.”
This is nonsense. Try to write clearly.
The letter Cole wrote to Slate which Slate has put below Hitchens’s article reads as follows:
“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.”
Why is it that almost everyone else quotes it as “Israel must be wiped off the map”? I never took it to mean that the Iranians are going to setup gas chambers. Hitchens points out the “occupation regime” is the state of Israel and the threat is bad enough without referencing the Nazis. I don’t understand what’s so tough about getting this.
Cole argues that warmongers are using the phrase to whip up war fever. Well, maybe Ahmadinejad shouldn’t have said it then! Why does Cole apologize for Ahmadinejad, when Ahmadinejad hasn’t denied his tough talk to the rest of the world, where the rest of the world interprets it differently from Cole?!
Johann Hari has an excellent piece warning Israelis that they should get their act together (I think he’s too alarmist about Ahmadinejad. Cole’s not alarmist enough.)
http://www.johannhari.com/index.php
May 9th, 2006 at 11:34 amPeter, enough: I did write clearly. I said that Cole was concerned with the mistranslation of a particular phrase. I said it more than once. Cole has said it more than once, including in the quote you cite, which is from, if you didn’t already know, the April 23 email in which he corrected the April 22 one from which Hitchens quoted on May 2.
You, on the other hand, insist on applying some global significance to the issue of this one particular phrase. It is glaringly, unavoidably obvious that Cole is a harsh critic of the Iranian regime and the man who is now its titular head, that he was so long before the Hitchens piece appeared and that he continues to be so now.
Rather than recognize this, you choose to believe that his entire approach to Iran is encapsulated in his insistence that five words were mistranslated and subsequently used for inimical purposes. As I said earlier, even if his translation is wrong, the charge that he’s an apologist for Ahamdinejad is foolish. Worse than foolish, at this point.
But at least you’ve dropped the flip-flopping notion. That’s progress, I guess.
May 9th, 2006 at 1:50 pm“You, on the other hand, insist on applying some global significance to the issue of this one particular phrase.”
So you don’t think it’s a significant phrase? Cole’s point is that some people (Zionists, neocons and warmongers probably in his mind) are using this unimportant, negligible phrase to whip up war fever against Iran.
Hitchens point is that attacking Iran is a bad idea (many regular Iranians like America b/c they don’t like their government, a fact Cole never ever mentions). However, truth and accuracy matter.
Today at his blog, Cole wrote: “Although [Shimon] Peres says that Ahmadinejad threatened to destroy Israel, he did not in fact menace Israel with a military attack.”
Still, threatening to destroy a fellow member of the UN is bad enough. Imagine if Canada threatened to destroy us?
“Ahmadinejad views Israel the way President Gerald Ford viewed the Soviet Union. He wishes it would vanish as a regime, but he is not prepared to launch a military attack to accomplish that goal.”
So inaccurate. Ford didn’t give speeches saying the Soviet Union should be wiped from the map. “Vanish” is such a nonthreatening word. It’s like Ahmadinejad wished the “regime” was voted out of office.
Cole does write “Since Iran sits in the United Nations with Israel, Ahmadinejad is in contravention of the UN charter in rejecting Israel’s legitimacy.”
Israel’s Defense Minister told Peres to knock it off and not use unimportant negligible phrases that threaten Iran in turn with being whiped from the map, a phrase with no significance apparently.
May 10th, 2006 at 11:13 amPeter K. has one thing right, precisely, and that is that Ahmadinejad doesn’t need Cole apologizing for him. That’s because he explains himself quite well in the recent letter, laying out his beef with Israel and our support for it, even trying to explain his Holocaust remarks. Along with his insistence that excessive violence betrays his values, Ahmadinejad plays a much more convincing “man of faith” than his counterpart in Washington, and actually responds rather directly to the israeli-american planted meme that he is somehow out to drop a mushroom cloud on Tel Aviv.
So Cole was absolutely right to draw attention to the use of this particular speech/phrase to dishonestly demonize Ahmadinejad in the press (a necessary precondition for going to war).
May 10th, 2006 at 12:02 pmIt is apparent that Cole’s translation, as well as that of the conservative MERMI, is accurate. Thus, the phrase “wiped off the map” was never used.
And yet Hitchen’s defenders here insist that Cole’s motive in offering the proper translation must have been to mislead readers into the fantastical belief that neither the Iranian president, or the Ayatollah, had any objections whatsoever to the existence of the Jewish state which was established in 1948.
And who are the readers who we are asked to believe to have been in danger of drawing such an inference from the proper translation? A highly educated private group of academics, and policy makers.
Once again, here is Coles translation:
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).”
Cole nowhere says this is about only the occupation of Jerusalem; he makes clear rather that it is the regime which Ahmadinejad is saying “must vanish”.
I simply see no reason to believe that Cole’s translation isn’t accurate. No one has pointed out a single word which has been wrongly intrepreted. In order to buy any of this critique of Cole, I think that one would have to believe that Cole’s critics somehow have a better grasp of Farsi than they seem to have of English.
May 10th, 2006 at 1:04 pmBush to Iran: “We Will Bury You”
Those observers of American history who are able to separate their personal demons from their observations — or whose personal demons aren’t activated by the situation at hand — have long been aware that translations are among the pri…
May 10th, 2006 at 7:16 pm