Pbel, you are more ignorant then I thought. Saying that the Zionist regime will be wiped off the map is enough to warrant an attack. Also, Iran is the main supplier of weapons to Hezbollah. Enough with Iran ! Their time has come.
However, there is a VERY VERY easy way to avoid this war.
ready for it ?
ready?
Stop the nuclear program
Stop Giving weapons to Hezbollah
Here we go with the name calling...just provide a link...I've heard of translations where wiped off by history and not a threat to attack...
I'll Google too.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Translation controversy
Many news sources repeated the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting statement by Ahmadinejad that "Israel must be wiped off the map",[9][10] an English idiom which means to "cause a place to stop existing",[11] or to "obliterate totally",[12] or "destroy completely".[13]
The Iranian presidential website stated that "the Zionist Regime of Israel faces a deadend and will under God's grace be wiped off the map," and "the Zionist Regime that is a usurper and illegitimate regime and a cancerous tumor should be wiped off the map."[14]
Ahmadinejad's phrase was "بايد از صفحه روزگار محو شود" according to the text published on the President's Office's website.[15]
Ahmadinejad himself has repeatedly said that his remark was misinterpreted. Dan Meridor, Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, has also stated that it was not what Ahmadinejad said.[16]
The translation presented by the official Islamic Republic News Agency has been challenged. Arash Norouzi says the statement "wiped off the map" was never made and that Ahmadinejad did not refer to the nation or land mass of Israel, but to the "regime occupying Jerusalem". Norouzi translated the original Persian to English, with the result, "the Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."[17] Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, agrees that Ahmadinejad's statement should be translated as, "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."[18] According to Cole, "Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to 'wipe Israel off the map' because no such idiom exists in Persian." Instead, "he did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse."[19] The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated the phrase similarly, as "this regime" must be "eliminated from the pages of history."[20]
Iranian government sources denied that Ahmadinejad issued any sort of threat. On 20 February 2006, Iran's foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference: "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."[21][22][23]
Shiraz Dossa, a professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, also believes the text is a mistranslation.[24]
Ahmadinejad was quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini in the specific speech under discussion: what he said was that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." No state action is envisaged in this lament; it denotes a spiritual wish, whereas the erroneous translation – "wipe Israel off the map" – suggests a military threat. There is a huge chasm between the correct and the incorrect translations. The notion that Iran can "wipe out" U.S.-backed, nuclear-armed Israel is ludicrous.[25][26][27]
The Guardian columnist and foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele published an article based on this line of reasoning.[28]
In a 11 June 2006 analysis of the translation controversy, New York Times editor Ethan Bronner stated:
[T]ranslators in Tehran who work for the president's office and the foreign ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement, including a description of it on his website, refer to wiping Israel away. Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran’s most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say “wipe off” or “wipe away” is more accurate than "vanish" because the Persian verb is active and transitive.
Bronner continued: "..it is hard to argue that, from Israel's point of view, Mr. Ahmadinejad poses no threat. Still, it is true that he has never specifically threatened war against Israel. So did Iran's president call for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question."[19] This elicited a further response from Jonathan Steele, who noted that Bronner agreed that "map" or any other place noun had not been used and criticized this Wikipedia entry (as it was on 14 June 2006) for "claiming falsely" that Ethan Bronner had "concluded that Ahmadinejad had in fact said that Israel was to be wiped off the map".[29]
At a gathering of foreign guests marking the 19th anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 2008, Ahmadinejad said:
"You should know that the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime which has 60 years of plundering, aggression and crimes in its file has reached the end of its work and will soon disappear off the geographical scene."[30]