Bush 'planted fake news stories on American TV'

As someone with actual Native American blood in me, I am deeply offended by this statement.  Of course, elsewhere, he does lump in American Indians and Hispanics with African Americans as "inferior".  It seems that the European colonialists always preferred destroying the cultures in the areas they colonized, as opposed to the previous colonial empires, (Romans, etc) who tended to assimilate more of the culture of the areas they conquered into their own culture.  The Europeans never really had any respect for any of the other peoples of the world.  There were actually sophisticated societies on all of the continents they colonized prior to their arrival, but they destroyed thousands of years of culture and history based on the assumption that the white races were somehow more pure.  This man and others at amren seem to be holding on to this faulty world view for reasons I cannot understand.  I guess they have no other way of developing self-esteem.

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The Discourse against Iran

I have been deeply discussing politics with one of the most lucid Republicans/ Bush supporters that I have ever met. Unfortunately, She still believes some of the spin concerning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comments toward Israel. She used the comment that she had heard on mainstream television as the rallying point of her argument of why we MUST war with Iran. "The President of Iran said he wants to wipe Israel out!"

 

Well, that is an untruth perpetrated by American media.

 

As Juan Cole stated http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html#comments 

 

"is that I object to the characterization of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having "threatened to wipe Israel off the map." I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that he wants to play Hitler to Israel's Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people.

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."

 

And further he stated in regards to Ahmadinejad :

He made an analogy to Khomeini's determination and success in getting rid of the Shah's government, which Khomeini had said "must go" (az bain bayad berad). Then Ahmadinejad defined Zionism not as an Arabi-Israeli national struggle but as a Western plot to divide the world of Islam with Israel as the pivot of this plan.

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.

 

The Media spun it and Right wingers everywhere gobbled it up.

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Hat tip to Fade at House of the Rising sons. 

Read the whole thing here.