All right, y'all, welcome back.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Arash Nooroozi, and I'm sorry for saying your name wrong.
I'm sure I did.
He's an artist and co-founder of the Mosideq Project.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
Very good, Scott.
Thanks.
I'm happy to have you here.
I'm sorry.
I'm sure I did say your name wrong, right?
It's actually Arash.
Here's a little hint.
Car crash without the seat.
Ah, there you go.
Arash Nooroozi.
But Nooroozi, I got right?
Perfect.
Excellent.
Poor guy.
You got to tell everybody the car crash thing, huh?
Yes.
What a pain.
All right.
All right.
So this morning, the Washington Post called.
They wanted a comment from Anti-War.com about this subject that we've covered often over the years.
And no matter how much we cover, it never seems to really go away.
And I referred him to your article at our website, Wiped Off the Map, the Rumor of the Century.
I hope that he'll go and read it and understand the full context.
The article's from May 26, 2007.
The way I remember, I think the original quote came from 2005, right?
Seven years ago.
Yeah, we're at least about six and a half years ago.
It was right after Ahmadinejad had been elected.
Right.
And now, you know, I don't know if any of the quotes that I gave the Washington Post were worthwhile.
It was early before my coffee.
I hope I don't come out looking too silly.
I hope at least he got my quote right, even if I didn't give a very good one.
But my point was basically how sad it is, what an unfortunate thing it is, that the mistranslation of the president of Iran's speech back from the fall of 2005 has served as a talking point for so many warmongers so many times in a row, you couldn't even count it, really.
This has just become a standard truth under the big lie theory that if you just say it over and over and over again, people conclude that it must be true or else because it just couldn't be true that people are lying that much, basically.
When in fact, no, they're lying.
Or at least they don't want to be corrected on something that they could have been corrected long and long, a very long time ago.
So anyway, that's my little introduction to this thing.
Wiped off the map the accusation from every anti-Iran warmonger.
It comes from a speech in October 2005 by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Why don't you tell us about the speech?
First of all, give us a little bit of the context of the speech.
Then give us the real translation of the segment in question, and maybe we can get a little bit further into the context after that.
How's that?
Sure.
Well, basically, the context is actually more crucial than the translation of the quote in question because the speech was, you know, The World Without Zionism was about, obviously, the end of Israel.
The context was that he was referring to, of course, he's quoting Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, that the Soviet Union had disappeared and, you know, Saddam Hussein must go and so forth.
And in this context, he was also referring to Israel as, you know, the regime that occupied Jerusalem.
The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.
Basically, referring to not a declaration of war, but more of a kind of a dissolution of the state as a Jewish state or as a occupied territory.
Right.
So, now, this is a part that I emphasized to the guy from The Post this morning, too.
My understanding at the time, I don't think I ever interviewed you back in 2007, but I did interview Juan Cole, I think, back in 2005 about this.
Well, and probably after that, again, as well.
And he talked about how the context really was the president is not just saying this, he's actually paraphrasing the old dead Ayatollah Khomeini, as you just said, you know, who was referring to Saddam as well, but he was also talking about the Soviet Union.
Now, they were at war with Saddam Hussein at the time.
America was backing both sides, Iraq more, I guess.
But if you look at the context of the USSR, there's no way anyone thought, or I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but did anyone in the 1980s think that the Ayatollah Khomeini was threatening Moscow with a first strike?
Absolutely not, yeah.
The other fascinating thing that never comes up is the idea that although they were basically ideologically enemies and stated enemies, that is, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel, everyone remembers the Iran-Contra scandal in which Israel actually sold arms to Iran, the same state that apparently was threatening to destroy it, according to the media.
Because, again, this is a quote from Khomeini.
So there are many lapses in logic in this whole narrative about the suicidal nature of Iran and the idea that Iran would be intent on destroying the state of Israel physically.
And then there's also the question of really how serious they are and how I believe that this is more of a political stance.
It's really kind of like a distraction from their own human rights abuses and their own contentious nuclear program.
I think all states are doing this.
Israel is using Iran as a kind of a distraction from the question about Palestine.
It's just kind of a tit-for-tat.
It's circular, it goes around, and it's really more politically motivated than necessarily something that is their determined agenda.
Right.
Well, and now here is an important piece of context, too, and that is that Ahmadinejad, as jerky as he is, and he says a lot of very provocative things and likes to make his adversaries red in the face or whatever, he's not the commander-in-chief of the Iranian military.
Might that matter a little bit?
Yeah, that's also rather significant.
Of course, the so-called supreme leader, Khamenei, is in control of the military and the nuclear program and far higher than the office of the president.
Because the office of the president is the most visible and he comes to the U.N. and does interviews, we're obsessed on him and fixate on him.
But, you know, that's the other thing, that this is pretty much a universal policy, foreign policy of Iran towards Israel.
This is not something that is dependent on Ahmadinejad.
You know, whether he had stayed in the election in 2009, that fraudulent election, or not, this would have carried on.
So, actually, I'm surprised that Israel relies so much on Ahmadinejad because, in fact, this is the position of Iran regardless of that figurehead.
Well, you know, I noticed, and I was less familiar with Iranian politics and all this in the 1990s, but, you know, I was kind of sort of paying attention.
And back then you had Rafsanjani and Khatami.
Now, I don't have any idea whether there's any actual reason to consider those two men moderates, but at least they were perceived in Western media as friendlier and more approachable type characters.
And so, back then, all the anti-Iran propaganda focused on Khamenei, the Ayatollah, who, after all, is still very scary-looking and has a funny hat and a big beard and looks a lot like, he's not quite so wild-eyed as the previous Ayatollah, but he's still a very scary-looking Ayatollah, Theocret figure, and they would always focus on him.
But then when Ahmadinejad came into power and replaced Khatami, and he's a little bit more of a, you know, dangerous villain character for their media narrative, all of a sudden they forgot about Khamenei, who's actually a pretty reasonable, you know, politician when it comes to international relations.
He doesn't really tend to do anything very provocative.
And they just decide they'll focus on the loudmouth, because he's better for the narrative, even though he's not the one with the power.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's an amazing thing.
All right, now, we actually have very little time.
When we get back from the break, a rash, crash, yeah, then I will ask you to actually go through and just sort of kind of once and for all, we'll do this again, and give us a word-for-word and translate this thing, and prove to us what it was that the president of Iran never said, not that it really should matter anyway, but it does.
I just kind of want to get this, you know, as long as we have the opportunity.
Oh, and I didn't mention, I'm sorry, this should have been in my gigantic, long-winded, half-nonsensical introduction, that the reason this is in the press again is because the Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, the Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy, has admitted to Al Jazeera that, yeah, they never really said that.
They didn't say we'll wipe it out, but just it will not survive in a more general context.
Anyway, we'll be right back with Arash Nowruzi.
He wrote this article back in 2007 for Antiwar.com.
Wiped off the map the rumor of the century.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Our guest is Arash Nowruzi.
He runs a thing called the Mossadegh Project, and he wrote this article, he wrote four articles for us at Antiwar.com.
Antiwar.com/Orij slash Nowruzi dot php, you'll find it.
Or just Google the rumor of the century, and you'll find this article come right up on your favorite search engine.
It got reprinted a lot of places and linked to a lot of places, because it's a definitive debunking of the accusation that the President of Iran, who has no capability to do so anyway, wishes to wipe Israel off the map with an offensive military attack of a nuclear nature or another kind.
And now, Arash, could you please take us through this, translate from the Farsi.
What exactly did this guy say?
And we'll just again dispense with this accusation once and for all.
Would you like the Farsi or just the English?
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, go through in Farsi first, and then, I don't know, break it down word by word or term by term, if you can.
As you will.
You know, the Farsi is, imam koft en rejima eshgalgar equd bayad as-safyar ir-rusgar mav shabad.
It's basically, again, he's quoting Khomeini, and the entire trajectory of what he was saying was sort of building up to, hey, the Shah fell.
That was the whole point of the revolution.
Nobody ever thought it was possible.
It was unthinkable, and it happened.
And, of course, there was violence, but it wasn't through war.
It wasn't through wiping out their own country.
The Soviet Union, you know, the Cold War was enormous.
You know, it seemed like it was never going to end.
It fell on its own without war.
Then you have Israel, and he said, the imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem, referring to Israel, must vanish from the page of time, and that this statement is very wise.
So now, it sounds like what you're saying is, not only is he not threatening a first strike, in context, he's explicitly referring to the non-violent kind of velvet revolution style end of regimes.
Right?
Or no, I guess you say he refers to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as well.
Or no?
Well, one of the things that he had mentioned, actually three, the first was the Shah of Iran, which was the US-installed monarch that had, you know, the previous regime that they overthrew, Russia, and, of course, Saddam Hussein was their archenemy.
Saddam was an enemy of Iran, even under the Shah, but it was like the basic tenet that Khomeini was basically outlining, that Saddam must go.
So that was actually something, at that time, that had been unfulfilled.
That actually happened through war eventually, but not at the hands of Iran, although they fought an eight-year-long war.
So it's really just, yeah, the context is absolutely crucial to this.
Well, so I don't know.
I guess, you know, back to the context, not of the speech, but of why we're talking about it.
It's the biggest deal in the world, that here an Israeli official has admitted as much, and said, oh, yeah, they never really did threaten any sort of first strike, or say, we'll wipe it out.
We just said it ought to go away someday.
And so, you know, that's a pretty good, rough paraphrase from an Israeli official on this.
Does that mean that from now on, you and I can say, look, even the Israeli government admits that they never really did say that, and maybe then this will stop being an effective talking point of the war party here and in Israel?
Yeah, you know, one wonders what effect this kind of thing will have on the media, because Dan Mirador is the Deputy Prime Minister, and he's the Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy, apparently, so he's kind of high up in the Israeli government.
And the fact that he is clarifying, and he was actually very fair in his description.
He said that they didn't say we'll wipe it out, but it won't survive, it's a cancerous tumor, it should be removed, etc.
He's admitting that Iran is questioning the legitimacy of the state and not threatening to actually wipe it out, which, of course, is still a very major and inflammatory thing.
But the idea is that U.S. and Israel have, and I think it's fair to say have for a number of years now, had a policy towards Iran based on this rumor, based on the idea that Iran's nuclear program is military and that it is intended to be used against another country.
And that is, obviously, if that's the case, that's going to be one of the most significant events of our lifetimes, and I think it's significant to make that distinction.
In this case, Dan Mirador has done that.
In addition, there are other officials that are coming out that are saying this.
Ron Paul, in the past few weeks, he was on Humanity and he said this, and he refuted this misquote.
He also was on Piers Morgan's PNN, and that was a major primetime show.
He said that this is a misquote and that's not what they said.
What's interesting, what's curious is that after all these years, even though we have people like Ron Paul and people like Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei from the IAEA and other figures who have made reference to the fact that this is not what was said, that none of the major media have seemed to pick up on even just the mere idea that some people are questioning it.
That alone would be interesting.
So it seems to be that the media is kind of set in their ways and have decided, look, we can't turn back now.
We've been telling the world.
The sky is falling for the past six, seven years.
How can we suddenly damage our credibility by saying this huge thing that we've been telling you is actually way off?
Right.
Well, this is something that the more I replay it in my head, the more I think I probably failed this morning at getting my points across very well to the guy from the Washington Post.
Part of my complaint was that the media majors have never really corrected this.
Maybe, and I'm not sure, but maybe the Post and the Times have run things on their blogs, on their websites, but never in the paper.
And they certainly never did a whole story about how, oops, we were the ones who were wrong and told you wrong.
And certainly on TV, if a pundit says, look, everybody knows that they threaten to wipe Israel off the map, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They just build that in as the premise to their argument.
No one ever stops and corrects them.
You know, Ron Paul would be the only one, when they build it into the premise for their question to him, he has to stop and refute the structure of their question before he answers it.
But other than that, yeah, you're right.
I mean, the narrative just completely carries on anyway.
And you said a lot better than I did.
I should have just had him call you, but I didn't know your phone number yet.
Next time, I'll just give him your number.
I certainly recommended him your article.
Well, I want to mention that the Washington Post itself, fact-checker Glenn Tesler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
He has a couple of months ago, October 2011, did Ahmadinejad really say Israel should be wiped off the map?
Oh, really?
And he concludes, no.
And now this was on the blog or this was the actual story in the Post?
It's probably Internet-only, it's on the blog, yeah.
But still, that's pretty good, though, if Glenn Tesler has, in fact, attempted to clear that up.
It does go on, though, as the false premise, and very rarely challenged.
Now, one thing here, I want to see if I can challenge you a little bit better than I have so far.
Somebody posted on my Facebook page this reality check by Ben Swan.
He's a local news anchor, I forget where, and he does some really good reality checks about a lot of things.
And he says, well, a lot of people contact me saying I was wrong, quoting Juan Cole, who paraphrases it the exact same way you do, I believe.
But then he found some others who said, no, let me see if I can quote this part right.
Sourabh Madhavi, one of Iran's most prominent translators, and Saimak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who's bilingual, both say, wipe off or wipe away is a more accurate translation than vanish, because the Persian verb is active and transitive.
Which, now we're really quibbling, because it's still clear that they never, he was not talking about I am threatening a military action here.
But still, on the quote, vanish or wipe away, argue about it with these guys.
Well, again, I would go back to the fact that, you know, there's way more than just that little moment there.
In fact, it's weird that after all the scrutiny, the speech itself has not been examined.
It's kind of an interesting speech.
It's an interesting read to see what the hell they're talking about, about Israel.
Well, without Zionism, he's basically trying to push this idea forward, you know, in the Muslim world, presumably, and around the world, that Israel is illegitimate and that, you know, he's a leader of a state.
So that's pretty significant whenever he's holding a conference all about it.
Anyway, the context is very clear, regardless of whether one wants to quibble over exact, I mean, all translations can be interpreted slightly differently.
And that's dangerous.
If you remember, everyone has probably heard about the Khrushchev, we will bury you in the Cold War.
And that was another misunderstanding.
Right.
Yeah, all he was saying was we'll outlast you, we'll be there at your funeral, basically, because we'll survive and you won't, which, of course, was wrong, because he was an idiot and their entire system was based on a horrible economic policy that couldn't possibly survive.
But anyway, not too much unlike our own, I guess.
Right, yeah.
So, I mean, one needs to really go back.
I would encourage people, if they're curious, go and look it up.
I mean, the New York Times, I think that was one of the translators that, I mean, they did incorrectly put Wife Off the Map, but if you actually read the article, you'll come away with a different impression about what he's saying.
Read the speech.
And you can also go to Memory, which is a pro-Israel, you know, translating service.
They have a very different translation.
It was a Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, I believe, a while ago, tried to actually debunk the people who, like me, who were saying that it's a rumor.
But in doing so, they actually had a translation they got, which was far different and didn't have Wife Off the Map in it, but they argued that that's what he meant.
But even the fact that they're admitting that those words are completely wrong is fascinating.
You know, Amit Gingrich has come here many times, he's always asked about this, and it's curious that he never says something violent, you know, which is what we're expecting.
Larry King interviewed him a while back, a year or two ago, and he was even basically feeding him the line, like, you're not talking about destroying Israel, right?
You're talking about the regime change.
So he was actually already with that understanding, and then Iran's state media then took that and put it on their articles as a headline that, you know, Iran is not going to wipe Israel out.
In fact, the Iranian government does have an official policy on this, do they not?
Which is just, we want an election held that includes all of Israel and West Bank and Gaza, too.
Whenever they're asked what their solution is, they always say a referendum, and that would be essentially the way that Israel would vanish, essentially.
But they're really talking about, you know, my interpretation of this, and especially if you look at everything, they don't appear to be abusing the Jewish population in Iran.
So I don't think that this is about the Jewish, the question of Jews.
They also have, I mean, there's a state that is not against Zionism as a principle, but just not there, not on Palestinian land.
Maybe this is overstating it a little bit, but pretty much I'm under the impression anyway, how about I'll say it that way, I'm under the impression that if Israel would withdraw out back to the 67 borders, not the 48 borders, but the 67 borders, and, you know, keep just West Jerusalem, that more or less the rest of the Muslim world would go along with that.
Most of the, I think that's actually the official position of most, quote unquote, Muslim countries already anyway, is just end the occupations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
So, you know, the Iranians might say, you know, go have Zionism in Madagascar or outer Mongolia or something like that.
But ultimately, if the Israelis had a reasonable position on the situation, I think it's pretty likely the Iranians would too.
And in fact, we have the evidence of the great peace offer of 2003, where they said we're willing to talk about all of these things.
So, anyway, I don't want to be too rosy and optimistic about that, but it's just pretty obvious who's picking the fight here.
It's the United States and Israel.
Yeah, and when I try to deconstruct these sort of things and figure them out, I just use a basic kind of algebraic sort of perspective, which is, oh, Iran is defending the plight of the Palestinians, and they're standing up for the Palestinian cause.
So what are we to make of that?
That they are great, you know, icons of human rights and justice?
Well, if that were the case, they wouldn't be murdering and torturing and, you know, jailing people and journalists and so forth.
So you can then deduct that this is not about human rights.
This is about politics.
Now, if they were, you know, pure democracy and free and, you know, like Candyland over there, then maybe we would say maybe they're sincere.
So when you look at the whole picture, this is power politics.
This is, you know, what do you call it, a jockeying for position in the region.
Iran is a hegemon.
Israel is also a hegemon in a way in the military sense.
Israel is obviously, there's already a preexisting, you know, notion that the Arabs want to push them into the sea, and this already exists in the Jewish psyche, obviously for good reason.
And so this already kind of concept was there before Iran said anything about Israel.
All right.
Now, real quick, can you please tell us about the Mossadegh Project?
The Mossadegh Project was really something that I guess I would describe as academic and educational.
It's a nonprofit.
Our purpose is basically to explore this period of time in the 50s whenever Iran was democratic and was moving into a direction which had a lot of hope because they were nationalizing their oil.
They were trying to resist this historical trend of being dominated by the other powers, by Britain and Russia.
And Mossadegh is kind of like a Gandhi-type figure for us.
He's a very, very principled person, almost in a way kind of like freakishly democratic in many, many ways.
He kind of had a very strong belief in that.
And so it's a very ironic and tragic story.
So we're basically, I mean, obviously this was something the CIA was involved with.
It was covert.
There's a lot of secrecy.
There's a lot of misinformation.
And our intent is to try to sort of gradually research it.
And as we learn about it and try to fill in a little bit more, we are then sharing that with people.
We have a long-term goal, which should be happening soon, which is the Mossadegh exhibit, which will be touring, a five-city tour, hopefully opening in Los Angeles.
And that will be all about Mossadegh's life and times, all about this period whenever there was the nationalization of oil.
This is a long time ago, but this at the time was the equivalent of the nuclear issue today.
It was everywhere in the news.
It was like the fate of the world rested on what happened with this dispute between Iran and Britain.
And they had a nationalized Anglo-Iranian oil company, which later changed its name to British Petroleum, or BP.
And so there's a lot of connective tissue really when you look back in history, because time is just a continuum.
And when we're looking at Iran now and the whole interplay between the nations, a lot of this doesn't quite make sense unless you understand the historical context for Iran, not as the dictatorship the way it is now, but just as a state and how it was viewed on the map and how it was treated as a kind of a chess piece, and the importance of oil.
So there's the CIA, there's oil, there's cloak and dagger, and all kinds of archetypal issues that are timeless and still have a very resonant part in our present life and current events.
And that's at mohamedmosadeq.com.
D-E-G-H is how that ends, mohamedmosadeq.com.
And I really like the quote, That's ancient history.
That's Jimmy Carter talking about the coup of 53, which was only 26 years before the revolution of 79.
Somebody asked him, well, hey, in the context of this revolution, the fact that this guy, the Shah, was our installed puppet dictator this whole time?
And he says, that's ancient history.
That has nothing to do with this, basically.
And yet, just think about it.
If Ronald Reagan had been overthrown and replaced with a royal backed by a foreign power, Iran or anybody else, whether we'd be over that by now, that like, well, you know, we're used to just being living in a state run by a sock puppet of a foreign empire.
26 years?
That's not ancient anything, you know?
Yeah, they're still talking about hostage crisis, and it's been more than that.
Yeah, exactly.
Great point.
Great point.
Yep.
All right.
We got to go.
We're over time.
I thank you very much for your time.
I want to recommend to everybody the website, mohamedmosadeq.com.
And also, you can go there and find out about this touring exhibit.
Tell us a little bit more about where you're going and when.
Well, we're just developing it right now, but it will be opening in L.A.
So we haven't scheduled anything yet.
But look for that, you know, probably this year.
Okay, great.
And that's Arash.
And we have a Facebook page as well.
Arash Nowruzi.
Thanks very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
