Iranians, we will never bomb your country - We Love You
usamamasan1
Posts: 4,695
To the Iranian people
To all the fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters
For there to be a war between us, first we must be afraid of each other, we must hate.
I’m not afraid of you, I don’t hate you.
I don t even know you. No Iranian ever did me no harm. I never even met an Iranian…Just one in Paris in a museum. Nice dude.
I see sometime here, on the TV, an Iranian. He is talking about war.
I’m sure he does not represent all the people of Iran.
If you see someone on your TV talking about bombing you …be sure he does not represent all of us.
I’m not an official representative of my country. I m a father and a teacher. I know the streets of my town, I talk with my neighbors, my family, my students, my friends and in the name of all these people …we love you.
We mean you no harm.
On the contrary, we want to meet, have some coffee and talk about sports.
To all those who feel the same, share this message and help it reach the Iranian people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... BnCX7_bPxo
very nice huh.
Guess the two governments aren't so sure though. Would be nice if bombs didn't drop down but that whole nuclear Iran conundrum sure is problematic.
To all the fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters
For there to be a war between us, first we must be afraid of each other, we must hate.
I’m not afraid of you, I don’t hate you.
I don t even know you. No Iranian ever did me no harm. I never even met an Iranian…Just one in Paris in a museum. Nice dude.
I see sometime here, on the TV, an Iranian. He is talking about war.
I’m sure he does not represent all the people of Iran.
If you see someone on your TV talking about bombing you …be sure he does not represent all of us.
I’m not an official representative of my country. I m a father and a teacher. I know the streets of my town, I talk with my neighbors, my family, my students, my friends and in the name of all these people …we love you.
We mean you no harm.
On the contrary, we want to meet, have some coffee and talk about sports.
To all those who feel the same, share this message and help it reach the Iranian people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... BnCX7_bPxo
very nice huh.
Guess the two governments aren't so sure though. Would be nice if bombs didn't drop down but that whole nuclear Iran conundrum sure is problematic.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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We all have much more in common than we have in difference.
Phila, PA 4/28/16; Phila, PA 4/29/16; Fenway Park 8/7/16; Fenway Park 9/2/18; Asbury Park 9/18/21; Camden 9/14/22;
Las Vegas 5/16/24; Las Vegas 5/18/24; Phila, PA 9/7/24; Phila, PA 9/9/24; Baltimore Arena 9/12/24
Tres Mtns - TLA 3/23/11; EV - Tower Theatre 6/25/11; Temple of the Dog - Tower Theatre 11/5/16
Great message. I'm sure a lot of us may feel cynical about this and, considering how tangled the world is, the history of war and so forth that's understandable to some extent, but I don't think wishing for peace can ever be a waste of time and I don't think hoping for peace is foolishness.
Thanks for posting this.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Usama, why not just post the link and focus on the message? You contradict the whole point of the message with your 'problematic' comment. point being: most people in both countries abhor what their leaders push for. Many, many Iranians have taken a risk to post messages in support of this campaign. How can you hear that message, and respond with 'but your leaders are dicks'...? Be a part of the solution, not the problem. Woot.
They DO NOT share my values...
Sincerely,
Citizen of the US
Do you realize that everything you just typed is pure guff?
Ahmadinejad didn't say that Israel should be wiped off the map. This was a deliberate Western Mistranslation, much like the more recent mistranslation that had him saying Israel is a cancerous tumour that should be removed. He never said it. He said that the Zionist regime is a cancerous tumour that should be removed. Big difference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ah ... ontroversy
Many news sources repeated the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting statement by Ahmadinejad that "Israel must be wiped off the map",[5][6] an English idiom which means to "cause a place to stop existing",[7] or to "obliterate totally",[8] or "destroy completely".[9]
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."[10]
Ahmadinejad's phrase was "بايد از صفحه روزگار محو شود" according to the text published on the President's Office's website.[11]
The translation presented by the official Islamic Republic News Agency has been challenged by Arash Norouzi, who 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."[12] 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)."[13] 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."[14] The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated the phrase similarly, as "this regime" must be "eliminated from the pages of history."[15]
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."[16][17][18]
Shiraz Dossa, a professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, also believes the text is a mistranslation.[19]
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
And as for Israel being surrounded by countries that want to destroy it, can you name one?
The Muslim Brotherhood that is taking over the Middle East
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... omment.usa
Jonathan Steele
The Guardian, Friday 2 June 2006
The remarks are not out of context. They are wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was mistranslated. The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished.
He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The "page of time" phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... 14/post155
Jonathan Steele
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 June 2006
The phrase was widely interpreted as 'map', and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not 'Sahneh roozgar' but 'Safheh roozgar', meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word 'map' again."
This, in my view, is the crucial point and I'm glad the NYT accepts that the word "map" was not used by Ahmadinejad. (By the way, the Wikipedia entry on the controversy gets the NYT wrong, claiming falsely that Ethan Bronner "concluded that Ahmadinejad had in fact said that Israel was to be wiped off the map".)
If the Iranian president made a mistake and used "safheh" rather than "sahneh", that is of little moment. A native English speaker could equally confuse "stage of history" with "page of history". The significant issue is that both phrases refer to time rather than place. As I wrote in my original post, the Iranian president was expressing a vague wish for the future. He was not threatening an Iranian-initiated war to remove Israeli control over Jerusalem.
Two other well-established translation sources confirm that Ahmadinejad was referring to time, not place. The version of the October 26 2005 speech put out by the Middle East Media Research Institute, based on the Farsi text released by the official Iranian Students News Agency, says: "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history." (NB: not "wiped". I accept that "eliminated" is almost the same, indeed some might argue it is more sinister than "wiped", though it is a bit more of a mouthful if you are trying to find four catchy and easily memorable words with which to incite anger against Iran.)
MEMRI is headed by a former Isareli military intelligence officer and has sometimes been attacked for alleged distortion of Farsi and Arabic quotations for the benefit of Israeli foreign policy. On this occasion they supported the doveish view of what Ahmadinejad said.
Just that. The Zionist regime. The regime that currently governs Israel. Like the Apartheid regime that ruled South Africa, or the Nazi regime that once ruled Germany.
Huh? Bigotry? Fearmongering?
Do explain. Please no long winded cut-pastes from the guardian. Sure seems like you got some kind of guardian discount.
Thread shitting fun eh?
Hmm, I dunno, maybe the same methods that were used to get rid of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Sanctions, boycotts, protests, strikes, petitions, e.t.c.
Perhaps it would resemble a democratic, multicultural, secular state, much like present day Germany.
While you're at it, let me ask you this: If Turkey were to call for the "hellenic regime" in Greece to vanish from the page of time, and were then to take actions that resulted in Greece becoming a majority Turkish country, with Islam supplanting Greek Orthodoxy as the state religion, and Turkish supplanting Greek as the national language, and the repeal of all laws relating to Greek culture, but the state retained the name "Greece," would you argue that Turkey had not, in some meaningful way, destroyed Greece?
I gave you a concrete, non-evasive answer. Here, I'll post it a second time. There's nothing ambiguous or evasive about it at all.
Nobody said anything about supplanting one state religion for another. You're just making ludicrous exaggerations because you're afraid or unwilling to admit that there's an alternative to Israel's current breed of ethnic nationalism. As I said above, Israel could become a secular state. And as for supplanting the national language, you live in America, right? Is America being destroyed by Spanish speaking people? No, thought not.
:fp:
do you realize ahmadinejad has no real power? he's basically just a figurehead
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
You're scared of Iran?
I've encountered these tactics before with defenders of Israel. They try to bore and/frustrate their opponent into submission with convoluted hypotheticals and semantics. It's the same trick many lawyers use. Yosi's training to be a lawyer, so it makes sense that he'd engage in this tedious nonsense.
Though what I do find amusing is that they describe it as 'reasoned debate', whereas it's clearly nothing but evasion and equivocation.
oh yosi surely youre not suggesting theres a comparison worth discussing with your hypothetical?
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Disengaging from Zionism
Issa Mikel, The Electronic Intifada, 13 September 2005
'...A closer look at the historical record reveals that, far from being a bastardization of Zionism, the maximalist colonization of the West Bank and Gaza is part and parcel of the Zionist project.
The desire for control over all of historic Palestine has been shared by most Zionist leaders for over a century. We need not delve into the details and evolution of thinking on the question of Israel’s borders, as there has been a good deal of disagreement over a wide variety of questions (such as the nature and pace of settlement, relations with the British during the Mandate, and how properly to “deal” with the indigenous Palestinian Arab population). But from Herzl, Ben Gurion, and Weizmann, to Begin, Sharon, and Barak, expansionism, and even the idea of forcible population transfer, has been a hallmark of the Zionist movement.
During the time of the British Mandate, David Ben Gurion viewed plans for a Jewish state in part of Palestine as merely a precursor to “the ingathering of the exiles in all of Palestine” (see ”Revisiting the UNGA Partition Resolution” by Walid Khalidi.) In a similar vein, Chaim Weizmann wrote of proposals to partition Palestine developed in the 1930s that, “In the course of time we shall expand to the whole country … this is only an arrangement for the next 15-30 years” (see “Zionism and Its Impact,” by Ann M. Lesch). Thus, even when the early Zionist leadership expressed a grudging willingness to settle for less than the whole of Palestine for the state of Israel, their moves were part a strategy to obtain as much land as they could in anticipation of later expansion. They were not “compromising” in any real sense.
Another telling statement is that of Menachem Begin upon winning the 1977 Israeli election, when he proclaimed in reference to the territories occupied in 1967, “What occupied territories? These are liberated territories!” Later, even as Begin negotiated with Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat over the Sinai Peninsula, he staunchly refused to budge on the question of the West Bank and Gaza (and the Syrian Golan Heights), where settlements were already expanding. And let us not forget the now famous quotation by the former Israeli general and defense minister Moshe Dayan that Israel should make it clear to the Palestinians that “we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave.”
More recently, as the Oslo process slouched toward its violent end, the colonial expansion under both Labor and Likud Ministers — Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, and Sharon — reached a fever pitch. Throughout the last century, the Zionist movement has made abundantly clear their designs on Palestine through these and countless other words and deeds.
Moreover, the Zionist leadership does not stand alone in its maximalist claims. Though a majority of Israelis voiced support for the “disengagement,” the will to remove the colonies of the West Bank is drastically weaker. Expansionism in Israel arises from complex socio-political phenomena and has a long, tangled history. And however much some adherents of Zionism may object to control over the West Bank, we ignore the harsh realities of Zionism at our own risk.
...One who supports an ideology of racism and militarist expansionism cannot ignore the suffering that results. Despite the protestations of the Zionist left that Zionism should be taken back to its pure, just roots, Zionism is a captive of its own tragic flaws. There is no such thing as a "just Zionism," just as there is no such thing as a "just white supremacism" or "just colonialism." A system that enshrines bigotry, that establishes one people as the chosen people of a state, whatever the putative justifications, cannot but discriminate and oppress.
But just as the racism of the Zionism system generates oppression, its claims to justice and democracy cannot be ignored either, especially by those who are the staunchest supporters of bigotry and privilege. A system that makes racist claims will be called upon to be racist, while a system that claims to be just and democratic will be called upon to be just and democratic. From Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, to the Druze, to the Ethiopian Jews, the downtrodden have and will continue to come knocking on the door of the Israeli state to cash in on the promises it has made. And as their calls grow louder, Zionism's contradictions will grow all the more apparent. Like ideas, people have an uncanny way of refusing to disappear.
Look at it from the Israeli perspective: the whole point of creating Israel was so that the Jewish people would be able to exercise self-determination in a state of our own. If we wanted to live as a minority in America, clearly that is an available option to us. What B is talking about is a situation in which Israel no longer exists in any meaningful way. What would it mean for the "Zionist regime" to no longer exist? Presumabely this would entail the combination of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza into a single political entity, and the "return" of millions of Palestinian refugees. Overnight Jews would no longer be a majority in the state. Everything substantively Jewish about the state's organization would presumabely disappear. I don't know how any honest, rational person can pretend that this scenario would not constitute the destruction of Israel just because the state might retain the name "Israel."