Tuesday, August 06, 2013

What Would We Do Without The Lede?

The Lede blog at the NYTimes disproves the Iranian "sore" statement as referring to Israel.  It was just "the occupation".  It takes issue with Bibi Netanyahu.


As my colleague Thomas Erdbrink reports from Tehran, Iran’s state media scrambled on Friday to correct comments wrongly attributed to the country’s president-elect, Hassan Rouhani, after he was incorrectly quoted calling Israel “a sore which must be removed.”
Press TV, the English-language arm of Iran’s state broadcaster, subtitled Mr. Rouhani’s actual remarks, made to a reporter during the Islamic republic’s annual march for Quds, the Arabic name for Jerusalem. The video shows that the cleric did not mention Israel by name or call for its elimination, but did compare “the shadow of the occupation of the holy land of Palestine and the dear Quds,” to a “wound” or “sore” that “has been sitting on the body of the Islamic world for many years.”
Those remarks were still disturbing to Israelis, since they hewed to the Iranian government line that the entire state of Israel is occupied Palestinian territory. A longer clip of the state television broadcast showed Mr. Rouhani smiling and waving in the parade as chants of “Death to Israel” echoed in the background....the rapid spread of these false reports that Iran’s new president had explicitly called for Israel’s destruction echoed an incident in 2005, when the country’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was incorrectly quoted as saying that Israel “must be wiped off the map.” As The Lede explained last year, Mr. Ahmadinejad had, in fact, used a metaphorical turn of phrase in Persian that has no exact English equivalent, made no mention of a map, and might have intended his comment to be more of a prediction than a threat.

I left this comment there:

Thank you for this clarification.
Last August was worse.  Israel was then a "cancer".*  Now, something that spores a sore.
Iran is improving, as it continues to develop a weapon of mass destruction.  I'm so glad this blog is keeping track of this.
_________
*
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sharply criticized the supreme leader and also the president of Iran on Friday, describing their latest verbal attacks on Israel as “offensive and inflammatory.”

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s attack on Israel as being a “cancerous tumor” has already been condemned by the United States and France. Meanwhile, ahead of mass demonstrations in Tehran on Friday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that Israel will “disappear.”

Many thousands of Iranians shouted “Death to America, death to Israel” during state-organized protests on Friday and Ahmadinejad told them there was no place for the Jewish state in a future Middle East.

“The Secretary-General is dismayed by the remarks threatening Israel’s existence attributed over the last two days to the Supreme Leader and the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the U.N. press office said. “The Secretary-General condemns these offensive and inflammatory statements.”

 http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/08/18/232881.html

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