It will be interesting when in a few years, Iran has a weapons system and because of American deterrence (Obama won’t be President forever), the next likely target will be Europe. What then?

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Here is what President Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran REALLY said, transliterated from Persian into the Roman alphabet:

“Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.”

Word by word translation:

Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).

i.e.

“The Imam Khomeini said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

Note that President Ahmadi-Nejad is quoting an old passage from Imam Khomeini and neither Khomeini nor Ahmadi-Nejad threatened to “wipe [anything] off the map.” There is no idiom in Persian “to wipe [something] off the map.” That is an American or English expression.

Full text of President Ahmadi-Nejad’s speech, in Persian, here:

http://www.irandefence.net/archive/index.php/t-11027.html

Ref:

‘Wiped Off the Map’ — The Rumour of the Century
– By Arash Norouzi — 26 May 2007

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/norouzi.php?articleid=11025

University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole, a fluent speaker of Persian writes:

“As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase ["wipe Israel off the map"] in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem” to “vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed.

http://www.juancole.com/2007/06/ahmadinejad-i-am-not-anti-semitic.html