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Comment by firstOrder | Hacker News Reader

> It was reasonable to take the translation at face value

This has been bouncing around since 2005. The Washington Post did a story two years ago about how it was bogus - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/did-ah...

So they got six years of mileage out of this lie, I guess it was time to kill it after six years, right? Not really. Let me see if any news outlet has drudged it up this month. Yes, Businessweek/AP did...

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2013-10-11/new-iran-governmen...

'When the conference was first held in 2005, Ahmadinejad made his infamous remark that Israel should be "wiped off the map."'

So here it is eight years later and the major news outlets are still printing this lie as factual news. Even after it was authoritatively debunked by the Washington Post two years ago.

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Yeah, I don't know why they don't just use Khamenei's quote when trying to establish the Iranian government's antagonistic standpoint with regards to Israel. Especially considering that the Ayatollah is the real power in Iran and the cancer analogy is much more visceral.

Still don't see how this is evidence of propaganda in light of the myriad legitimate quotes are out there that are equal in meaning. Poor journalism, perhaps.

Part of the problem here is a matter of conflating people and government.

"Death to America" =/= "Death to Americans"

The better translation is "Regime change in America" -- they want a "better" (in their eyes) gov't in America, and an end to the obnoxious (in their eyes) American foreign policy. (Obviously, chanting does not automatically grant such. But whatever.)

And that works the other way around. "We support regime change in Tehran" translates into "Death to Iran". Iranians understand this. Americans do not.

When an Iranian official says "We believe that the unjust Israeli gov't will eventually fall, and only be a memory in the history books", they may mean exactly that. "Somehow" that gets translated into "Kill all the Jews" in certain Western media.

Of course, "kill all the Jews" is provably wrong, because there are tens of thousands of Jews still living in Iran. (The number has been declining, but the rump of a once thriving populous still endures.) If the Iranian gov't actually believed killing Jews was a positive thing in the eyes of Allah, they could rack up tens of thousands of bonus points in short order. They do not. Their quarrel is with the existing governments of Israel and America, not with the people in general.

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